I moved to Kia over two and half years ago just as Covid started, so I had to deal with the pandemic as well as learning about the new company. It wasn’t the easiest of combinations. But the team here is immensely proactive and clever in how they approach things so that was a journey we took together. What impressed me was the speed in which we worked digitally. We have very good 5G in South Korea so we could work online and use VR with the different studios very quickly.

From an interior perspective we need a bit more physical design to go with the digital, because ultimately you need to sit in a vehicle, feel comfortable, understand the waistline and the volume of the dashboard, as it’s all very close to you. So it’s about a good balance between the two. Digital saves time, but it doesn’t replace physical. 

At Kia, three years is a long time. When I arrived the EV9 project started as a production car project and then we communicated it through the 2021 show car. Kia is a smaller brand in relative terms to Hyundai and one that needs to have a recognisable identity that is unmistakably Kia. We have many markets to serve so there should be differentiation between the regions but there…