Students from Humber Polytechnic's transportation design program put their automotive concepts on display at the 2025 Cobble Beach Concours.Chittley, Jordan/The Globe and Mail
Jaguar, the great British maker of many of the most beautiful, desirable cars in the entire back-catalogue of automotive history, recently decided to reinvent itself for the electric era.
The result? A bit of a laughingstock; a rushed-looking concept car and glitzy ad campaign, both of which arrived as Jaguar was winding down production of its entire lineup and laying off workers. The sheer number of bad decisions by Jaguar’s leadership over the last five years that led to this point truly boggles the mind. With its new car not set to arrive until next year, the brand is still in limbo.
All of which is to say that reinventing an old brand such as Jaguar isn’t easy, but it’s something more car companies are doing as they enter the electric era.
“It’s really, really tricky, especially when you get something that’s quite old and you’ve got to change it into something quite new,” said Bruce Thomson, a professor of transportation design at Toronto’s Humber Polytechnic.
Recent history is littered with examples that serve as cautionary tales: Mercedes-Benz with its futuristic pill-shaped EQ-series EVs, which the brand is now moving away from; or Ford trying to convince diehard Mustang fans that its four-door electric Mustang Mach-E crossover was worthy of the name.
Reinventing a brand is a minefield, Thomson explained. Design something too radical and you upset fans and lose the cachet of the old brand. Design something too safe and it’s instantly outdated and unexciting.
The high degree of difficulty is exactly why fourth-year students in Humber’s Transportation Design program were tasked with reviving and reinventing dormant automakers, including Packard, Duesenberg, Cord and Isotta Fraschini. Ken Cummings, a former car designer turned Humber professor, oversaw the projects.
Shariq Mohamed, with his concept for a Duesenberg remastered.Chittley, Jordan/The Globe and Mail
The students’ designs were all highly original, surprising and thoughtful, carefully navigating the minefield of brand reinvention better than some big companies in recent memory.
They presented their designs at the 2025 Cobble Beach Concours d’Elegance in mid-September in Owen Sound, Ont., where they were able to see some of their classic inspirations in the metal for the first time.
“One thing you don’t realize is these [pre-war] cars are massive. I could fit in the engine bay. I’m six-foot and it feels like I could lay in there comfortably,” said Benjamin Krautner, a fourth-year transportation design student.
Ben Krautner's design for a luxury sedan from a revived Packard brand.Chittley, Jordan/The Globe and Mail
For his design, he reinvented Packard – a revered American luxury brand from the first half of the 20th century – as a sleek sedan for 2040. Krautner spent most of the summer making a clay model of his concept, which was on display at Cobble Beach, melting ever so slightly under the sun.
“As you’re refining one surface or carving out another, sometimes your tools dig into another surface. You just finished and you have to go over it again,” he said.
But, clay modelling is a skill – an art, really – still used in modern car design. His design is beautiful and, frankly, might be a better direction for Jaguar than its Type 00 concept.
Krautner, like several of his fellow transportation design students I spoke with, sees car design as a relatively artificial intelligence-proof career choice. Initial sketches and the final touches are still done by hand.
“That’s kind of what makes cars cool, it’s that there’s still that human ingenuity behind the designs,” he said.
Nowhere is that more evident than at a car show such as Cobble Beach, where the students’ concepts exist alongside so many spectacular old cars designed with little more than a pencil and paper.
“I know AI is really shaking up the field, but I feel like AI is really only being fed stuff from five years ago, 10 years ago. So it’s not really designing the future,” Krautner said.
Xander Adams moved from Vancouver to Toronto, to study automotive design at Humber, one of the few colleges in Canada that offers this program.
I interrupted Adams while he was sketching – pen on paper – a classic Buick GSX parked on the lawn at the Cobble Concours.
“[I’ve] been sketching cars for a long time,” Adams said. What he likes about them is “that sense of freedom, like the American dream. Pick a car, go anywhere. I like sketching those cars that will take me wherever I want to go.”
Xander Adams sketches a Buick GSX on display at the Cobble Beach Concours.Chittley, Jordan/The Globe and Mail
Xander Adams with his sketchbook and his concept for an Isotta Fraschini grand tourer.Chittley, Jordan/The Globe and Mail
His concept for a reborn Isotta Fraschini – an Italian luxury automaker founded in 1900 – is suitably large, but Adams’ taste in cars skews small. He likes the subcompact 1983 Honda City Turbo II hatchback and the first-generation Suzuki LJ, a miniature 4x4.
Thea Shekaran’s love of cars came from the Fast and Furious movies.
“I had the first three movies on DVD,” said the fourth-year student, explaining that the appeal of the cars in the films wasn’t their performance but the way they looked. “I also think it was the [street racing] culture and how they glamorized it.”
“I like the silly things, the things about cars that make people happy […] like stickers and fake hood scoops,” she said.
Transportation design student Thea Shekaran with her concept for a future Duesenberg.Chittley, Jordan/The Globe and Mail
People and their cars, she thinks, can even sometimes begin to look alike.
“It’s like with pets,” she said while laughing. “I really like it when your car carries an emotion and a feeling. Today, if you look at the [modern] cars, we’re kind of losing that emotion and feeling that cars carry. Everything looks a little more generic.”
Her concept, inspired by the Duesenberg Boattail Speedster, captured the extreme opulence and grandeur of the marque. It exudes that evil-villain vibe all old Duesenbergs seem to have.
As far as brand reinventions go, the students’ concepts might actually be better than some of the manufacturers’ work we’ve seen lately.
Shekaran and her classmates whom I spoke with were all aiming to break into the rarified field of car design, a field in which Canadians are unfortunately few and far between. To do so, they may have to pursue post-graduate programs in the U.S. or Europe. That’s how Canadian designers – like Jason Battersby, formerly at Audi and now Jaguar, as well as Karim Habib, who shaped BMW’s design for decades before taking the top design job at Kia – both got to where they are.
Perhaps some of these young designers from Humber Polytechnic will eventually join them, shaping the electric future.
Former car designer and current Humber professor Ken Cummings, right, with transportation design student Louis Seguin at the 2025 Cobble Beach Concours d'Elegance.Chittley, Jordan/The Globe and Mail