Thomas Kohn was born in Vienna in 1926 and went to school in Brno before the family left Czechoslovakia in 1939. He reached England in 1942 and studied aeronautical engineering at Loughborough College. He worked for Hunting Percival, then the Air Registration Board, and studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He joined the Ford design studio in 1955, working on the interior of the Ford Anglia 105E.
After a spell with David Ogle, Hotpoint and Philips, he was invited in 1962 to take charge of Ogle Design after David Ogle died in a crash in an Ogle SX1000. He was managing director and chief designer until 1999. Cars he oversaw included the Reliant Scimitar and Robin, and the Bond Bug. Ogle also designed the Raleigh Chopper with Alan Oakley, the Eccles caravans, the Anadol A1, the first Turkish car, and lorry cabs for Leyland. For the Star Wars films it produced Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder, built around a Bond Bug chassis.
Not all was popular: the box-shaped fuel tanks of the 1971 Triumph and BSA motorcycles were nicknamed “bread bins”, and the Ariel 3 moped was much derided. He died in 2022.
