"What Was The Car Designer Thinking???"

Odometer: 4850 miles
Avg. MPG: 24.1


Even though I’ve never been a car lover or aficionado, I see cars every day of my life. And I know they each are designed by designers who wanted to evoke a certain feeling or emotion in us. And I’ve been thinking a lot more about car design recently.

When researching cars these days, you can get inundated with viewpoints on a car’s design by not only magazine editors, but car buffs in forums and those leaving comments on blogs like www.leftlanenews.com. As the classic line goes, “Everybody’s a critic.”

I enjoy reading thoughtful comments and comparisons, but there are also a lot of folks just lack a keen eye or decent vocabulary ("that’s just fugly") or like to fling out accusations (“that’s a total rip-off of a BMW 5 series headlights”).

While we can read plenty of what a test editor, car company marketing dept. or consumer or thinks of a car, we rarely get to hear from the designers themselves on what they were trying to accomplish with a particular model.

I found a 2006 interview by Design and Emotion magazine with Young Ill Kim, the head designer at Hyundai talking about car design and his philosophy about it. An interesting article though I wonder if parts got lost in translation.

I’ll distill his interview into 3 points:

1. He feels there are marked differences in ways of seeing, perceiving, and designing between West and East(Asian).

2. He acknowledges that while Japanese and Korean car makers are following the trends set by the west right now, he longs to develop car designs with more emotional resonance with his own Korean culture and attitude. He regularly meet the head designers of Toyota, or Nissan for example, and at Toyota they are now trying to find their own proportions, lines or identity so to say. They are trying to create a line at the side of the car as if it was cut out by a traditional Japanese sword. This is exactly what he would like to start with, but differently of course, because Korean lines are less strong and softer and rounder than Japanese lines.

3. That doesn’t mean he can to ignore Western sensibilities for cars meant for the global market, but if he can inject some "K-Factor" design touches that harmonize with Western car design influences he is going to go for it.




After reading what Kim said about adding Eastern design into modern car design, I immediately thought of the recent cars from the Infiniti marque. Infiniti (and Nissan as well) has been coming up with the most unique looking vehicles in the past 3 years or so. The overall bodies have been very curvy and svelte, but contrasting those curvy shapes are the hard geometric headlights and tail lights. Rear tail lights are also very flat. (see above photo) They kind of look like origami paper shapes. Clean yet dynamic. Also immensely cool in my opinion is the grill of the 2008 G35 and M’s. The chrome bars remind me of a line of curved katana blades. (see photo below and at top) Before reading the article I didn’t see the Japanese influence. It just looked kind of cool and definitely distinct from what American and European luxury marques are doing. Now I do.



In an article by Christie Schweinsberg for WardsAuto.com, Shiro Nakamura, senior vice president and design director for Nissan, Nakamura says he gets design inspiration from many different things. Most talented designers draw inspiration from outside their area of practice. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t just look at what other car companies are doing. They will look to other products, their own culture and surroundings, other cultures, and as well as the past.

They want to come up with something original, but unfortunately executives and marketing get into the mix and designs get “compromised” from the original vision. I could see a lot of this going on in the Genesis sedan project. On the original concept drawing and model there was a continuous chrome bar that cut right through the taillight lenses and actually wrapped slightly to the sides. By the second iteration the the taillights had been kind of BMW-fied. (see photo below) And I've seen two different iterations of the grill design. I don’t blame Hyundai for second guessing. This project is their big dance. The Genesis needs to stand out on its own, BUT also resonate with car buyers who yearn for BMW and Mercedes cars but can’t afford them. In order to resonate with those buyers, Hyundai's luxury offering has to remind them in some way (even subliminally) of those cars.


I can’t end this blog entry without alluding to the Elantra in some way. Can I? When the pictures first came out on the Elantra, its worst detractors called it overly curvy and weirdly proportioned and lacking pizzazz. Perhaps this was an experiment in K-factor....
Remember what Kim said about softer, rounder lines. The Elantra's sculpted edges look extremely understated when compared to today's Western trend of cars being very sculpted with harder more distinct lines, sharp edges and muscular curves. The undulating character line reminds me of the sea, but I read somewhere it was inspired by the rolling hills in parts of Korea. So it seems “Korean sensibilities” were definitely being considered when designing the Elantra. I sort of thought the character line was graceful, but many American and Canadian desktop car critics didn’t care for it. I'm Asian and really partial to Japanese design, so maybe them’s thar East-West differences in aesthetics that Kim was talking about making their presence known.