Patrick Le Quément

the 78' Lagoon Seventy 8 catamaran at the Salon de Cannes 2017.

Patrick Gilles Marie Le Quément (born 4 February 1945) is a French car and boat designer, known widely as a former designer with Ford and Volkswagen; as the former chief designer with Renault and for his yachting catamaran designs for Groupe Beneteau and Outremer.

Responsible for the design of vehicles reaching an estimated production over 60 million, and has regularly contributed since 2023 to the automotive journalism site, Driven to Write, discussing design and stories from his career.

Background Le Quément was born in Marseille, France. His father, a Frenchman and Colonel in the French Foreign Legion, died when Le Quément was eleven. His mother, who was herself British, a nurse by profession, sent him to Britain where he grew up, attending a prep school in London and St Augustine’s College in Ramsgate. in Garches, western Paris and in Cassis, near Marseille.

After returning to England and joining Ford in 1968 as a designer. His signature designs included the Ford Cargo truck, and 1982's seminal Ford Sierra, the latter designed at Ford's engineering and research centre in Cologne-Merkenich, Germany. While with Ford, Le Quément tutored at the Royal College of Art for four years. Promised a promotion, he transferred to Detroit but left Ford because of the way the company treated Uwe Bahnsen after the introduction of the Sierra, While working for VW in the early 1980s, he referred to Wolfsburg as Stylingrad.

His team's designs for Renault included Twingo, Mégane and Mégane II – which he later admitted in an interview with Automotive News Europe magazine, was too bold; Scénic; the Espace models of 1994 and 1998; Kangoo; Laguna models of 1994; Avantime and the Vel Satis of 2002.

Le Quément said his structural changes were necessary to develop an independent and innovative formal language: "up to just a few years ago, I would have given you the name of individual products – but today I would be more inclined to say Renault Design. So basically we have abandoned what I call 'styling esperanto', namely the formal language used by most other manufacturers".

In 1987 Le Quément was appointed Senior Vice President of Quality and Corporate Design in 1995, when he also joined the Renault Management Committee. He was the head of Joint Design Policy Group formed by Renault-Nissan design body, since it was founded in 1999. Louis Schweitzer asked him to analyze the design organization of Nissan in 1999. Le Quément advised establishment of a head designer position, divorced from industrial tasks. Carlos Ghosn, in charge of Nissan, asked Le Quément to draw up a shortlist of designers for this position. Shiro Nakamura was Le Quément's favorite and became head designer at Nissan.

In April 2009, Le Quément announced his forthcoming retirement in October 2009, when he was succeeded at Renault by Laurens van den Acker.

Later career In 2012, Le Quément co-founded "The Sustainable Design School" with Maurille Larivière and Marc Van Peteghem, a school for sustainable design and innovation based in Nice.

Le Quément designed the Lagoon catamaran, for Groupe Beneteau and later designed yarchting catamarans for Outremer in conjunction with VPLP Design and Marc Van Peteghemhis.

Awards Le Quément won the French Grand Prix of Industrial Design (1992); Knight of the Ordre National of Merit (1993); Ordre National of the French Legion of Honour (1993); Honorary Doctorate Birmingham City University (1996); Lucky Strike Designer Award (2002) from the Raymond Loewy Foundation; Car & Driver Personality of the Decade (2004) and Eyes on Design Lifetime Design Achievement Award (2015).