Laurens van den Acker

Dutch automobile designer

Laurens van den Acker (born 5 September 1965, Deurne, North Brabant) is a Dutch automobile designer. He is the Chief Design Officer of the Renault Group.

Van den Acker studied at the Delft University of Technology, where he obtained a Master of Engineering at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering.

He began his career in 1990 as a designer at Design System srl in Turin, Italy, that worked on the interior of the Bugatti EB110 supercar. In 1993, he moved to Audi as an Exterior Designer in the Ingolstadt Design Center in Germany, where he met J Mays. In 1996 he followed J Mays to SHR Perceptual Management in Newbury Park as a Senior Designer. Van den Acker joined Ford Motor Company, where J Mays had become vice president of Design, in 1998. Late, he became chief designer of the Brand Imaging Group in Irvine, California. He was involved in designing Ford concepts such as the 427 (with Joe Baker), 021C (with Marc Newson), Concept U, and Ma; in 2003, he eventually became chief designer on Ford Escape in the Dearborn Design Center, Michigan (USA). In 2005, he became chief designer of Strategic Design of Ford. In May 2006 he replaced Moray Callum as global head of design for Mazda. He was responsible for the Mazda concepts Nagare (Los Angeles 2006), Ryuga (Detroit 2007), and Hakaze (Geneva 2007). He resigned from Mazda April 2009, and joined Renault on May 15, 2009. In September 2009, he became Senior Vice President of Renault Corporate Design to replace Patrick le Quément. He contributed to the design of Renault Twizy, as well as fourth generation Renault Clio and the 2013 Renault Captur. Van den Acker also worked for Volvo, but for very short time.

Richard Blackburn wrote in an article in Sydney Morning Herald that van den Acker 'still has some of the sketches' of cars 'he penned as a five year old, with smoke bellowing from exhausts and cartoon like lines depicting the wind. He keeps them because they "capture the emotion of motion". In layman's terms that means creating forms and surfaces that look as if they're moving when they're standing still.'