DEARBORN, MI – Designing a performance-car interior takes a dedicated team with passion and vision that also possesses the ingenuity and know-how to craft a cabin that is both functional and pleasing to the eye, says a designer panel at the 2014 WardsAuto Interiors Conference here.

William Chergosky, interior chief designer-CALTY Design Research, outlines the steps his team took in designing the interior of the Toyota FT-1 concept car, which was introduced at the 2014 North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

The FT-1 originally was designed for the Gran Turismo video game, and Chergosky and his team were tasked with bringing the car from the screen to the road.

Chergosky says within the design community there is a “race to add bling,” but doing so can become a substitute for a meaningful design.

“To really innovate, you have to solve a problem and also be rebellious,” he says. “You have to question the real purpose behind every element and discover new ways to reimagine it.”

The main objective for the FT-1, Chergosky says, was to design a “kick-*** sports car.” Once that was made clear, the team had to think about how to achieve that goal.

After taking competitive high-end sports cars around a Las Vegas racetrack, the team set out crafting an interior that broke down the barriers between man and machine, he says.

The FT-1 interior was designed to be a “serious place to do serious driving,” Chergosky says, adding a key objective was to limit distractions to the driver, especially when operating the vehicle at high speeds. Key to this was designing an innovative wheel-mounted display so eyes stay on the road.

“The final design is lightweight and purpose built for serious driving,” he says. “There are no distractions.”

Helen Emsley, interior design chief-General Motors, faced a challenge similar to Chergosky’s, but she had to reimagine the interior of the Corvette, one of the world’s most iconic sports cars that had been heralded for its performance but panned for its lackluster interiors.

Given full control of the project by design chief Ed Welburn, Emsley ran with that freedom.

The first order of business was conducting a design blitz that solicited sketches from all of GM’s global studios. The field was narrowed down to three concepts, and from there the team began building scale models and conducting consumer clinics.

Suppliers were brought into the studios early on to work with the team, which Emsley says was critical to the process because they were able to share the vision for the new Corvette interior.

The unusual step was taken of fabricating a full-scale model with lights and engine sounds.

“We had to show Ed (Welburn) to make sure he was okay with it,” she says. “Everything was real.”

After beating out the Porsche 911, Nissan GTR and Audi R8 in another consumer design clinic, the team went to work building a production version of the interior, which came with its own challenges.

One was deciding where to place the infotainment system. Other GM performance models had a screen that rose out of the dash, but the design team didn’t want to break up the flow of the interior, so the decision was made to place the display lower in the center console.

Another challenge was getting the door design elements to match up with the rest of the interior when closed. When engineers said it couldn’t be done, Emsley called in workers from the Corvette assembly plant in Bowling Green, KY.

“They found a way to have the door lineup with the instrument panel,” she says.

Markus Kussmaul, vice president – Recaro North and South America, says designing performance seats for a variety of global customers presents unique challenges.

“The seat itself is an integral part of the interior, and it needs to speak the same language (as the vehicle),” he says. “A lot of OEMs use it to distinguish the interior of a sport-performance vehicle.”

Kussmaul says Recaro likes to work with automaker studios to design a seat that’s a perfect fit to the car, but doing so can be tricky.

“Studios don’t want to tell you what they’re doing, but we have to understand the path or we won’t understand what direction they’re going,” he says.

Ultimately the objective is to design a seat that is comfortable and supportive, but not one that is noticed by the driver. Additionally, safety is paramount because the seats, especially in high-performance vehicles, are in integral part of a car’s safety features.

Designing seats that are exclusive to a particular automaker is an important part of Recaro’s business, but doing business that way is expensive, as each seat has to be designed from scratch.

To mitigate that problem going forward, Recaro is working on a modular seating concept that can share parts but can be uniquely configured for each automotive customer.

“With modular blocks we can combine the inner values of the seat and work on the external appearance,” he says. “When producing a seat the highest cost is engineering and tooling. If we spread that cost out we can bring them down, and that’s what we’re working on.”

After beating out the Porsche 911, Nissan GTR and Audi R8 in another consumer design clinic, the team went to work building a production version of the interior, which came with its own challenges.

"I want to make people happy through cars and thus make them smile in the face" - Akio Toyoda.

Do not dismiss concept cars as the dreamy imaginings of car designers searching for inspiration and indulging in wish-list creativity without goals, boundaries or cost constraints. Car companies do not often bother with pure dream machines, not any longer.

Concept cars such as the Nissan BladeGlider, the Kia GT4 Stinger, the Volkswagen Beetle Dune and Jaguar’s C-X17 have a mission and a purpose. Dream machines? No. The notion of a 21st-century concept car died with the great recession of 2009-2010.

Instead, concept cars are the product of car companies operating with clear intent and financial discipline. The goal of making money is never far from an auto executive’s thoughts; therefore even the most interesting and entertaining concepts are often near to a sell-able production model.

“We make two types of concept cars,” says Andy Palmer, head of product development at Nissan Motor. “One type includes the cars that are ‘in-plan’ or under development. We use these concepts as a signal to the marketplace.”

Palmer says that with these cars, Nissan is “looking for an early reaction” from auto show visitors and media consumers and commentators. The Nissan Sport Sedan Concept, for example, is a signal of something soon to go on sale. In this case, you’re likely looking at the next-generation Nissan Maxima.

And then there’s the second type of concept.

“These are wilder,” says Palmer. “With a car like the BladeGlider, we’re testing for reaction. What we’re doing here is saying, ‘Okay, let’s reinvent the sports car. Let’s take EV [electric vehicle] technology and use the advantages that it gives you. You don’t need the engine block [up front]; you can put the electric motors in the wheels …You can take race-inspired technology and bring it to the road for the customer who loves sports cars but wants a car with a guilt-free edge.

“So concept cars allow our designers to show you a sports car of the future and yet what we’re doing here is very real, very much possible with the technology we have within Nissan.”

Car designers are serious about their art. It’s a business for them.

Jaguar design chief Ian Callum, for example, considers himself the living repository of Jaguar’s corporate history and culture, both of which are central to the models driving Jaguar’s comeback as a viable business. With every concept and production car coming out of his design house, Callum asks himself, “Is this something [Jaguar founder] Sir William Lyons would do?”

And yes, he would almost certainly approve of the C-X17 shown at last month’s Toronto auto show. That’s a concept crossover wagon with “production car” written all over it.

“The key is that it’s a Jaguar,” says Callum. “You ask if Jaguar can build a crossover. Yes, if it’s a Jaguar. This [concept] is sculptural; this is sensuous.

“And if we want to grow up in the world and become a truly global brand, this is the sort of thing we have to do. This is what people really want. So we have to put this [concept] out there and see if people will go there.”

Car companies rarely introduce a concept car without a purpose in mind and, more often than not, that purpose is to use auto show visitors as the final focus group. By the time a concept hits an auto show stand, it has been tested in countless private focus groups and undergone internal design reviews. Concept cars on offer at auto shows are a reliable signal of things to come.

And even when a concept cannot possibly morph into a production model with only modest changes, the ideas packaged in a so-called “design study” almost always speak volumes about future plans. Mazda’s Shinari concept was never intended to become a production model, but the “Kodo” design language embodied in the car is making its way into production models like the Mazda3.

This is certainly the story of Toyota’s most interesting design study in years – the FT-1 sports car. “FT” stands for “Future Toyota,” and the number “1” represents what Toyota says is “the ultimate” – as in “the ultimate expression of a Toyota coupe design.” Toyota’s designers reached into the company’s “sports coupe heritage dating back to the 2000GT, Celica, Supra, MR2 and most recently Scion FR-S.” Without question, the FT-1 hints at a future Toyota Celica Supra.

It also exists to reinforce Toyota’s ongoing effort to put an enthusiastic spin on Toyota’s image. The FT-1 is the latest expression of Toyota president Akio Toyoda’s insistence on creating new models with eye-catching designs and exhilarating performance. The FT-1 is the embodiment of what Toyoda insists are key brand values – sending the message “no more boring Toyotas.”

One Thing Isn’t New in Car Design: Clay Prototypes

Despite Digital Inroads, Auto Makers Still Create Full-Size, Hand-Sculpted Models Before Committing to Production



Why auto makers still create full-size clay models of new cars, sculpted by hand.

New cars have enough digital horsepower to connect to the Internet while going 70 miles an hour, compute speed and direction multiple times a second and drive themselves for long stretches if the law allowed.

When it comes to designing these high-tech machines, however, auto makers still depend on clay models sculpted by hand—a craft that goes back to the industry’s early days.

Designs for a new car may start with a simple sketch on a cocktail napkin. At Ford Motor Co., such a sketch could get turned over to digital modeler Kevin Goff, who fits the lines of the drawing over a digital rendering of the car’s engine, suspension and other chassis parts. The idea then might go to clay modeler Larry Pelowski to be transformed into a series of clay models, usually starting with sculptures four-tenths the size of an actual car.

“I’ve saved a lot of articles [saying] holograms are coming in, they’re going to take over” for the clay models, says Mr. Pelowski, a 25-year Ford veteran whose father also worked for the company. It hasn’t happened.

Indeed, despite Ford’s use of three-dimensional imaging technology that allows executives to don headsets and see a virtual vehicle in a computer-generated cityscape, the top brass won’t sign off on producing a new car—a decision that can involve spending a billion dollars or more—until they see full-size physical models.

The same is true at other major auto makers, even as advances in industrial-design software have allowed them to cut back on some physical prototypes.

The pressure to produce new designs more rapidly intensified when competition in the auto industry went global. During the 1990s and into the 2000s, big auto makers boasted about how quickly they could bring new vehicles to showrooms as they slashed product-development times from five years or more to two years or less by relying more heavily on computer-design tools.

They figured they could squeeze the time from concept to showroom even further if they did more designing online and less via physical prototypes.

The rapid decline in the cost of computing power and continual improvement in design software have moved the auto industry closer to a world where the mathematic models of a car’s exterior and interior surfaces—rendered as a thick web of points and polygons—could go directly to computer-driven machines that cut dies and molds for production.

“We have a European manufacturer we’ve worked with—they were able to eliminate about 70% of the clay models they were using,” says Ed Martin, a business-development manager at Autodesk Inc., which sells Alias, a design software widely used by auto makers.

“It’s when they start getting into final choices,” Mr. Martin says, “that they get into physical clay.”

Indeed, Chris Svensson, the director of design for Ford’s North and South American operations who helped push the use of holograph-projection technology within Ford, says he still struggles to evaluate whether a computer-generated design will work until he sees it in a physical model.

“We always came back to clay,” says Mr. Svensson. The problem is, he says, digital projections can’t accurately show how light will play on a car’s surface. “You can’t replicate the sun.”

So instead of trying to eliminate clay models, automotive designers are now increasingly mixing the two mediums, training clay modelers in the use of digital tools and vice versa.

At Chrysler LLC, designer Mark Hall works closely with sculptors like John Morris, who says he was hired in part because of his skill at creating convincing mock headlights from plexiglass and repurposed Christmas lights.

An auto like the recently launched Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat muscle car will start life as a paper sketch that Mr. Morris will use to create a clay model three-eighths the size of an actual car.

Mr. Hall, who began his career as a clay sculptor, and Mr. Morris will work together refining the lines of the scale model. It’s highly detailed work—a change of just a few millimeters in the elevation of a crease in the door or in the width of a taillight can make the difference between cool and cold. Mr. Morris makes the adjustments by hand using scrapers and other tools.

“That’s the point the computer can’t replace,” Mr. Morris says.

Once they agree they have a model about 60% right, they can use an optical scanner to translate the clay scale model into a package of digital data that can power a computer-controlled milling machine. The milling machine can produce a full-size clay replica in a day or so, which they further refine by hand.

That’s a big improvement from years ago, when designers would have to use cardboard templates and hand-held dividers to transfer the lines of a scale model to a life-size clay prototype.

The clay-to-digital, digital-to-clay approach is now common, designers say. Designs go back and forth between clay and digital renderings, and are integrated with digital representations of the car’s chassis and other mechanical components, or “hard points,” developed by engineers. The connection with engineers working on the hard points is critical to avoid spending hours refining the line of a fender only to discover that it’s occupying the same space required for the car’s front suspension.

At Toyota’s California design center, known as Calty, designers mixed clay modeling and all-digital processes to construct a prototype sports car called the FT-1 unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show in January.

“The exterior was developed in clay,” says Kevin Hunter, president of Calty Design Research. But the car’s interior was designed using digital technology “all the way through. We confirmed the shape using quick foam studies.”

Still, Mr. Hunter says he doubts Toyota would offer a car to the public before reviewing a full-size model.

When a digital rendering is produced in a full-size, three-dimensional form, he says, “there’s always a surprise.”