Every story
has a
beginning.
KAHN® - About Us
A design company built on the conviction that a motor car is never merely a means of travel, but a considered expression of the person who commissions it.
Thirty years of that conviction have produced a design house in the fullest sense: wheels, coachwork, interiors and complete motor cars, conceived, engineered and built in Britain under one roof. Today that same studio works to Tier 1 OEM manufacturer standards, and offers its capability to the wider industry.
KAHN® designs to the standards of the manufacturers themselves.
DESIGNING
TO A TIER 1
OEM STANDARD
The studio works to Tier 1 OEM process and quality, the benchmark by which the world's vehicle manufacturers develop production cars. Design intent is not sketched and approximated. It is surfaced, engineered, validated and signed off to the tolerances a production programme demands.
That work is executed in Autodesk Alias, the class-A surfacing software used by the great manufacturer design studios, supported by a full digital pipeline from concept sketch to visualisation, engineering data and manufacture. Digital precision on one side of the studio, hand craft on the other: hammer, wheel, leather and thread. Very few companies of KAHN®'s size possess either. Fewer still possess both.
The result is design that survives contact with reality. Every surface KAHN® draws can be built, and is.
THE
FOUNDER
For Afzal Kahn, it was line and proportion. The understanding that a car, like a well cut suit, succeeds or fails on balance alone. He trained in architecture, but the discipline could not hold him. The automobile could.
What began in West Yorkshire as one man's exacting eye has become one of the most recognisable names in automotive design anywhere in the world. And it began before there was an industry to join. When Afzal Kahn started designing for the road in the mid 1990s, the field of luxury vehicle design beyond the factory gates barely existed. KAHN® was among the very first companies of its kind, and it wrote the rules the rest would follow.
Three decades on, the company that pioneered the discipline is stronger than ever. No longer an aftermarket name at all, but a fully fledged British design house, conceiving, engineering and coachbuilding motor cars of its own.
KAHN® has never followed a trend. It has set them.
THE WHEEL
THAT STARTED
IT ALL
In 1996, Afzal Kahn drew the RS-R. An alloy wheel unlike anything then on the road, its spokes appearing to flow uninterrupted to the very edge of the rim. A small canvas on which to announce a design philosophy, and it announced it emphatically. The first production run of one thousand wheels sold out entirely, and from that success A. Kahn Design was founded in 1998.
The wheel remains the KAHN® signature. Each is treated as a piece of design in its own right, sculpted, weighted and proportioned to the car it dresses, and it is where every KAHN® transformation still begins.
In the years since the RS-R, the company's wheels have become shorthand for a certain kind of understated authority. Recognised at a glance, never needing to shout. Countless imitators have borrowed the language since. It was written here first.
THE
MARQUES
RECOGNITION
KAHN® has appeared on a number of popular TV shows including the BBC's 'The One Show' with Theo Paphiptis, Idris Elba's BBC 2 show 'King of Speed', Channel 5's 'How The Other Half Lives' with Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford and Channel Four's 'How'd You Get So Rich?'. I was also the design guru on the first series of the global TV show 'Supercar Megabuild'.
The quality of the fit and finish is first rate.
Afzal Kahn is onto a winner.
Kahn Design has set the premium benchmark.
Afzal Kahn is a true Great British success story.
Kahn is passionate about using the best quality suppliers and he is a keen supporter of British industry.
Clients choose Kahn because they want something a little more exclusive from an already desirable vehicle.
Kahn is rapidly progressing towards becoming a fully fledged vehicle manufacturer.
As you might guess from his works, this is not a man who lacks ambition or self confidence.
Kahn is as bold in talking about the future as he is when he's speaking about the present.
Project Kahn has earned a reputation as one of Europe's leading automotive fashion houses.
THE STUDIO,
OPEN TO THE INDUSTRY
Thirty years after it helped invent an industry, KAHN® is entering its next chapter: opening its design studio to the wider automotive world.
The company now offers its design and engineering services in collaboration with other manufacturers and marques. Concept and sketch work, class-A surfacing in Alias, engineering and feasibility, prototype and low volume coachbuilding, interior design and trim. The same eye that shaped the Vengeance, and the same Tier 1 discipline that underpins it, placed at the service of others.
This is more than a commercial ambition. It is a matter of conviction.
At a moment when the global industry is being reshaped, and overseas volume manufacturers are entering the luxury space in ever greater numbers, KAHN® stands unapologetically for British engineering and innovation, and for the protection of British and European car design. The company is committed to keeping the great trades and craftsmanships alive, coachbuilding above all, and to keeping the business of designing and building motor cars in the United Kingdom, where it has flourished for more than a century.