Automotive | Product designer | Coachbuilding
Niels van Roij runs an award-winning and eponymous automotive design studio, which specializes in coachbuilding: designing and building completely custom made cars.
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Niels van Roij is a leading Dutch car designer and founder of the award-winning Niels van Roij Design, based in Uden, the Netherlands. After more than ten years of design experience in London, including contributions to projects for Volvo, Ford, Car Design Research, the Helen Hamlyn Centre For Design and the Future London Taxi for Karsan, he returned to the Netherlands to focus on coachbuilding: designing and making fully bespoke, hand-crafted cars based on existing automobiles.
His studio develops exclusive one-off cars such as the Shooting Brake based on a Tesla Model S, Adventum Coupé on a Range Rover chassis, Silver Spectre Shooting Brake on a Rolls-Royce base and the provocative Breadvan Hommage, inspired by the legendary Italian V12 race car.
Each coachbuilding project is a collaboration between the Niels van Roij Design designers and clients (co-design), where months of intensive design research, experimenting with materials such as wood, metal, leather, aluminium and refining every detail — from rubber colour to teak in interiors — culminate in the design of a car.
In addition to practical work, Niels gives keynotes, masterclasses and theatre lectures worldwide on car design, innovation, technology and inclusive design. He regularly appears as a guest lecturer at various academies and universities in the Netherlands and abroad. His work has been exhibited in prestigious institutions such as the London Transport Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. He also presented his vision at the 10 Downing Street Design Summit.
Niels is known for his passion for the human aspect of design. He uses a holistic and critical approach, in which design serves as a strategy of seduction and innovation. His lectures combine theory, practice and entertainment. An example is the theatre lecture “Blik op Wielen” (“A View On Wheels”), in which he, together with presenter Bas van Werven, explored the essence of car design in an interactive way.
Niels van Roij has an enthusiastic style, rich visuals in photography and video and in-depth structure. Niels brings two ingredients in any case: hard facts and a healthy dose of humor.
We build dreams – every line tells the story of the customer
Car designer Niels van Roij will discuss, using concrete examples from the automotive industry, how your organization’s sales can be boosted to new heights. With the right design strategy, sales can even be doubled!
Inclusive Design is used to achieve inclusivity for all diversity in this world: relevant for all products, from stairs to scissor and cars, and services. How do you shape your improved service or product, without stigmatizing, so that everyone – from elderly people with dementia to disabled people – becomes your customer? Niels will share examples from, among others, the Future London Taxi that he designed. A unique taxi was developed together with disabled people, mothers with babies, blind people, students and elderly people. Niels will inspire you by sharing unique design-thinking processes. It gives you tools with which you can immediately identify – and implement – concrete improvements to your product, service and organisation!
Humans are irrational: design is the number one reason for purchasing a car worldwide. What can you learn from the car industry? Because why don’t people fall in love with their refrigerator or washing machine but do with their car? Sometimes car design is neuroscience. Because our personal connotations with products and services are very special and also locally defined. People see faces in the moon, on a tree and in objects.
Coachbuilding, the tailor-made design and construction of very exclusive cars, is synonymous with beautifully individually crafted works of art on wheels. Niels van Roij is used to unusual requests to perfect cars according to customer wishes through his studio and is well-versed in making extreme ideas a reality. How do you ensure that your customer is truly central?
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