Nio has elevated Senior Vice President of Design Kris Tomasson to oversee design across all three of its brands, EV learned on Friday at the Beijing Auto Show.
Previously serving as design chief of the Nio and Firefly brands, Tomasson now takes on the same role for Onvo as Global Brand Officer of the Shanghai-headquartered carmaker’s entire brand lineup.
The restructuring extends Tomasson’s remit to a sub-brand that saw its Vice President of Global Design Raul Pires depart the company earlier this year.
Tomasson was among the executives at Nio‘s press conference on Friday morning on the opening day of the Beijing Auto Show, alongside Executive VP and Chairman of the Quality Management Committee Fen Shen, Nio US Chief Ganesh Iyer, and Principal Chief Engineer Danilo Teobaldi.
Brazilian Exec Leads Car Design
While Tomasson holds the brand-level design oversight, day-to-day car design at Onvo is now led by Brazilian executive Juliano Vilas Boas, a long-serving member of the sub-brand’s design team.
Vilas Boas joined Nio in 2023 to work on Onvo‘s first model, the five-seat L60 SUV, serving as Interior Design Director from the Shanghai Design Center.
The Onvo brand was launched in May 2024 with deliveries of the L60 beginning four months later.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he was promoted to Head of Design in December — two months before Pires’ departure became publicly known.
The bifurcated structure places strategic brand identity under Tomasson while concentrating vehicle-specific design execution under Vilas Boas, who has worked on Onvo vehicles since before the sub-brand emerged from stealth.
Tomasson’s Expanded Role
Kris Tomasson joined Nio in February 2015 as one of the company’s earliest employees, after serving as Head of Exterior Design for the BMW i division.
He started his career at BMW headquarters in Munich after graduating from ArtCenter College of Design.
Tomasson established Nio‘s global design headquarters in Munich in 2015, making it the company’s first R&D site in Europe when, as Tomasson recalled in an interview last year, the operation “had no team, no office, not even computers.”
The SVP has been central to shaping Nio‘s brand design, from creating the Nio name itself — when the company rebranded from NextEV — to designing the company logo over a decade ago.
His elevation to oversee Onvo marks the first time all three Nio brands report into a single design executive.
Pires Departure
Pires’ exit became public days after Onvo posted its weakest sales month since deliveries began in September 2024, and as the brand prepared to enter its first international markets.
The Brazilian designer joined Nio in June 2022 as VP of Global Design for Onvo while the sub-brand was still operating in stealth mode.
He led design strategy and execution for the L60 SUV competing with Tesla‘s Model Y, the L90 three-row SUV, and the upcoming L80 — which is scheduled to launch on April 28.
Onvo has struggled to maintain early delivery momentum since the L60 launch, and Nio Chief Executive William Li acknowledged during a recent internal address that Onvo’s brand awareness is currently at levels comparable to where Nio stood in 2019.
