In the Driver’s Seat : Cars: In August, BMW acquired 50% of a Newbury Park design firm. It isn’t the first German auto maker to invest in U. S. talent.
Most people think of Munich as the home of BMW, but when it comes to the fine art of discerning American car buyers’ tastes, BMW looks to Newbury Park for answers.
That’s the home of Designworks/USA, which for seven years has been helping BMW come up with high-tech seat designs, color patterns, new textures and other features that the German auto maker hopes will lure buyers to BMW and away from competitors.
Designworks, which had $3 million in sales last year, also designs things like camera bodies for Vivitar Corp. in Chatsworth and personal computer frames for Houston-based Compaq Computer Corp., plus garden clippers and office chairs.
But car design is Designworks’ biggest market. In August, BMW paid $4.5 million in a deal that included a 50% stake in Designworks. The investment, BMW’s first hookup with a design studio outside Germany, was meant to shore up the car maker’s U. S. market share, which has been eroded by a weak dollar, the recession and the invasion of Japanese luxury models such as Lexus and Infiniti.
“California defines a part of the Zeitgeist ,” or spirit of the age, said Uwe Mahla, BMW’s spokesman at the company’s Munich headquarters. “We felt it was important to keep our finger on the pulse.”
Indeed, the BMW-Designworks partnership is the latest move by a foreign car maker to establish a foothold in the U. S. auto-design scene, reflecting the hot competition by foreign car makers for the U. S. market, especially in Southern California. In addition to BMW, Mercedes-Benz last year opened a design center in Irvine and in January, Volkswagen of America and its sister company, Audi, set up a studio in Simi Valley. Volvo, meanwhile, has a studio in Camarillo.
But the Europeans are playing catch-up with the Japanese. Toyota, Isuzu, Mitsubishi, Mazda and Subaru have opened design studios in California recently--most in Orange County. The studios’ innovative designs, such as Mazda’s Miata sports car, have helped cut into the Europeans’ overall U. S. market share, which stands at 4.3%, the lowest in three decades.
Through October, BMW’s U. S. sales this year were down 15% to 43,519 cars, spokesman Tom McGurn said. In 1986, BMW’s best year in the United States, the company sold 90,000 cars.
Volkswagen, which has been on a long slide in the United States, saw its sales through October fall 28% to 85,370, while Audi’s sales plunged 44% to 10,191 cars, the company said.
Volkswagen’s Simi Valley studio is geared not just to recapturing the U. S. market but also to preparing to compete against the expected onslaught by the Japanese into the European auto market. (Japanese auto makers have a smaller share of the European market than they do in the United States, but Europe’s strict trade barriers are expected to ease in the next few years.)
At the Simi Valley studio--Volkswagen’s first outside Germany--21 designers are busy trying to come up with the car of the future. H. Michael Tozer, director of design management at the studio, said Volkswagen wants to learn about Americans’ tastes by having its designers live--and drive--in Southern California. Their task is to design new cars that appeal to worldwide tastes but remain distinctly German.
“It’s not enough to know if car buyers are young or old,” said Verena Kloos, who in March was dispatched from VW’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, to head the Volkswagen design team in Simi Valley. “Today, we need to know a lot more facets . . . and offer more specific design concepts.”
Kloos and other VW/Audi officials declined to say exactly what concepts they’ve been working on in Simi Valley--as with most studios, such matters are a tightly kept secret--but possible projects range from simple things such as door knobs and new interior and exterior colors to designing an entire car model that might be introduced worldwide in three to four years.
“This is a very secret place,” Tozer said. “Not even many people in the corporation are allowed in here.” The company chose Simi Valley for its studio in part because it’s only a 20-minute drive from VW/Audi’s Western regional headquarters in Westlake Village.
J. C. Mays, Kloos’ counterpart on the Audi side of the studio, is an Oklahoma native who spent 10 years with Audi in Germany before coming to Simi Valley earlier this year. Mays said Americans and Germans have widely different views of cars and driving. Germany’s famed autobahns, where drivers routinely hit speeds above 100 m.p.h., require snug-fitting seats more suited to a racetrack, for example. But the same seats can be a pain for commuters inching along in Los Angeles freeway traffic, so Audi is looking into more comfortable designs, according to Mays.
And while they are stuck in traffic, Americans like to have such gadgets as cellular phones and even fax machines to get a head start on work. Most Germans, however, have shorter commutes so VWs and Audis until recently weren’t designed with those devices in mind, Tozer said. “We need to develop things around those different needs,” he said.
At BMW’s Designworks, a crew of 27 designers is working on many of the same problems, albeit for a more elite market. Its projects include the front seats for BMW’s $82,000 sports car, the 850i. The seats, standard equipment on the 850i worldwide, have three memory settings that allow automatic adjustment to a preset position at the push of a button. The seats are also easier to get into because of a special seat-belt design in which the shoulder strap is attached to the seat’s shoulder, instead of to the car frame.
So far, the seats are the only Designworks concept that has shown up on BMW showroom floors, but the company is also researching new car colors: Examples include earth tones and bright colors--such as a turquoise exterior. Designworks is also trying to come up with less complicated instrument panels for several BMW lines.
Charles W. Pelly, president and founder of Designworks, said a big push is to make cars more compatible for women, who make up about a third of BMW buyers in the United States. “There’s more sensitivity to the whole form of the car--not so Teutonic and stark,” he said.
Another Designworks project--still in its conceptual stage--is a BMW electric car made of aluminum and recycled plastic, Pelly said. The concept car, which will be unveiled in January at the Los Angeles Auto Show, is akin to a BMW battery-driven car introduced last summer at the Frankfurt Auto Show. None of the vehicles are yet planned for mass production, but they reflect efforts to prepare for tough new California smog laws that will go into effect in the next 10 years.
Pelly, who like many of his peers graduated from the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, opened Designworks in 1972 after working for a design consulting firm in New York City. He started out working at home, after spending $500 to buy modeling clay and drawing paper.
About two years later, Pelly teamed up with Raymond Carter, whom he knew from New York and who is now the company’s executive vice president. Together, they designed a funky-looking motor home built on a Mercedes-Benz van. It never sold, but later Designworks had more success with designs for hospital infusion pumps, X-ray equipment, office chairs and alarm clocks. Other projects included a snowmobile, a slot machine and a high-tech sports car, called the Torrero. The car, designed for a Canadian car-parts manufacturer called Magna International, was never produced.
BMW first approached Designworks in 1985 hoping to borrow some of Designworks’ office-seat concepts for use in its cars, Pelly said. Now BMW accounts for 50% of Designworks’ sales, Pelly said.
“Originally, we were called in to get American sales, and now it’s turned around to be American designs for European sales,” Pelly said.
