[Alpha Biz=(Chicago) Reporter Paul Lee] Kia has hired two car designers from Mercedes-Benz and BMW.

Kia said on the 26th that it will appoint Oliver Sampson, who went through Mercedes-Benz in Germany and Nio in China, as the head of Kia's European design center, while Lim Seung-mo, a designer from Germany's BMW and China's Jiri Motors, will be in charge of Kia's Chinese design.

Oliver Sampson will lead the development of the next-generation internal and external design as head of Kia Europe Design Center. Sampson graduated from the department of transportation design at Pforzheim University in Germany, which is prestigious in the field of automotive design, and joined the Hyundai Motor and Kia European Design Center in 2003 when he was a first-time designer. At that time, I participated in projects such as Hyundai Motor i20 and Kia Ceed show car production. After serving as Mercedes-Benz (2007), he was in charge of external design for Chinese electric car maker Nio (2018) and director of innovation design platform at Jiangan Automobile in China (2022).

In 20 years, he returned to Kia Europe Design Center.

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