Tom Karen

Thomas Josef Derrick Paul Karen OBE (born March 1926 in Vienna , Austria ) is a British designer of Czech origin. Karen designed both automobiles and everyday objects. From 1962 to 1999, Karen headed the British studio Ogle Design . His most famous designs include the three-wheeled Bond Bug and the Shooting Brake Reliant Scimitar GTE , which he realized for Ogle and which is considered a trendsetter.

Life

Karen was born in Vienna. In the 1930s, his family lived in Brno in the Czech Republic . After German troops marched into Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Karen's family fled to Great Britain via Spain and Portugal and settled in Bristol in 1942 .

Karen trained as an aerospace engineer at Loughborough College and initially worked in the UK aircraft industry. From 1955 he worked at the British Ford factory . Here he won a design award from the Institute of British Carriage to Automobile Manufacturers for the Rascal styling concept . In 1959 he moved to Ogle Design and a year later to Philips . After David Ogle was killed in a traffic accident, Karen returned to Ogle Design in 1962, where she became chief designer and managing director. In the following years, Karen designed numerous vehicles for the British small and sports car manufacturer Reliant . With the Scimitar GTE presented in 1967, Karen established the concept of the three-door sports suit (in English: Shooting Brake ) in the upper middle class market segment. Numerous other European manufacturers later took up this idea with their own models. Karen's Scimitar GTE is therefore the conceptual forerunner of the Volvo P1800 ES and the Lancia Beta HPE . Some of Karen's designs also reached the Turkish market through Reliant, which carried out numerous development contracts for the Turkish car manufacturer Otosan .

Karen worked for Ogle until 2001. In February 2011, Karen's works were shown cross-sectional in an exhibition in Cambridge .

plant

Automobiles

Commodities

Karen has designed radios in five decades, including the Bush TR130, the best-selling British radio of the 1960s, as well as toasters , washing machines and bicycles . His work also includes the Raleigh Chopper, known in Germany as the Bonanzarad .