Alfonso_Albaisa

That's a great question! It seems like a basic question, but it's always a difficult one to answer no matter how many times I try. It happens out of so many different places. I'm extremely lucky that I have four global studios, so I have one in Beijing, I have one in So Cal, I have one in London, and of course one in Japan. So culturally they're so different, so what happens is when you're a guy from Miami working in Japan is that you can't trust language as communication, so things become very visual ... so I'm bombarded by stuff from the world constantly, daily, every hour. And fundamentally it inspires me. So short answer - my international team and their diverse opinions and personalities is an endless source for me.

Because we're a big company, we have product planning as a different group and they come to us with profiles of different people and show us the ambition of the customer in four years and how they want to live, and their life, and their history and where they're going, and it kind of jars you because as designers we live in our own little minds and little worlds, and we live in high security areas where we spend a lot of hours, so immediately we get this picture of a person, and then we start drawing and we start seeing sketches and bouncing ideas off each other globally. So we start inside and outside at the same time, what do we think is cool, what's the vibe happening globally that we like in other industries and we throw it all together into one big mess - there are so many drawings it's almost intimidating, even after 30 years...so this kind of early reduction of great ideas is very painful, it's a lot like salmon swimming upstream and so many are lost- that's how it is in the early phases of the drawings. Then we migrate into models, and eventually one comes out of a factory years later. One salmon makes it!

Yes. The Q80, most recently. The INFINITI Q80 was a 5.2meter long 5-door hatch. I love old Hollywood, this image of the day when cars were coach built - a car company would go to a coach builder to make a bespoke car for a Hollywood director - and when we made Q80 there was a sense of that. Like this car was the most elegant car on the street, and a car that would be the first one that kids would remember if they saw it on the street. That silhouette would slow life down, almost like a black hole. I'm still always trying to squeeze that car into something. Executives will be like "Hey Alfonso, we need a toaster" and I'll be like "Hey! How about the Q80?"

(Edit: Formatting) 911. It's my spring water, it's the most clean and clinical yet somehow I feel a heartbeat in it.

Cheetah. Because the internal project name for the first QX70 was Bionic Cheetah. It's a high-speed cat, very specialized, very focused, very purposeful, a little iconically different than a normal cat.

If you're young you really just need to start drawing and dreaming all the time. Don't hesitate and don't put limits on yourself, because it'll be the best thing to prepare yourself for art or design school. We don't care where you come from, car designers don't need any particular knowledge - they just need ideas. And you need to be independent since there are a lot of people who want the job, but there are limited jobs available. So we'll get a lot of portfolios but there are only 1-2 openings a year. What really stands out is individuality. Technical skills are easy to achieve, but that spark that makes you stand out is what matters. So find who you are, amplify your soul in your drawings and in your models. Look at what's great that's already out there, but don't let it affect you. Study a lot, but don't let that studying cause you to lose your identity. I like artists, I like people who were born different, because we're a creative community.