When you are the head of interior design for a major, automotive conglomerate like Chrysler, you have quite a responsibility weighing on your shoulders. If you don’t believe that’s true, then you should spend some time with the Chrysler coorporation’s chief of interior design, Klaus Busse. Holding this position at Chrysler since 2005, Busse has quite a bit to say about his job at Daimler-Chrysler.

According to Busse, his position at Chrysler basically entails that he and his design group, “touch, smell, hear and feel an interior,” working with his team to make each interior for each make of car look and function at its absolute best.

Busse says that his career, even before joining Chrysler in 2005, involved both exterior and interior design; during the first ten years of his career, he concentrated on both, but shifted his focus primarily to interior design once joining the Daimler-Chrysler coorporation.

But Busse’s career as an interior designer is driven by a philosophy, a philosophy that interior design on a car involves more than what he describes as “shapes,” but is driven by the very sensation that one has spent their life in there, making sure everything is to-par. According to Busse, there’s so much more that a designer can do now to change the “aura” of an interior than ever before in the automotive industry, and he says that this is because of the fact that everything in interior design today is done with computers/on a screen.

When asked which Chrysler brand was his favorite to work with, Busse stated that he really doesn’t have one; for Busse, each brand and each individual project posed its own set of design opportunities and challenges. For example, where Dodge allowed Busse and his design team to build a more driver-oriented interior, Jeep allowed them to build something that was, according to Busse, “rugged and utilitarian.” And while Busse claims that he doesn’t have a “favorite” Chrysler brand, he also claims that Chrysler itself has been, for him, the most fascinating, because Chrysler has been the brand that looks to Europe for ideas about style and elegance, while also embodying America and what America has to offer.

Well-rounded in design and function, the Daimler-Chrysler corporation continues to strive, and with a well-rounded designer like Klaus Busse, it’s easy to see why.