PETER STEVENS ON CAR DESIGN
What are the challenges faced by today’s car designers, and what new hurdles will they see in the future? Peter Stevens tells the inside story
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DESIGN’ IS AN OFTEN MISUSED WORD in the business of developing a consumer product. Everyone wants to be The Designer. A pointless affectation because there are two equally important elements that are crucial to the creation and development of any product: the engineering of the mechanical parts and the visual appearance. The automobile is no different from any other product: it’s a highly complex object that is expected to work perfectly and look better than its competitors.
Appearance has always been a major selling point when it comes to cars. In the early days of the automobile industry the more you paid for a car the better it looked. The very wealthy could have a body constructed to their own design taste from dozens of independent companies. These craft-based makers would clothe whatever chassis the customer decided to buy, and often the body would cost more than the chassis. Coach makers would give their customers a side view drawing of what the body would look like. These were finely detailed pen-and-ink drawings with water colour painted surfaces.
When, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, companies like Budd and Briggs in the United States developed all-steel technologies to replace the slow and costly wooden body frame practice for building car bodies, they revolutionised mass-produced vehicle production. The advances in giant press tools from 120-ton presses in the 1920s to those exerting a pressure of many hundreds of tons by the 1930s meant that panels with much more curvature could be made. This radically changed the forms that designers could propose.
New sketching techniques developed to help visualise the new shapes. Harley Earl, head of General Motors’ design division, quickly realised that a more artistic approach to design was needed. The traditional method where engineers designed the bodies was no longer relevant. He was the first to introduce modelling clay as a means of exploring new forms. The executives at General Motors viewed Earl’s conceptual ideas as flamboyant and not founded on proper engineering. Earl was often referred to as one of the ‘pretty picture boys’, and his design studio as being the ‘Beauty Parlor’, a view that has still not quite disappeared today!
GM chairman Alfred P Sloan, with the encouragement of Earl, introduced ‘Dynamic Obsolescence’, in fact planned obsolescence, and the ‘Annual Model Change’, which introduced the concept of a new model for each year. Earl liked the concept, both for the work it brought to his division and that it positioned design as a driver for the company’s product success. He also had the sense to realise that continuity of style that suggested evolution rather than revolution was important for not alienating conservative-minded customers.
Earl and Sloan’s concept for a style-driven marketing structure at GM was soon followed by every automobile manufacturer. Henry Ford was suspicious of the idea until his son Edsel finally persuaded him to accept the new direction. Now almost all cars are good at what they do, within the limitations of their intended market; price and appearance are what sells – with a fair push from marketing.
Twenty or thirty years ago the design process that produced a new car from a major manufacturer was standard throughout the industry. The marketing department would follow the market trends of its competitors in terms of price, size, specification and performance; they would buy the competitor cars, strip them down, weigh and estimate the cost of each component. From this fairly rough analysis would come a detailed spec for the new car.
This was often quite restrictive. Marketing would often specify the angle of the windscreen, the diameter of the wheels or even the size of the interior armrests! Design’s job was to ignore these restrictions and just sketch what they felt like for senior management design reviews. Usually one or two of the most extreme and exaggerated sketches were chosen for the basis of the full-size clay models and it was at this point that disappointment began to set in because the buck onto which the modelling clay was applied was built to the engineering package. A lot of the drama of the sketches vanished. Design would cheat on ride height, wheel and tyre width and screen rake, and if the vice president of design trumped the other VPS in the company hierarchy, then progress could be made.
A full-size clay model is still the recognised and preferred method of design development among all the best companies. There are some who believe that all the design work can be done on the computer screen – as a designer it is clear to see which those companies are! Lloyd Vandenbrink, modelling manager at Ford Truck Studio in Dearborn, Michigan, is a big believer: ‘Clay has two characteristics that make it good for use. It’s easy to change – you just add it, or take it away. It allows you to be creative and come up with something quickly. Secondly, it’s a great collaborative tool. Everyone can get around it, brainstorming three-dimensionally.’
In the last ten years almost all car manufactures have broadened their model line-ups to cover market areas that were previously foreign to them. In the recent past the idea of Aston Martin, Maserati, Bentley, Rolls-royce, and in particular Porsche building high performance SUVS would have seemed ridiculous. Now it’s usually the quickest route to profitability. Current customers seem to find this change of focus perfectly acceptable. Brand image means nothing more than a ‘posh’ badge on the front and rear; history appears unimportant.
This search for new niche markets has influenced what the industry calls ‘time to market’. The period during which variations on the design are evaluated and the design details are carefully and thoughtfully developed becomes a battlefield where design, engineering, tooling, purchasing, sales and marketing do battle with each other and with finance. Design is often the loser in this pushing and shoving for a few fewer weeks on the project Excel spread sheet. Time to market is used by the sales and finance people to demonstrate to those holding up the programme how much their refinement efforts will cost the company in lost sales.
Those at the top who are responsible for signing off new car budgets that are frequently more than one billion pounds, dollars or euros, are naturally conservative and often frozen in the headlights. Hence the similarity of basic design layouts and architecture with only the decorative parts like the front grille, lights and sculpting of the door surfaces differentiating one car from another. Some 30 years ago General Motors coined the phrase ‘Down the Road Graphic’, DRG, meaning an easily identified frontal appearance; these days that quest for originality results in an ever more extreme corruption of an at one time familiar and well-liked ‘face’.
In recent times, computer-aided machining (CAM) has become a common way to create a basic 3D form from data derived from an initial Alias 3D CAD model, often generated by a young designer. Only after the clay has been roughly machined do the clay sculptors then take over the model development, guided by the designer. The relationship between designer and model maker is a crucial element in producing an outstanding design. The designer has to demonstrate that he knows exactly what he wants the form to be and the clay sculptor needs the skill to interpret that concept into three dimensions. Quite often that successful understanding of the designer’s intensions by the sculptor can ‘make’ a designer. Threedimensional design using just the computer and a CAD modelling program can easily produce very badly resolved forms and surfaces but a skilled modeller will have the experience to guide the designer and point out surface treatments that cannot be made to ‘work’ in three dimensions; although I now hear stories of young designers who refuse to make changes to their design.
Since the arrival of CAD, the design process has apparently been speeded up but I don’t see any signs that this early concept stage of the development of a new car has become either faster or more efficient. It is important to remember that the computer, whilst being a useful tool, is just a box filled with wires, plastic and sand; there are no ideas inside that enclosure. They are in the designer’s head and in the clay sculptor’s hands.
The introduction of both hybrid and all-electric vehicles has caused many companies to search for a new ‘design language’ to express the new technology. Styling themes that appear to owe more to air conditioning styling are still very common and are irrelevant to objects that move through the air (whatever happened to aerodynamic efficiency?). Designers were told that the very different layout of the components in the electric car would liberate them from conventional forms, but this is clearly not the case
I remember a conversation some years ago with Patrick Le Quément, past director of design at Renault, when we discussed the possibility that in the future cars would become nothing more than ‘white goods’. We were not sure when that would be but both hoped to be out of the car business before it happened. We now feel that there is a strong possibility that this will no longer be in the distant future. The coming of Uber, car rental schemes, car shares and of course the electric car and its de-personalising of the car ownership experience is almost certain to eliminate the pleasure of ‘my car’ and all that brings in terms of personal freedom.
If you are lucky in your choice of car it can quickly feel like your best mate who will see you through every kind of joy, heartache, drama and discovery. It’s your small personal space with your stuff in it; that space can be anarchic, liberating, secret or even a haven of calm. You can pick your nose in the belief that you are invisible, turn the music up really loud or bang the steering wheel in frustration in a space that feels familiar and friendly. I have never heard anyone say that about an electric car or a hire car, and to many people most modern cars are just that, cars bought for a fixed period and then given back to be changed for a newer one. White goods: quickly replaced products that have no soul. Who reads Practical
Dishwasher? And in the not too distant future who will rush to read about the latest battery upgrades? Could this be one of the reasons for the recent trend to buy a restomod, an updated, beautifully restored reprise of a classic car, such as a Singer 911 or one of Rod Emory’s divine little re-imagined 356 Porsches.
You sometimes hear people saying that they love their smartphone but what they are actually saying is that they love what it does or how it does it. Those painstakingly crafted corner radii are not a must-buy factor, and the name is part of the attraction, not because of what the purchaser thinks of the brand but because of what others will think of the buyer’s choice and hence of the buyer. The automobile has always offered the possibility of freedom. It is an empowering product that will take us exactly where we want to go, whether that is to Egypt’s Great Sand Sea, the rock cut Treasury at Petra, beyond the Arctic Circle or from Cape Town to Cairo. When we make those trips neither us nor the vehicle will be the same at the end of the journey as we were at the beginning; there is a strange bonding between man and machine that occurs in a quite uninvited way. It is doubtful that an electric vehicle using the present technologies will ever allow such adventures.
I think our fixation with the soulless electric vehicle technology as we now know it will be rather like the brief lifespan of Eight Track car stereo tape machines. Older readers may still remember the central reservations of motorways being littered with discarded strands of pale brown tape spooling out of broken cassettes. At that time, somewhere there must have been a young university student who thought that all we were trying to do was take our favourite music around with us in an easily accessed way. And now it’s all on your phone that talks to the car! Perhaps somewhere his grandson is thinking that all we are trying to do is carry a portable source of energy around with us, in a way that doesn't harm the planet but still enriches our lives. Here’s hoping.