Designer Autos : Toyota’s High-Tech, Expanded Calty Center Is Quick on the Drawing
Toyota Motor Corp. pulled out the stops recently and opened the doors of its usually secretive Calty Design Research center in Newport Beach in ceremonies rededicating the facility, located on a 7-acre campus, after a $19-million expansion project that added a third building and brought the center’s size to 85,000 square feet.
While Toyota hid away anything that would have given visitors a clue to future designs, the tour did provide some insights into the mechanics of a major auto company’s design processes.
Calty is one of four Toyota design centers. There are two in Japan and one in Europe. Calty designs and concepts generally are judged in competition with submissions from the other centers, said David Hackett, director of the Newport Beach studio, and a lot of the work done there never sees the light of day.
That, however, is part of the design process. If just one in 10 ideas made it into production, the center would be one of the most fruitful in the industry.
For the technology-minded, Calty showed off two marvels of the computer design age: a measuring machine that can plot up to 4,000 separate measurements on a car or a car model to within 0.03-inch accuracy; and a computer-aided design system that translates all those computer plot points into full-size drawings of the car.
Before the advent of the drafting machine, it took several draftsmen a full week to turn out a completed set of drawings. The machine does it in two to three hours.
But not everything is high-tech.
The 40 or so designers, model makers, painters and other crafts people who populate the studio still spend a lot of time thinking, doodling, experimenting and getting their hands dirty, Hackett said.
Among other things, the studio consumes about 5 tons of red modeling clay each year--clay supplied by a New Jersey firm that closely guards the secrets of its exact composition.
When Toyota opened Calty in 1973 in El Segundo it was the the first automotive design facility to be established in Southern California by a major auto maker.
Now there are about a dozen in the Southland.
Orange County alone is home to corporate studios for Mazda, Mitsubishi, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Suzuki and Subaru as well as Toyota and hosts several independent automotive design firms as well. Toyota moved Calty to Newport Beach in 1978.
Southern California is a magnet for the studios because the car culture here breeds the inventiveness that car companies need to survive.
The Mazda Miata--a legend in the industry at the ripe old age of 2--was conceived in Irvine, and designers there say the car would have been completely different, probably not even a convertible, had its design been done elsewhere.
At Calty, the design staff gave Toyota the then-revolutionary 1978 Celica, the now-revolutionary Previa van and a car Toyota hopes will start the next revolution, the 1991 Lexus two-door coupe that hit the showroom floors June 1.
