Peter Rawlinson
Vice President & Chief Engineer for Vehicle Engineering
Prior to Tesla, Peter led vehicle engineering at Corus Automotive, an engineering consultancy specializing in advanced engineering solutions for the global motor industry. Traditional vehicle programs Peter worked on at Corus include the X type, XJ and F-type Jaguars, Land-Rover Freelander and Discovery, Ford Fiesta, Honda Accord, BMW 5 Series and Bentley Continental. He also led development of the Think electric vehicle platform, which was done with only 5 engineers in 6 months, while still meeting cost and mass targets. Peter’s design set a new world record for best crash safety performance in the subcompact vehicle class.
Before Corus, Peter served as Chief Engineer of Advanced Engineering at Lotus, where he pioneered the use of advanced aluminum body structures, bonding cast elements with stampings and extrusions, an approach subsequently widely adopted within the industry. Vehicles using this approach include Aston Martins, the new Jaguar XJ, the current Audi A8 and the latest generation of the Audi TT.
Prior to Lotus, Peter was Manager for Advanced Drive-train and Suspension Systems at GKN Technology in the UK. At GKN, he developed an advanced drive-train layout with a forward front drive and axle-line, paving the way for safer and more spatially efficient vehicles only now emerging in the marketplace, such as the Toyota IQ.
Before GKN, Peter was Principal Engineer at Jaguar for almost a decade, responsible for advanced body structure design, layout and packaging, including crashworthiness. He was one of the first to apply computer-aided-design to automotive engineering and was an integral part of the team that advanced the integration of computer-aided-design with computer-aided analytical tools within a simultaneous engineering environment. That same methodology is being applied at Tesla.
Peter is a Mechanical Engineering graduate of Imperial College, London.
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