Mussawer Ahmed

Takaya

Takaya is an industrial design thesis that explores a structural gap in Canada’s automotive industry. Despite being one of the world’s leading automotive manufacturing nations, Canada does not own a self-sustaining automotive brand.This project proposes a design-led alternative to the traditional OEM model through a Virtual OEM platform that integrates Canada’s existing supplier ecosystem into a unified system. Rather than building a company from scratch, Takaya acts as a coordination layer that enables authorship, ownership, and long-term value creation.A low-volume hybrid hypercar is developed as a proof of this system, demonstrating how design, engineering integration, and software can transform distributed capability into a Canadian-owned platform. The vehicle is not the end product, but the entry point into a scalable ecosystem of technology, IP, and future expansion.

“his project began with a simple question: why does Canada build some of the most advanced vehicles in the world, yet still not have a brand of its own?Through research into industry structure, trade dependency, and supplier relationships, it became clear that the limitation is not technical capability, but coordination and ownership. Canada has world-class subsystems, but lacks a unifying system that brings them together under a national identity.As an industrial designer, my role was not to engineer every component, but to design the system that makes those components meaningful when integrated. Takaya reframes automotive design as a question of authorship, where design operates at the level of platform, ecosystem, and long-term value.The hypercar serves as a strategic tool to validate this model. It creates visibility, attracts investment, and generates intellectual property, while opening pathways for expansion into broader markets.Takaya is not simply a car proposal. It is a design-led exploration of how Canada can move from manufacturing for others to building something it owns.”