Roy Axe

Royden Axe (September 1937 – 5 October 2010) was a British car designer.

Axe was born in Scunthorpe and attended Scunthorpe Grammar School (now St Lawrence Academy). Axe began his career in 1959 with the Rootes Group where he progressed first to chief stylist and then to design director. Rootes became part of Chrysler Europe in 1966. Axe led the styling efforts on almost all of the Chrysler/Rootes/Simca products of the early to mid 1970s; the car models involved included the Simca 1308/Chrysler Alpine and Chrysler Horizon which won European Car of the Year in 1976 and 1978, respectively. Following Chrysler Europe's collapse in 1977, Axe moved to Detroit to head Chrysler's styling studios in the United States. In 1982, Axe returned to the United Kingdom, joining British Leyland (BL) where he took over as styling director from David Bache (who had been sacked from BL owing to disagreements with the company boss Harold Musgrove over the still under development Austin Maestro), and was responsible for the building of a new styling studio at their Canley, Coventry plant; the former opened in 1982. He also recruited a new team. Early projects from the new studio included Project XX (the Rover 800) and the MG EX E concept car. In 1991, Axe became head of the Warwick based vehicle design consultancy Design Research Associates (DRA), which resulted from a management buyout of Rover's design studio in 1986. DRA was acquired by Arup in 1999.

After selling DRA to Arup in 1999, Axe moved to Florida. He died on 5 October 2010 after battling cancer for two years.