Three years ago, ola stenegärd and his team brought us the chief platform and now we also have them to thank for the new range of scouts
This isn’t the first time we’ve written about Indian Motorcycle’s Director of Product Design, but his latest top-tier work definitely puts him in the spotlight again.
A modest man, Ola Stenegärd always insists that he's just one cog in the machinery of his design team – but whether he likes it or not, he’s become the face of the brand’s design work. He was responsible for the new line of Chiefs, and now he's helming team efforts to replace the entire Scout platform with the 2025 models that we first saw in Munich last April. For anyone who doesn't know him, here's a quick rundown of the facts. As his name suggests, Ola Stenegärd is Swedish. He grew up on a farm among brothers who were into motorbikes and American cars with big V2 or V8 engines.
His dad taught him to weld when he was 7, and at 11 he built his first motorcycle (powered by a chainsaw engine). Moving on to scooters and 125 ccs, he eventually graduated to heavyweight rides when he was old enough. That’s when he joined the Stockholm bikers’ club Plebs Choppers and honed his skills in the Unique Custom Cycles workshop.
Ola’s love of design and stacks of drawings of motorcycles got him into design school, first in Sweden, then the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
From 2001 to 2003 he was Senior Designer at the former Indian Motorcycle production facility in Gilroy, California. He loved the brand, so when Polaris invited him to come and work on its modern-day Indian Motorcycle brand in 2018, he jumped at the chance. When Ola isn’t traveling the world as part of his exciting job, he spends time in the US, Switzerland or at home in Sweden. He’s deeply attached to his homeland and likes to point out that the brand – which was founded in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1901 – has partly Swedish roots. He says, “I can't help but make the link with the co-founder, Carl Oscar Hedström. We Swedes are still very proud of what he did over 120 years ago. The brand’s origins go back a very long way indeed, and it's an honor for me to keep carrying a small part of that flame!” Ola recently got to visit Hedström's birthplace in Lönneberga.
Although nothing but the foundations remain of the family homestead, the historical importance of this place is marked by a memorial stone, showing a 1913 Hedström engine in bas-relief. Ola was lucky enough to make the mini-pilgrimage with two of the co-founder's descendants, Bengt and Anders Hedström. They belong to the branch of the family that remained in Sweden when the others emigrated to Brooklyn in the late 1800s. But Ola Stenegärd is also making news in his own right, after Sweden's biggest motorcycle museum opened an exhibition dedicated to his work in June 2024. The museum is housed in what used to be the Royal Stables of Tidö Castle (mc-collection.com). For a good few years, the owner has been buying up everything his friend Ola Stenegärd ever built since he was a teenager, including choppers constructed around the chassis of mopeds. Much to Ola's surprise, the goal was to stage a retrospective that brings together some twenty of his motorbikes and five decades of his sketches and drawings. The exhibition is set to run until 2026.
By Charlie Lecach – photos : IMC, Joachim Cruus
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