Patrick Le Quément

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Patrick Le Quément (born 4 February 1945) is a retired French car designer who was the chief designer of Renault. He was born in Marseille and grew up in the United Kingdom. He earned a BA Hons in Product Design from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design and an MBA from Danbury Park Management Centre.

He began his career at Simca in 1966, started his own design business (which failed), and then joined Ford in 1968. At Ford he worked on projects like the Cargo truck and the 1982 Ford Sierra, which was designed in Cologne, Germany. In 1985 he moved back to Europe to lead the Advance Design and Strategy Centre.

Renault recruited him in 1987 as vice president of Corporate Design and gave him wide-reaching reforms: the design department became independent from engineering, outside consultants were removed, the team grew to over 350 people, and design took a seat on the executive board. His Renault projects include the Twingo, Mégane and Mégane II, Scénic, Espace (1994 and 1998), Kangoo, Laguna (1994), Avantime, and Vel Satis (2002). He championed a design philosophy he called “Design = Quality” and pushed Renault to develop its own distinctive design language.

In 1995 he became Senior Vice President of Quality and Corporate Design and joined Renault’s Management Committee. He led the Renault-Nissan joint design policy efforts from 1999. He helped select Nissan’s head designer, with Shiro Nakamura ultimately taking the role. He won the Lucky Strike Designer Award in 2002. Le Quément announced his retirement from Renault on 10 April 2009, and was succeeded by Laurens van den Acker. In 2012 he co-founded The Sustainable Design School in Nice. After leaving Renault, he did exterior design work for Lagoon catamarans.