International Automotive Design
British car manufacturer
International Automotive Design (IAD UK Ltd) was a British design company, based in Worthing, West Sussex, England.
IAD UK Ltd was founded in 1976 by John and Yvonne Shute. Initially, work came in the form of design services for rail cars which then led to Automotive Body and Chassis Engineering. However, due to the increasing customers' requirements, it soon expanded to encompass everything from design/styling and engineering through to small-scale production. IAD UK Ltd had at its peak a large R&D facility in Worthing, West Sussex, UK, plus 5 overseas operations in the USA (Huntington Beach, California and Detroit, Michigan), France (5 facilities), Spain and Germany (3 facilities) along with liaison offices in Korea, Japan and Russia. The US, German and Spanish offices having their own styling studios. It was the world's largest R&D consultancy, and worked in automotive, commercial vehicles and aerospace. The company was in competition with Italdesign, Pininfarina, Bertone. By the early 1990s, the company employed over 1400 people. The majority of the projects completed by IAD were never made public, keeping the high level of security that John Shute believed was the key to customers allowing IAD to be considered for future projects.
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This entry incorporates text from “International Automotive Design” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.