What You’ll Be Driving

The car of the future may have a hydrogen-fueled heart, a computerized brain and an exotic skeleton of alloy metal and composite plastic, but the auto industry remains convinced that design will still provide its soul.

Looks aren’t everything, and consumers won’t keep buying a well-styled vehicle if it isn’t also reliable, well-equipped and built with quality. But without good looks, few quality vehicles can survive a market that still places passion above practicality.

“Every brand has to exude an emotion,” says Susan Westfall, who heads the design team for Ford Motor Co.’s new Explorer Sport-Trac, a 2000 model that marries a short pickup truck bed to the passenger cabin of an Explorer sport-utility vehicle. “Design is important because it is what communicates that something special to the customer.”

Indeed, a recent survey of young import-car owners involved in the performance and customizing scene found that 57% rated looks--the factory design that they intended to modify--as the principal reason they bought a particular model. Quality, at 51%, came in second in the survey, which allowed participants to vote for more than one factor.

Perhaps one sign of design’s growing importance is the recent decision by struggling Nissan North America to turn its chief designer, Jerry Hirshberg, into its chief pitchman. Hirshberg, widely respected in design circles, is now becoming a familiar face in many consumers’ households because of his appearances in Nissan television ads--the first time a designer has been so featured.

He says design is critical not only to the success of an auto company, but also to the consumer’s ability to use and enjoy a product. Good design, Hirshberg said in a recent interview, “means we’re putting people back” into the picture.

With the auto industry poised for major changes, The Times asked a group of designers to sit down and talk about their business and its future in a Highway 1 Automotive Round Table. (See accompanying box for list of panelists.)

They agree there’s a huge move into niche marketing and away from the theory that success means having one mass-market car that will appeal to a million buyers. Now auto makers want 10 specialty vehicles, each of which will appeal to 100,000 people.

They say there’s a need in the industry to change the visual aspects of automobiles more quickly than ever before. With greater use of exotic materials, they add, designers now have to deal with what can and can’t be done with aluminum alloys, carbon fiber composites and plastics.

And there’s the globalization of the industry, which opens the whole arena of shared or universal platforms and the challenge for designers to use the same basic underpinnings to get a tall, skinny car in Europe or Asia and a low, wide car in the U.S.

There are mandates for lighter cars, for more fuel-efficient cars, for cleaner cars. We’re looking at cars with electric motors and hydrogen storage tanks.

We asked how all these changes will affect the visual envelope of future vehicles and just how important design has become.

Susan Westfall: Design certainly plays a more important role in the auto industry than it did 15 or 20 years ago. We have a new design boss [at Ford, former Audi design chief J Mays], and, coming from Europe, he certainly has made us much more conscious of that importance. We’re very focused on design. But design and quality and craftsmanship are all interrelated things, and we’re trying to blend them together. Good design is a part of those other items, and we’re trying to get our manufacturing people to understand that. It’s a team effort because if everybody isn’t on board with it, you’re not going to achieve the type of vehicle that you want.

Felix Nagelin: [The car of the future] should look different. It should look fresh, and I’m just waiting for which car company is going to make the race.

George Peterson: One thing that we’re seeing in the research we’ve been doing is that the battle in the future might not necessarily be about design but about the package. It’s about how to better use that shadow that’s on the road in order to better seat the people and carry the things they want to carry. That’s exactly what has made the truck so [popular]. The truck today really appeals to people in terms of how you sit in it, how you see out of it, how you get into it, how you get out of it. We’re finding that cars have swayed so far away from what appeals that they may be irrelevant now.

Times: So the car disappears?

Dan Sims: No. There’s another factor that comes into play. Twenty years ago, all that was available were station wagons and sedans. But today there are so many types of vehicles that one household can have an SUV and a sports car and the next-door neighbor can have an SUV and a sedan. There’s that one obligatory utility vehicle in every garage, and then there’s another vehicle that’s maybe for going out to dinner or commuting to and from work. I think the fact that we are becoming typically two- and three-vehicle families means that each vehicle can be relatively specialized.

Brian Baker: The majority of us around this table grew up with just three or four television channels. But the young designers straight out of school grew up with hundreds of channel options. They have a totally different perspective on what they expect from everything in their lives, including the vehicles they drive. For them to accept the simple concept of “it’s got to be either a minivan or a sport-utility or a sedan” is prehistoric. The next great vehicle for Southern California commuters is going to come from one of these Nintendo-generation designers who’s going to find something that clicks with the core of that generation but also has a broad appeal. I think that’s what we’re all searching for.

Times: Felix, you’re the new designer at this table. Are you searching, and have you found it?

Nagelin: I’m still waiting for a typical California car. I’m from Europe, and I’m traumatized by how Los Angeles deals with cars. There are so many, so why do people drive SUVs and pickups? Back in the ‘60s, I guess, Volkswagen brought over a minibus [the Microbus] that became identified as sort of a California car. What I’m now looking for is if there possibly could be--and I’m not speaking for BMW but just as a designer--the will at one of our companies to make a very specific, cool car which pleases also the young customer.

Westfall: I was the designer on the Explorer Sport-Trac and can tell you that we see that as a very modern concept. And yet we didn’t go into it to design something that just would look new or look different. We wanted to communicate a particular emotion to the customer. It was based on identifying it with the Explorer; that was part of the design process.

Times: That vehicle evolved from an existing design. Are we on the edge of an era that will see a whole new kind of passenger vehicle?

Baker: You know that GM just announced a historic agreement with Toyota to enter into a long-term effort working on electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles and fuel-cell vehicles. You have two powerful research organizations coming together to try and find the new vehicle types. It’s just as in the early days of the automobile, when they were trying to figure out whether the engine should go where the horse was or back there with the wagon bed. When you get a new set of components to arrange, you have opportunities to ask those questions. These new vehicle types should enable us to pioneer a new aesthetic, the way Mercedes did with the A-Class [which tucks the engine and drive train under the passenger compartment]. They rethought how to arrange the architecture of a vehicle to make it carry four people safely in a much smaller footprint.

Ronald Hill: The four-door passenger vehicle is not going to go away. No matter what the technology is, whether the componentry is in the back, underneath or on top, the ergonomics cannot change because human beings aren’t going to change shape. We have to ensure that the consumer not only has the utility and convenience that they want, but that we’re also less crowded in terms of the footprint size on the road, particularly in congested areas like Southern California or the Eastern Seaboard or Europe or Asia. But the great demand for personal mobility through use of the personal automobile is not going to go away, as much as some people would like to see it go away.

Sims: I think the most significant area in which change will happen is in what the car does. We’ve been designing cars as transportation pieces but not as [components of] transportation systems. Any person buying a PC these days should be shot if he buys a PC that can’t plug into the Internet and talk to everybody in the world. In the future, our cars could become like that. Little pieces of a larger network, so when you go out on the 405 Freeway and there’s a traffic jam ahead, the cars ahead are already signaling back so the cars coming up will know about it and alert the drivers to take alternate measures.

Douglas Halbert: You’re really right on in all this talk of systems. The Harvard Business Review recently wrote about a whole new business approach based on the [geographic] clustering of like people and industries. That could mean that we design certain styles of cars that become clustered as niche vehicles in this very new world map. Certainly the high-tech clusters on Route 128 in Boston and in Palo Alto could probably use similar vehicles. The habits of the people in those clusters are the same. The numbers of kids are the same. Their economic levels are the same.

Times: We’ve been talking about marketing and engineering subjects. Where does the designer fit into all of this?

Baker: At General Motors, it seems as though we’re going through a rebirth of the focus on design. We’re the first place in the whole operation that the product becomes visible, and finally there’s a recognition of the importance of our skills. We’ve got 13 global brands and seven major domestic brands. And if you don’t make design a priority, customers won’t be able to perceive the differences between brands.

Sims: One of the key roles a designer has today is to be a communicator. To take our vocabulary of shapes and forms and elements and use them as communication tools. There’s no longer a substantial difference between manufacturers as far as quality of the vehicles, the reliability and dependability and things like that. So where the differentiation is going to come about in the future is in how you position your brand, the message your vehicles convey about your company. In other words, design is going to become a major competitive factor.

Westfall: There certainly was a dark time for design, back when engineering took over, when we jumped on the safety wagon and things like that took over. But we’ve now put a lot of money into updating our vehicles, getting them to a point where they compete properly with Japanese vehicles, with German vehicles. The American companies are at that point now. Design is more important. The company looks to us to achieve a good-looking vehicle that brings all the other concerns, like safety and fuel economy, into harmony.

Halbert: And now we’ve got brand-identification issues to deal with. So design, or styling if you will, has taken on a very important role. Here [at Honda] in the U.S., we have to make the distinction between Acura and Honda, and since some cars that are Acuras here are sold as Hondas in Japan, it’s been kind of a battle between us and our Japanese counterparts at times. The role of the designer within our corporation, especially because our [design and build] cycle is so quick, is to stay with a product from the time it is launched. We’re right out there with the market research people and the product planners, seeing what the reactions are among consumers and dealers.

Times: We asked a number of people what they’d want to know if they had a chance to ask a car designer any question. The one that came up the most was this: Why do so many passenger cars look alike?

Sims: I think part of the reason cars look the way they do is that there have been a lot of restrictions and regulations put into the mix. The car you know as an automobile sedan today is probably the best combination of efficiency, aerodynamics, lightweight packaging, safety and fuel economy ever. But a lot of those things have been forced onto this vehicle, to the point that it’s gone beyond what the customer really wants. Trucks, on the other hand, have been immune from the same safety regulations, the same weight regulations. Does anybody care what the aerodynamics of a Ford F-150 pickup are? Not really. So it’s got a lot more headroom than a car. I’m not sure that when people buy trucks they’re necessarily buying trucks anymore. They’re buying the attributes that they really want in their cars. And we’ve been forced to remove them from cars because of a lot of self-imposed and government-imposed regulations.

Halbert: There’s another factor. It’s been printed numerous times in the past that most of the designers either come from Art Center or Center for Creative Studies and that there’s a certain amount of generic sameness because of what the schools teach. I don’t know how the rest of the companies are dealing with that dilemma, but I know that at Honda we are really working to put more personality back into design. A four-door sedan, as Dan said, obviously is going to have certain parameters in packaging, aerodynamics, etc. But emotion and excitement are coming back, I think, to all manufacturers.

Charles Pelly: There’s another twist to this perception of all cars looking the same. Actually, we’ve got everything from Dodge Vipers to Mazda Miatas to Cadillac. Could the real issue be quality? Look at the wine world. No one talks about all wines being the same, even though there are 7,000 reds and 2,000 Chardonnays. So could it be that what people are really talking about is too much mediocrity and not enough refinement?

Westfall: It does take more than just good design to communicate to the customer, and I think there are cars and trucks that do that, because not only do they look good, but they project an image of quality. It’s like a Nike shoe or a Reebok shoe. They have a reputation [for quality], and when you pick up one of those shoes, you don’t have to question those aspects. You can look at it and say, “Yeah, this is a Nike and it looks good, so I will buy it.” That’s what our car companies need to be going for if they don’t already have it.

Times: We’ve heard a lot of senior people on how the design system works. Now let’s put Felix on the spot. As a new designer, do you see it working the way the others describe it?

Nagelin: It’s interesting because [at BMW] we have also a sort of cross-fraternization between the core designers, the engineers, interior people and product [planning] people.

Times: And do the senior people listen to young designers in this process?

Nagelin: I think if they want to keep their positions, they better listen! And those who are up there, they do, of course. [The industry] changes so rapidly that it’s a must that we all try to keep up.

Times: How does the design process start? Does somebody from marketing or some other level of the corporation come to the studio and tell you that there’s a need in the lineup for a three-wheeled vehicle that’ll run on methane, so please design one? Or do the designs originate with the designers?

Peterson: Let me kind of represent the bane of the designer’s existence, and that’s product planning. In most of these companies, there’s a pretty formalized planning process that considers the freshening of existing models and the introduction and development of new vehicles. That process considers investments, production costs, market strategies, product timing--all of those things. Then the designers are put to work. But, having said that, some of the more serendipitous things do come straight out of design. Volkswagen’s Concept One [which led to the VW New Beetle and Audi TT sports coupe] definitely is one example.

Halbert: We’re always going to have automobiles to freshen up, like the Accord and Civic, for example, because they’re our bread-and-butter cars. But we have flexibility within our staff. If a young designer comes up with some concept--and it could be right off the wall--and if his design gets accepted, then we’ll keep them with it. We had an excellent example of this in Japan several years ago with the Honda City. The people who designed that car are now way up in the organization, but then they were young kids who came up with a car designed specifically for Tokyo. It was very tall, somewhat narrow and very short, and it had a small minibike in the trunk to use once you found a parking place. It took off, and it is huge.

Hill: To make it even murkier, the process really isn’t a set process. There is strategic planning, as George says, and there is the other extreme where ideas bubble up from young designers. But in between, there are a lot of projects done that never see the light of day. We used to call them “shelf cars,” and I can tell you that you do far more shelf cars in your career than you ever do cars that see the light of day.

Times: You’re smiling, Felix. I take it you’ve already put a few on the shelf?

Nagelin: Yeah. But the exciting part about being a designer is to have from time to time the possibility, even in a big corporation, to go through the sky and do something way out and have the chance that it catches on.

Times: And is that potential there?

Sims: To come up with creative stuff, you have to have a project divorced from the everyday work. At Mitsubishi, we purposely set time aside to come up with product concepts. We’re not necessarily trying to come up with a fine, finished design all the time. Often it’s a concept that we put in a design bank, so when there’s an official program coming along and people are having a hard time putting their finger on what exactly the vehicle should be, we can go to the design bank. The SSU concept car we showed last year [a sporty, high-performance utility vehicle] was an example of a design-bank car that was built in full size. It’s a way of generating a lot of excitement in the corporation and with the public, and it lets us gauge public response to a new idea.

Baker: We have teams of people [at GM] who are building this bank of 200 concepts, of which several dozen may become full-size models. It happens. Several of the vehicles GM showed at this year’s auto show in Detroit were never intended for public showing. But the Oldsmobile Recon [a truck-like car] and the Pontiac GTO were part of this giant, bubbling bank of concepts and generated so much internal enthusiasm that we decided we just had to show them to the public and get a reaction.

Halbert: I’m somewhere in between GM and Mitsubishi. What we try to do at our R&D; studio at Honda is to oscillate the designers between the “R” stage and the “D” stage. Instead of having an advanced studio where you just do show cars or a production studio where you just do production cars, I try to get everybody oscillating back and forth so they may do an Accord program and then a show car. That way they get to all stay young with the fanciful research work, and then they get stuff into production in the design studio.

Pelly: There’s a deadly rumor that secretly circulates among all the designers of the world: that it may be that you only do one great car in your life. If you really take a look at the great cars of the world, you see that they have two things in common. Many of them, of course, are a single stroke of genius, and they were totally controlled by the designer. They’re not team efforts. They are pure expressions of sculpture done by an individual. And when we talk about these back-closet projects, which we all do, we really must treasure the ones from the young people. Because we know they indeed do have secret cars in their minds. And we’re very, very careful with the first expressions that they make, because quite often it could be one of these singular statements that becomes a great car.

Times: Doesn’t that argue against all the teamwork we’ve been discussing?

Westfall: Not at all. And I’ll use a couple of examples to help express our thoughts at Ford right now. One would be the Concept One. From what [Ford design chief Mays] has told us, it wasn’t so much that he wanted to make an impact with a specific new shape. It was that the shape communicated to the customer that this was a Volkswagen Beetle in a much newer and modern way. We’re trying in the design area at Ford to work like that--to become more businesslike in our approach to design without losing our creativity. The new Ford Thunderbird that was shown at the Detroit auto show is another example. We’re taking a [classic] vehicle and reinterpreting it, and communicating to the customer an exciting emotion.

Baker: I’m going to borrow a quote from Susan’s boss. We recently had a designer conference in Detroit, and [Mays] said something I thought was pretty profound. He said the next 15 years in the business have the potential to be the 1950s with a brain. I think there’s a lot to that comment. All of us long for the days when there was minimal legislation and designers had a very free hand to create whatever they wanted. The true test of our skills, though, is not going to be in doing it because we can, but doing it because it’s what’s appropriate, it’s what makes the brand better and it’s what makes that passionate statement within the confines of the regulations that have come up. To do that, we will have to be even more creative than the guys who were doing it with total freedom.

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The Automotive Round Table Panel

Panelists in the Highway 1 Automotive Round Table represent European, American and Japanese auto makers and design theory. Most are designers who work for major auto makers, but the group includes an automotive marketing consultant and the chairman of one of the world’s most prestigious transportation design schools. In alphabetical order, they are:

* Brian Baker, 39, creative design manager at General Motors Corp.’s GM Corporate Brand Center in Detroit. Baker, a graduate of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, started his career with GM in 1984 and has worked with Opel in Germany and at GM’s Cadillac, Saturn and advanced-design units.

* Douglas Halbert, 51, executive designer at Honda R&D; Americas Inc. in Torrance. He holds a bachelor’s degree in art education from Youngstown State University in Ohio and another in transportation design from Pasadena’s Art Center. He began his career as an auto designer with Volkswagen at its U.S. studio in Simi Valley in 1977 and joined Honda in 1980.

* Ronald Hill, chairman of the transportation design program at Art Center College of Design since 1985 and a former chief designer at several GM divisions. He worked on scores of vehicles at the company and cites the 1964 Chevrolet Corvair and the 1982 Pontiac Fiero among his major achievements.

* Felix Nagelin, 29, a native of Switzerland, trained in engineering before switching to auto design in 1995. The Art Center graduate joined Designworks/USA, a BMW design subsidiary in Newbury Park, last year after interning at BMW’s studio in Munich. He helped design the new 3-Series coupe.

* Charles W. Pelly, 62, who founded Designworks in his garage in 1972. The studio, acquired by BMW in 1995, has 80 designers who combine transportation and general product design work in Newbury Park and Munich. Pelly, another Art Center graduate, designed the original Scarab sports car and is a past president of the Industrial Design Society of America.

* George Peterson, 51, founder of AutoPacific Inc. The Tustin automotive research firm recently conducted a major study of the gap between what auto makers offer and what consumers want in their vehicles. Peterson has also been an executive at Nissan North America Inc. and Ford Motor Co., where he was manager of luxury car marketing plans.

* Dan Sims, 38, chief designer at Mitsubishi Research & Design America in Cypress and a graduate of the University of Cincinnati. He worked for seven years in Chrysler Corp.’s international design studio in Michigan before moving to Mitsubishi in 1991.

* Susan Westfall, 32, a member of the truck design center at Ford Motor and a graduate of the Center for Creative Studies transportation design program in Detroit. She began at Ford in 1991 and has also worked at the company’s design studio in Dunton, England. She has headed the Explorer Sport-Trac design program since 1995.

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John O’Dell can be reached via e-mail at john.odell@latimes.com.