DESIGN CENTRAL: With eight of the 17...
DESIGN CENTRAL: With eight of the 17 Southern California automotive design studios packed into Orange County, it has become the center of the West Coast auto design world. . . . Why? “It’s the light. . . . It makes cars look better,” says Ronald C. Hill, of the Pasadena Art Center College of Design. But Indiana native David Hackett of Calty Design Research Inc., Toyota’s Newport Beach center, says there’s another reason: “Who wants to spend their winters in Detroit?”
WATCH FOR IT: The first car to come out of the Mercedes-Benz design center in Irvine--the only European design studio in Southern California--started as a concept for a two-seat, electric-powered micro car. But it caught the eye of the president of Switzerland’s Swatch Watch Co. “Swatch has formed a joint venture with Mercedes to build the cars,” says Gerhard Steinle, who heads the Irvine center. . . . The Swatch Car is expected to hit showrooms in 1997--but not in the United States, because it wasn’t designed for our traffic needs.
MUSEUM PIECE: The new Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles celebrates the influence of the auto on life in the Southland. One of the crowd pleasers is a concept car whose design was inked at Mazda Research & Design in Irvine in 1989. It evolved into the curvy third-generation Mazda RX-7 for the 1993 model year. The design was the work of 37-year-old Wu-Huang Chin, above, who also was a member of the Miata design team. Chin says having his project in a major museum “is a designer’s dream come true.”
KEEP ON TRUCKIN’: Long-haul trucks owe a lot to Orange County. Independent designer Ronald Powers in Newport Beach is credited with helping companies like Peterbilt and Kenworth turn boxy behemoths into aerodynamic packages that please the eye and save on fuel. “Style is the last thing on (manufacturers’) minds, but they finally realized that the drivers who buy them are influenced by appearance,” says Powers, who founded Orange County’s first transportation design company in 1974.
