Car Designers in Southland Keep Detroit Styles in Shape for the Future : Ideas Ferment in Auto Culture
Far away from their Detroit bosses, auto designers are pondering the shapes of cars of the future. Much of the advanced design for all of the Big Three auto makers has shifted from the Rust Belt to car-conscious Southern California.
The auto makers arrived during the past two years, a full decade after Japanese manufacturers, including Toyota and Honda, opened design studios in the area. Industry experts predict the Europeans will follow.
Japanese and American designers alike have discovered that Southern California, where the automobile is a prime form of self-expression, may be the best stimulus for creativity in car design.
“California is at the cutting edge,” said Dutch Mandel, West Coast editor for AutoWeek, a Detroit-based trade magazine. “All the best car ideas are coming out of here.”
Most of the ideas from the U. S. auto designers here are not on the road yet. The time from design table to production floor is at least three years, sometimes as much as seven, and the studios are still too young to have much of a track record.
The nation’s two largest auto makers rely on design centers in the outlying Santa Clarita and Conejo valleys.
General Motors started its Advanced Concepts Center in Newbury Park in 1983. Concept Center California, an independent design firm in Valencia, began working for Ford on an exclusive basis in 1984.
Chrysler’s Pacifica Advanced Product Design Center, which opened two years ago, is in Carlsbad, north of San Diego.
The Japanese, led by Toyota, which opened a Newport Beach studio in 1973, do not claim any special foresight in being the first to arrive in California. They say they simply set up shop on the coast where their U. S.-bound cars were headed. Honda, Mazda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Isuzu and Subaru followed the Toyota example.
Like the East Coast and Midwest immigrants who populate California, the car designers say, they were attracted to the area for a myriad of reasons.
“The weather beats the heck out of Michigan,” one design executive noted.
But Detroit may be more frustrated over sales in California than jealous over its sunny skies. The state has almost as many foreign cars on its streets and freeways as domestic ones.
As of July, according to R. L. Polk & Co., a Detroit publishing company that compiles automobile statistics, 26% of the cars registered in the U. S. were imports. In California, 46% were from foreign manufacturers.
Advanced Southland Tastes
Analysts say California car consumers’ tastes are good indicators of trends, being perhaps four to five years ahead of the rest of the country. “Southern California accepts radicalism with appreciation,” said Gary M. Glaser, who follows the automotive industry for the First Boston brokerage firm in New York.
Also cited as a draw to California is the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, perhaps the premiere auto design school in the country. The school estimates that 60% of the 400 to 500 designers in the U. S. are Art Center alumni.
But the strongest, and yet least tangible reason Southern California is so appealing to auto designers, they say, is the awareness its residents have of cars and the way they use them to express their personalities. The state is packed with inspiration in the forms of customized cars and hot rods.
“In other parts of the country, cars are seen mostly as transportation,” Don Kubly, president of the Art Center, said. “Here, cars tell you who someone is, or who he wants to be. Designers need to feel that.”
‘An Artists’ Colony’
Kubly and the designers agree the Art Center is at the heart of Southern California’s design business because of the exchanges between students and working designers from auto manufacturers around the world.
“It’s an artists’ colony, like Paris during the Impressionists’ era,” AutoWeek’s Mandel said.
However, Concept Center’s executive designer, Richard Hutting, a 1976 Art Center alumnus who teaches at the school, said designers are very competitive and are cautious about disclosing proprietary information.
“There isn’t some small coffee house in Pasadena where we all sit around sipping espresso and arguing about car design,” he said.
One spirit manufacturers apparently have found to their liking is that of the small entrepreneurial venture. “The whole process is more creative when a couple of guys get together and feel free to do what they like,” First Boston’s Glaser said.
Newport Beach Celica
Glaser noted that Toyota’s first car developed from its Newport Beach studios, the 1978 Celica, was heralded as having changed the nature of Japanese car design.
“Clean, sheer statements sell, and that’s what the Japanese finally learned to do,” Hutting said.
Katsushi Nosho, executive vice president of Toyota’s Newport Beach design facility, Calty Design Research, said the Celica’s elongated, egg-shaped profile changed the American perception of Japanese cars.
“They saw we could keep cars practical, while giving them a lot of style,” Nosho said.
Different Design Schedules
The three major American auto makers are designing cars on different schedules. Whereas Chrysler and Ford are designing for the next four to eight years, GM is toying with concepts for 21st Century vehicles. Chrysler also plans to modify existing cars.
Concept Center is working on cars for Ford for the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hutting said. Ford arranged the necessary financing to install a machine shop in the studio.
The California shop is intended as an extension of Ford’s North American design studios in Dearborn, Mich. Based on an established engineering package--a certain engine size or arrangement, for example--the Valencia and Dearborn studios might both be asked to produce design prototypes, Hutting said.
Neither model would be the plan for the production automobile, Hutting said. The Detroit executives and engineers might take ideas from both cars, maybe a sloping hood from one, a grille from the other.
‘Homogenous, Total Design’
“Manufacturers want a homogenous, total design statement for their whole line of cars,” Hutting said. “They want you to know from 50 feet away that this car is, say, a Ford.” As a result, he said, final design decisions are made in Detroit.
There are four designers at the Valencia studio, including Hutting. Another eight people mold the prototypes, although Hutting says everyone’s responsibilities are varied because of the small-company environment.
Hutting said Concept Center has sent Ford six completely different, full-scale fiberglass prototypes since entering into the exclusive agreement last year.
Concept Center is hidden away in an industrial park, surrounded by high-technology companies.
Looking Further Ahead
GM’s Newbury Park studio also is in a high-tech neighborhood. The concepts being developed there are for model years 1997 to 2020, according to the company. The shop was opened as part of a plan to look further ahead than the GM Tech Center in Warren, Mich., where production designers are working on cars through 1990 and where advanced designers have taken on 1990 to 1996, said Henry G. Haga, director of the Advanced Concepts Center.
“The cars we’re designing would look totally outlandish to most people, at least in 1985,” he said.
The Advanced Concepts Center employs 30 people, including five designers. Haga said he thinks there will be more small, entrepreneurial groups at GM because the company wants to encourage that sort of creative environment.
Few complete prototypes are being produced by the Newbury Park GM center, Haga said, because the studio emphasizes engineering concepts.
Lancer Pacifica
Down the coast in Carlsbad, Chrysler Pacifica is designing changes for existing models. One completed project is the Lancer Pacifica, a modified Dodge Lancer, that will be sold only in California, beginning in the spring.
However, the main goal for Pacifica’s eight designers is to produce 15 prototype cars a year, according to Chrysler.
Pacifica has more space than the studios in Valencia and Newbury Park. The 34,000 square-foot building was built on 2.6 acres.
Pacifica gets engineering dimensions and marketing data from Chrysler’s Design Concept Committee in Highland Park, Mich. A Chrysler spokesman in Detroit, Tom Houston, said the Pacifica operation is more structured than others in California, but that “it’s still really nice for them not to have a zillion guys looking over their shoulders.”
