Designers Imagine the Perfect L.A. Car
Some of the hottest cars at the Los Angeles Auto Show can’t be found on the convention center floor. They’re still on the drawing board.
Take, for instance, the Volkswagen Mobile Lounge -- a Jetsons-like minivan for the family. Or DaimlerChrysler’s open-top Dodge Superbee, a cross between a classic California roadster and a futuristic Mars crawler.
Those are the two winners among 11 car renderings entered in the inaugural Design Challenge at the L.A. Auto Show, which opens today downtown.
All are the creations of Southern California-based studios set up over the years by a range of carmakers. Among them: VW, DaimlerChrysler, Hyundai Motor Co., Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co., Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., Mitsubishi Motors Corp. and Mazda Motor Corp.
In their everyday jobs, the designers try to reflect the Southland’s legendary trendiness. Their aim is to lure customers into showrooms around the world with, say, a sexy new hood grille or a cool, sloping windshield.
But the contest goes a step or two beyond that. Organizers asked the companies to forget about normal financial and production constraints and simply create -- at least on paper -- the perfect “L.A. car.”
The results vary greatly. Some of the designs would be best suited for a shopping spree on Rodeo Drive. Others would be ideal for a drive up the Santa Monica Mountains.
“L.A.’s car culture is a mixture,” said Charles Pelley, founder and chairman emeritus of BMW’s Designworks USA studio in Thousand Oaks and a key player in staging the Design Challenge.
“It is vintage cars and SUVs and sports cars and racing and luxury, and these designers reflect a little bit of everything in what they’ve submitted.”
The contest marks a bid by the privately owned L.A. Auto Show to drag itself out from the shadow of the better-known North American International Auto Show in Detroit, which opens just a few days later.
“Los Angeles has the largest concentration of design studios in the world, so why not deal with the culture of the car at the show?” said Truman Pollard, chief designer for Mazda Research and Design in Irvine. “It makes it unique.”
Showgoers can decide for themselves whether the designers’ handiwork is worth checking out: The contest entries will be on display during the event’s 10-day public run.
Judges were particularly impressed by VW designer Reto Brun’s entry from the company’s Simi Valley studio: an asymmetrical glass-roofed people mover.
With seating that can be arranged in a number of configurations and with plenty of room for TVs and DVD players -- or even a mobile office -- the VW might be the perfect antidote to L.A. freeway gridlock.
This “lets you make the most of your time in traffic,” said contest judge Nate Young, chief academic officer at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
In some ways, Young added, the VW was the yin to the Dodge’s yang.
The Superbee -- an open-wheeled two-seater with a lightweight carbon-fiber body and a fuel-efficient but powerful V-8 engine -- harks back to a simpler time in L.A.
For the judges, Young said, it “represented the latent part of us that wants L.A. to be the way it used to be, when you could take off and head down Pacific Coast Highway, cruising with a friend.”
Brian Nielander, the 31-year-old Chrysler Group designer who came up with the Superbee, said the car was “the ultimate machine for L.A. -- open, lightweight, almost a motorcycle on wheels.”
Despite the differences in the designers’ submissions, there are several constants.
“A car for L.A. has to reflect fashion, a youthful energy,” said Joel Piakowski, chief designer for the Hyundai/Kia Advanced Design studio in Irvine.
Several of the vehicle designs revolve around the beach. For instance, Ford’s Scout-7 is tailored to haul a surfboard. Meanwhile, Hyundai’s NTT (pronounced “Entity”) features a roof panel that slides off and becomes a surfboard itself.
Another common denominator: Many of the designers were mindful of California’s green-car movement. They chose a gas-electric hybrid or all-electric fuel cell as an alternative to the conventional internal combustion engine.
But the biggest shared trait among the artists is that all of them really “let their imaginations fly,” Pelley said.
Mercedes-Benz designer Chris Rhoades was quite literal about that.
The 43-year-old from DaimlerChrysler’s Mercedes-Benz Advanced Design North America studio in Irvine figured that the L.A. driver of the future should simply rise above it all.
His idea: a car with a body that conceals powerful fans. They would slide out on command and lift the vehicle from the road, enabling it to fly above traffic.
