Horbury started his career in 1974 at Chrysler UK. His first job in nearly a half century of working in automotive was designing the grille, headlamps and bumpers of the Chrysler SIMCA Horizon small hatchback, which went onto to win the 1979 European Car of the Year award.
He moved to Ford U.K. in 1977 and two years later became a consultant designer to Volvo, based in Sweden. In 1981 he worked for Volvo as a consulting designer based in the Netherlands. In 1986 he was named design director at the MGA consultancy in Coventry, England, before moving to Volvo in 1991 as design director.
In 2002, Horbury became design head of Ford’s Premier Automotive Group, which included Volvo as well as Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover.
Two years later he moved to Detroit as Ford’s executive director of design where he was tasked, along with design head J Mays, with creating a global “One Ford” styling language for the automaker’s next-generation cars.
He returned to Volvo in 2009 as vice president of design. A year later the Swedish automaker was sold by Ford to Zhejiang Geely Holding, and 2011 he moved to Geely as senior vice president for design. His successor at Volvo was Thomas Ingenlath, who is now CEO at Geely subsidiary Polestar.
At Geely, Horbury oversaw the design of Geely’s Lynk & CO brand.
He was replaced as Geely’s head of design by former Bentley design chief Stefan Sielaff in 2021. Despite promising to take a step back, Horbury stayed on to guide Lotus design following Geely’s takeover of the British sports car maker.
“I must say the Lotus projects that we’ve started, I am going to find it hard to let them go. They are so exciting,” Horbury told ANE in 2021.
“You can imagine that having the chance to design a new Lotus is something I would like to stay with a little while longer.”
Douglas A. Bolduc contributed to this report.
