Garen Nicoghosian

Ford GT exterior design manager whose team was responsible for the road and race-car exteriors; later documented as Multimatic design head.

Nicoghosian graduated in transportation design from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. He says an internship at Volkswagen/Audi’s Design Center California preceded his move to Michigan and Ford’s Dearborn design team, where he worked on Mustang generations, Ford and Lincoln models, and specialty vehicles.

In January 2012, Autoweek identified Nicoghosian as Ford’s design manager for specialty vehicles and one of the people heading the Design Center work on the 2013 NASCAR Fusion. He described the task of giving a long-hood, rear-drive racer the look of the front-drive production Fusion despite their sharing no body surfaces. He says he was chosen in 2013 as design manager for the 2017 Ford GT programme.

The GT road and race cars were developed together by a small secret team in Ford’s Dearborn basement studio. Hot Rod identified Nicoghosian as the exterior design manager, and Wired reported that he oversaw the exterior. He described the body as a collection of items that collect, avoid or better use air: inlets have outlets, while the aero-neutral buttress carries an intercooler-to-intake tube. Moray Callum said the design was largely set by 4 July 2014.

In 2018 he joined Multimatic to start an in-house design studio, according to his account. He names its early Ford GT work as the 2020 Mk II track vehicle, with bespoke liveries for each client, and the track-only Mk IV, the final production-run variant. A 2020 Multimatic release called him its design head and described the Studio Collection graphics as a Ford Performance–Multimatic collaboration reflecting his input.