TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092391/0923200.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.5 KB | 175 lines

                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 38

STYLE

California Dreamin'


Ideas for the world's autos now come from design studios clustered
around (where else?) trendsetting L.A.

By KURT ANDERSEN -- With reporting by Joe Sczensy/Detroit and Matt
Rothman/Los Angeles


    Cliches may be cliches, but they are usually also true.
The great nuggets of conventional wisdom about Southern
California -- the easy embrace of novelty, an approach to
creative endeavors largely unencumbered by tradition, a profound
attachment to cars -- are not only apt; they have converged to
form an extraordinary new center for automobile design.

    Most cars are still dreamed up in Detroit and Turin,
Wolfsburg and Tokyo. But virtually all the world's major
automobile companies -- 18 to date -- have established design
departments within an hour or two of downtown Los Angeles. The
Japanese were first. Then came special think tanks run by
America's Big Three. So far, an estimated two dozen
production-model cars have been shaped by the new California
design colony, including, of course, the delicious, almost
perfect, and instantly successful Miata, designed by four young
Americans (and a Japanese) working for Mazda in Orange County.
Now the influx has accelerated, and even the Germans have
deigned to establish Southern California design studios --
Mercedes last year, Audi last spring and, just last month, BMW.

    Pleasant weather is only part of the attraction. There is
a collective sense that to design for Americans requires
understanding them viscerally, and a belief that Los Angeles is
not just the wellspring of car culture but as close to
Ur-America as any one place gets. More prosaically, Southern
California represents the biggest automobile showroom anywhere:
every year 3% of all new cars on the planet are registered in
California, and most of those in Southern California. If you're
to succeed in the U.S., you must sell in Southern California.
And to do that, observes Peter Fischer, a marketing vice
president at Volkswagen, "you have to see, feel, smell what
these customers want." Says Mark Jordan, who was Mazda's chief
designer on the Miata: "If you can excite the people in
California, the rest of the country will take care of itself."
The world's car companies have been drawn to L.A. by the same
giddy promise -- a fresh start, anything goes -- that has always
pulled in immigrants. Detroit has been creating cars its own way
for 75 years. In Europe and Japan the conventional wisdoms can
be confining, even stultifying. "We selected a place like San
Diego for our design studio," says Gerald Hirshberg, Nissan's
chief U.S. designer, "because it had no track record, no
history. It feels like almost anything is possible out here."

    But the rationale is not simply the need to meet the
demands of the American car market or harness the spirit of
innovation. From the homogeneous vantage points of Japan and
Germany, the exuberant free thinking seems to be a function of
L.A.'s slam-bang Anglo-Afro-Latino-Asian ethnic mix -- cultural
democracy by default. "The Southern California area is like a
melting pot -- there are so many different races," says
Mitsubishi vice president Satoru Tsujimoto. "From those
different backgrounds, there are many different values. So there
are many different designs." For companies acutely conscious of
their need to sell cars all over the world to people of wildly
disparate sensibilities and experiences, California seems like
an unsurpassed multicultural proving ground.

    The intellectual epicenter of this design cluster, which
runs from Ventura down to San Diego, is the Art Center College
of Design in Pasadena. Among car designers, no institution is
more highly regarded. The Art Center exists in cozy symbiosis
with the industry: working designers, such as Geza Loczi, who
heads Volvo's studio in Camarillo, train students like Michael
Ma, 26, a Vietnamese refugee who graduated this August and went
directly to work for the Mercedes studio in Irvine. Ten of the
18 Southern California auto-design studios are run by Art
Center alumni, and their staffs are dominated by fellow
graduates, including Mazda's Mark Jordan.

    The studios are small, usually consisting of 10 to 20
designers, most of them American (10 of 13 at Mazda, all 20 at
Mitsubishi). Because their headquarters are thousands of miles
away, the designers stationed in California exist in splendid
-- and creatively productive -- isolation, relatively free from
the kill-joy scrutiny of bean counters, marketing drones and
engineers. "After a year in the U.S.," says Gerhard Steinle,
chief of the Mercedes studio, "I see how important it is to be
away from the factory."

    The California design shops do seem blessedly free of the
factory-like organization that prevails in Detroit and
elsewhere. Designer Alberto Palma, 27, interned at General
Motors in Detroit before coming to work for Toyota in Newport
Beach. He found the GM experience "kind of stuffy. Everyone was
divided into units for different aspects of design. Here we can
sit down and talk about a project from ground up." Jack Stavana,
Mazda's director of product planning and research who
masterminded the marketing of the Miata, agrees. "Frankly," says
Stavana, who worked for Chrysler for five years, "I needed to
get out of Detroit, because there weren't fresh ideas there. We
start with a fresh sheet of paper."

    It is the Japanese companies that seem to take their
Californians most seriously. Of the two dozen or so cars that
have been largely or entirely designed in California over the
past 15 years, most have been Japanese, notably the Miata,
Honda's sporty CRX and Toyota's Celica. Mercedes, which set up
shop only last October, plans to have a California prototype by
the end of next year. The other Euro peans are proceeding more
timidly. The sort of California innovations Audi expects in the
near term, for instance, are tilt-down steering wheels and
dashboard coffee-cup holders.

    The American automakers opened their studios in 1983 and
1984, and Chrysler's brand new LH model -- an intriguing
would-be car with the wheels 10 in. farther back than standard
to create more legroom and a stabler ride -- is mostly a
California creative product. But, in general, Detroit has been
typically cautious in handing design responsibilities to the
Californians. Ford's chief designer, Jack Telnack, allows that
the recent Thunderbird and Escort models have only been
"influenced" by notions from their people on the coast.

    The Miata, with its convertible top and intense colors, is
the only product of the Los Angeles studios that exudes a
distinct regional pizazz -- the first truly postmodern
automobile, both a reinterpretation of and an improvement upon
no stalgically recalled classic sports cars. Yet despite all the
drafting tables suddenly clustered together, the Miata does not
signal the emergence of a canonical L.A. style.

    The Californians do seem inclined (or ordered) to develop
cars of a certain general type -- determinedly jaunty,
self-consciously American. Having proved themselves unsurpassed
at manufacturing and mass-marketing reliable, well-engineered
cars, the Japanese seem to have descended on Los Angeles
specifically to master the improbable art of creating cars that
thrill. The most successful California designs have been
tough-but-smart, fun-but-practical Middle American vehicles
(Toyota's Previa minivan, Nissan's Pathfinder, Isuzu's Trooper
and Amigo) or else sports cars that temper the species' inherent
sexiness with a certain grownup decorousness (the Celica, the
Miata).

    The most interesting, thoughtfully conceived new cars
coming out of Southern California may, in the end, owe less to
local free-spiritedness than to the simple wisdom of hiring a
few talented people and allowing them to work, leaving their
problem-solving sessions and reveries undisturbed by the anxious
buzz of corporate headquarters.

    Many of their fetching schemes -- Toyota's inflatable car;
Izuzu's moon-unit Ex presso minivan; Michael Ma's Tatanka, a
sort of 21st century Beetle -- will prove too impractical, too
expensive, too weird. But the great achievement of the new
California design colony is that such cars are being imagined
and prototypes built. After decades of nothing but uninspired
nips and tucks, of corporate blandness, of timid styling,
automobile designers are being allowed to design again.