A Sit Down With the Chief Designer at Lexus / Toyota
How do you feel about the look of Toyotas and Lexus of late? If you are enjoying the design of vehicles from the two brands then you have Ian Cartabiano to thank.
A tide as turned at the brand
From the FT-1 Concept that may be the oft-rumored new Supra to the LC500 and even the all-new Camry, there is some very interesting design language going on at the brands. That new vibe is coming from American designer Ian Cartabiano who is pushing the styling in an effort to meet Akio Toyoda's declaration of "no more boring cars." Cartabiano, along with his colleagues at the Calty design center in Newport Beach, California, joined Toyota in 1997 and had quite the undertaking ahead of them in breaking people's preconceptions of what they expected from the brand. What made their job a lot easier was the Toyota New Global Architecture's introduction, the underpinnings of the car that allowed the vehicles to sit lower, wider, and a little meaner.
New Global Architecture's benefits
That modularized architecture that Toyota was now using allowed engineers to push down the costs by using common parts bin for a number of vehicles and thus freed up money that could be channeled back into better tech along with designs. "It's brought down cost in some areas, which allows more cost to be spent on more expressive design," he said of the modular architecture. "It's something that wouldn't happen in the old way of doing things."
Turning things up to 10
"The era of boring cars, of bland cars, and anonymous design is over," Cartabiano said at the Japanese carmaker's global headquarters here. "It's what Akio expects. When the president says something like that, it really allows designers to feel creative freedom." That kind of freedom is exactly how we got the LC500 which is almost identical to the LF-LC concept we were introduced to years ago. "When our team started designing the Lexus concept, we started with a few basic keywords: Avant-garde beauty, emotional drama and Lexus originality and distinctiveness. We took a lot of inspiration from the organic warmth of nature and blended it with the cool of technology—that's something you will start to see in Lexus' brand strategy."
From pen to paper to product development
"It's almost impossible to miss or ignore Toyota's products anymore," said John Manoogian, a professor of transportation design at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and a former General Motors designer. "It's so difficult to get a large corporation to understand the importance of design as a strategic tool and a product differentiator. Apple understands this. Mr. Toyoda understands it as well and has unleashed Toyota's designers to be as creative as possible."
It definitely is striking
Speaking of one of the newer Toyota's, the C-HR, Cartabiano likens the rear quarter panel's deep and intricate stamping to something that wouldn't be out of place in a gallery. "That's a crazy-ass shape," Cartabiano said. "I think the side panel of the C-HR would look really cool hanging on the wall as a piece of art. "In the old days, people would have said, 'That's a lot of extra costs or that's a lot of extra time. Let's take the easy way out."
It all had to start somewhere
In his youth, Cartabiano was mystified by future illustrations from Road and Track's Mark Stehrenberger. "I showed my dad, a toy designer, Stehrenberger's work and asked him how it was done. My dad pulled out markers and drew a Ferrari Testarossa and that started my career. In fact, my wife recently dug up old flashcards of side view drawings of R&T data panels I copied from my youth."
Here's to the future
"I respect something that's new but not perfect, rather than something that's beautiful but nondescript," Cartabiano says. "I'd rather be challenged than made comfortable. Polarizing is OK." While this is exciting to hear, Toyota is a brand that sells so many models across a spectrum of consumers that it can't take too many risks and possibly be polarizing to a chunk of the market. However, Cartibino says that Toyota's new designs are starting to click with customers, "in the olden days when we had brand identity, we would just toss it in the next car. It frustrated a lot of us," he said. "Now we're not throwing out what's good. We're now evolving it."
"Often, when you design something, you can see the compromise when you see it on the road," he said. "But when I see these cars just driving around here, I don't see compromise. I see purity."
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