Giles Taylor

Giles Taylor is a British car designer. He is the current vice president of design and chief creative officer for the Chinese state-owned FAW Group’s Hongqi marque. Taylor worked as a chief designer for Rolls-Royce, Jaguar and as an exterior designer for Citroën. His designs include the eighth generation Rolls-Royce Phantom and the redesigned Jaguar XJ (X351).

Education Taylor studied automobile design in Coventry, England, before attending the Royal College of Art in London.

Career Citroen

Taylor undertook his first car design job for Citroen in 1997 aged twenty nine. The vehicle in question was the Citroën Xsara. Taylor claims that Citroen headhunted him after he left the Royal College of Art. He posits that he was one of several designers to submit sketches, but Citroen adopted his. Taylor oversaw the Xsara's exterior design through to the production stage. Taylor claims that he based the design on the Citroën Xantia.

Jaguar Taylor joined Jaguar Cars in 1997 and worked for the organisation for fourteen years, latterly as the chief exterior designer. Taylor claimed that the car cost four hundred million dollars to produce and that executives initially challenged some of its features, such as the blacked-out C column. Taylor then exhibited the car at a selection of automobile design schools in the autumn of 2009, including the Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design in New York, the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, and the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Its exterior design employed a black-and-white colour scheme, while the interior styling included a clock co-designed with the Bremont Watch Company. replacing Ian Cameron as head of design the following year. He was responsible for the interior and exterior design of the Ghost and Phantom series, among others.

He oversaw the design of the 2016 Dawn. Taylor designed the Cullinan, the marque’s first sports utility vehicle.