Pick three blokes – any three blokes in the world – to sit around a table with and talk cars. Fast cars, interesting cars, everyday cars, driver’s cars, electric cars, motorsport and more. Come on – who are you gonna pick?  Well, you couldn’t do much better than these three: Matt Becker (chief engineer of vehicle attribute engineering at Aston Martin), Mike Cross (chief engineer, vehicle targets and sign-off, at Jaguar Land Rover) and Andreas Preuninger (director of high-performance cars at Porsche).  These three blokes will each be well known to regular Autocar readers because they’re among the most influential figures in the industry for defining and tuning the character traits of the very best driver’s cars in the world. They collectively have years of experience doing the sort of job most of us could only dream of, and have personally shaped and tailored some utterly unforgettable metal.  We have occasion to talk to them, each in isolation, pretty regularly. But never before the chance to sit them around the same table to gossip about the state of the sports car industry, about each other’s wares, and about all of our hopes and fears for the future of enthusiast motordom.  Not, at least, until now. You guys have what some would consider the best jobs in the world. But how do you know when it’s done? When is a car finished?  Mike Cross: The trouble is they never really are.  Andreas Preuninger: It’s never done (smiles).  Mike Cross: You just get to a point of sufficiently diminished returns that you know you’re ready for production. I’m not sure I’m ever completely satisfied with something, but I know when I’ve achieved my targets. Would your colleagues call you a perfectionist?  MC: Definitely. They’d be exasperated with me.  Matt Becker: They might use some other words, too Do you find you agree with your peers about what makes a really good driver’s car?  MB: There’s certainly agreement within my team, because my guys are hand-picked to recognise what ‘good’ is. It’s a little bit subjective. But you can’t do it all yourself. You need a team with the same instincts as you.  AP: That’s especially true, even now, with chassis engineering. You’re so dependent on what you feel in a car; and that’s really what we try to create and fine-tune. We want the driver to feel what the car is doing and to be sure that the electronic systems are adding to that feeling. It’s a challenge – but it’s important. It’s not just about empirical tests and computers and simulations. What do young engineers do better now than you did at their age, and what do you wish they did better?  MC: They’re a lot smarter academically than I was, but I’m not sure they’re quite as practical. I think they’ve got to want to love cars, they’ve got to be interested on a mechanical level, and they need an aptitude for it.  AP: I second that completely. Right now, there are still enough engineers with gasoline in their veins to keep us going, because you have to live for the job, to be creative and to think about it day and night in order to be really good. The generation of youngsters right now needs pushing a little bit more and their practical thinking is a little bit short. Could you pick the guy in your department who’ll be doing your job in 20 years’ time?  AP: Yes.  MB: Not yet.  MC: Not sure. If you were starting out today, do you think you’d pick the same career?  MB: Yes. Because, as Mike says, you don’t stop learning; and making use of the talent of the younger guys, with the heads for software, to get the feeling you want in the car is great fun.  MC: It never becomes routine because the next car is always different. Always more to learn.  AP: I’d definitely do it all over again. The sports car has been declared dead so many times, but where there’s technology, there’s always a way. The next 20 years will be even more exciting than the last.   Have driver assist systems made your cars better?  MB: The systems can – and do – enhance the appeal of the car. And in our cars, when you switch them off, they stay off. They’re not still active in the background. The fact is stability and traction control systems have improved so much and have become so clever, they can even pre-empt what’s going to happen to the car. It’s all about tuning them properly so they don’t dilute the driving experience – which is why we’re here.  AP: The big question about them for me is always ‘what purpose is it achieving?’. Torque vectoring on a sports car is very useful. People taking their cars on track days at the weekend want to be quick. So there is a tangible benefit.  MC: Also, getting the vehicle fundamentals right is so important. Then the assistance systems only need to augment what you’ve already got. You want the car to be engaging at low speeds and high speeds. Can you get the same character we currently see from the engine in a Porsche, Jaguar or Aston Martin from an electric motor?  MC: No. And I
Origin: A meeting of minds: Aston Martin, JLR and Porsche lead engineers debate the future of performance cars