At AVATR, Nader Faghihzadeh’s bet on emotive luxury and the end of status-driven cars

The automobile industry loves to pretend at futurism. Year after year, the same tropes get recycled — sharp lines passed off as innovation, sterile interiors lauded as minimalism. Against this backdrop, Nader Faghihzadeh, Chief Designer and Executive Vice President of AVATR, speaks with an unusual frankness: “Too many cars wear the costume of the future. We wanted to shape its soul.”

It is an arresting declaration, the kind that forces a double take. AVATR calls its philosophy New Emotive Luxury, a way of conceiving design not as engineering in search of function, but as atmosphere calibrated for resonance. “Every proportion, surface, and interaction is designed to resonate with feeling, not just function,” Faghihzadeh explains. The framework rests on three layers: Bold Confidence, Vibrant Individuality, and Harmony with a Twist. Together, they form what he calls the AVATR Energy Force — “a presence you feel before you see.”

The AVATR 11 becomes the manifesto in motion. Its “levitated buttress” and flowing surfaces are gestures that reject restraint. Inside, a capsule-like cabin organises itself around the Vortex, an iconic centrepiece that doubles as the car’s brain. “We don’t design futuristic cars,” Faghihzadeh insists. “We design future elegance you can feel.”

This sensibility pushes back against the excesses of an industry that too often chases novelty for its own sake. There is a refusal here to collapse design into spectacle. “Emotion is not abstract if you know how to shape it,” he adds. “At AVATR, every line has intention, every contour has a voice.” The cabin of the AVATR 11 becomes a living capsule, adapting to mood and need, folding intelligence into comfort. It is a proposition of luxury that feels oddly intimate, almost like companionship.

Such intimacy requires risk. Take the AVATR 012, born from a collaboration with Kim Jones. The pairing might sound predictable in an age when cars are dressed up with celebrity endorsements, but Faghihzadeh waves away any cynicism. “We didn’t invite Kim Jones because of fashion. We invited him because he shares our vision of design as emotion — bold, intelligent, and timeless.”

The 012 is less car than monolith, a coupé “carved from a single block.” In a radical move, its rear window is gone. What might seem like provocation becomes, in his telling, functional: privacy, acoustic refinement, efficiency. Jones sharpened the design language with a bespoke liquid silver paint, sculptural rims, and a tactile interior marrying Vachetta Tan leather with open-pore Silver Ash wood. The result is less collaboration-as-marketing and more provocation-as-ethos.

Singapore forms another chapter in this design narrative. Faghihzadeh calls the city “a place where East meets West, and tradition flows into innovation. It’s the perfect stage for AVATR.” He draws parallels between the clarity of Marina Bay and the silhouette of the AVATR 11, between the country’s multilingual texture and the car’s adaptive intelligence. It is a neat fit — a nation that has long turned infrastructure into identity hosting a vehicle that aspires to do the same.

What lingers is a redefinition of luxury itself. “True luxury is shifting from status to meaning,” Faghihzadeh reflects. The badge no longer suffices; what matters is a car that “grows with you, anticipates you, and reflects your evolving self.” This, he suggests, is the new theatre of aspiration: cars that behave like companions, intelligent and emotive, shaping how one inhabits mobility. The forthcoming Xpectra, AVATR’s Vision Car slated for IAA Mobility 2025, will carry this vision forward.

Designers like Faghihzadeh compel us to reconsider the automobile not as object but as medium — one that can encode identity, intimacy, and imagination. In his hands, a car becomes less about transport and more about translation: of emotion into form, of presence into experience.

And perhaps this is the broader lesson. That luxury, stripped of its traditional markers, becomes a matter of relation — between self and machine, city and citizen, vision and future. AVATR frames that relation as something alive, unfinished, and quietly, but confidently, radical.