Designed to Be Different

By Frank Gibney Jr./Dearborn

Once upon a time we really cared about our cars, and why not? Draped in chrome, sleek Lincolns and Cadillacs boasted bulbous front bumpers and mammoth tail fins that just screamed power. Smooth street rockets like the Chrysler 300 were breathtakers, although they could seem insignificant next to the glamorous elegance of Mercedes-Benz and Porsche designs. Sex was styled into every curve in those days. Under the hoods growled throaty tigers that guzzled gas, although everyone knew cars really ran on testosterone.

Then came a couple of oil crises and an army of wickedly shrewd engineers from a country called Japan, and cars were reduced to a lowest common denominator that was all about efficiency and reliability. Design took a backseat to gas mileage, and the result was that one car on the road looked a lot like the next, if not exactly like a Toyota Camry or Honda Accord. Smooth with little edge on the outside, functional within--how many cup holders does yours have? Even luxury cars, from Lexus to Lincoln, have become all but generic, right down to their CD players and navigation systems. Think of them as wombs with a view. Reliable? Absolutely. Efficient? You bet. Dull? Unequivocally.

So now comes a man named J Mays (that's right--first initial, no period) leading a crusade to make the automobile matter again. Mays is the man who brought us the first car with turn-of-the-century distinction, Volkswagen's alluring "new" Beetle. In 1997 the then 42-year-old Oklahoman was tapped to become chief of design--the youngest ever--at Ford Motor Co., itself in the midst of a crusade to be different, better and above all more consumer focused.

Mays is an articulate spokesman for a new generation of industrial artists who aim to bring us what we want rather than products that are prisoners of the engineering and manufacturing departments. "Cars have become appliances instead of something you lust after," complains Mays. "We've been designing from the inside out--hawking sheet metal to consumers instead of considering their wants and aspirations and desires, and now they're looking for someone to help them."

We sure are. Consumers these days face a jumble of look-alike products, from toothbrushes and teapots to sport-utility vehicles. So in the battle for our wallets, design has become a more critical component. "With all the noise out there, the trick now is to be as creative as you can in observing and then interpreting your expressive abilities," says Jerry Hirshberg, president of Nissan Design International, which, by the way, has been commissioned to design not just cars but also golf clubs and yachts and, most recently, to remake the Los Angeles Times.

Today's design revolution extends beyond cars. It is reverberating from Detroit to Madison Avenue, from the automobile right down the product chain to such simple items as trash cans. Design magazines are hot (Architectural Digest is about to launch a new publication called Motoring). Moreover, signature design is no longer the realm of the snobby, afford-anything rich. Ask Martha Stewart, or the prominent architects and furniture and car designers who swap industries these days just to give products that extra mark of distinction. Thus Hirshberg, who began his career as a Pontiac designer, is doing a newspaper. An everyman-discount store like Target, for instance, hires architect Michael Graves to design a toaster. And an everyman-car company like Ford hires a product designer like Australian Marc Newson to do a sprightly concept car.

No product is as much about lifestyle, of course, as the car. "Like rock 'n' roll and the movies, industrial design is one of the great art forms of the 20th century, and cars are the very height of industrial design," says Stephen Bayley, one of Britain's leading industrial-design gurus and the curator of a current exhibition on automobiles at London's Royal College of Art. No product but the car demands such elegance in spite of its complexity. No other consumer commodity is expected to be so exclusive and yet so affordable. So personal. So emotional. "I don't think [Target executive] Ron Johnson, Martha Stewart or I would be able to talk as much about design today if it weren't for what has happened in automotive design," says architect Graves. "The world has just turned around."

And designers are turning it, ever more conscious of their increasing influence. "We're not here just to shape a car--we're cultural architects," says Freeman Thomas, who collaborated with Mays on the Beetle and designed the revolutionary Audi TT Coupe before being hired away by DaimlerChrysler this summer. The language of design is all about connecting with people. Or, as Mays says, "it's the battle for their heartstrings."

In the case of the Beetle, that meant a simple car that reminded us of the Love Bug but didn't leave us feeling like antiques collectors. There is very little that is practical about the Volkswagen Beetle. But like the great cars of yore, it has a personality that lets buyers say, "Look at me!" And so dealers haven't been able to keep them in stock. "The new Beetle fails at most categories," says Nissan's Hirshberg. "The only thing it doesn't fail in is drop-dead charm."

Some critics dismiss this as "retro," and that draws a grimace from Mays, who prefers words like "progressive." But he admits that one thing he learned in his 14 years of designing cars for Volkswagen/Audi is that you never look forward without first looking over your shoulder. Not surprisingly, the first design from Ford that bears Mays' signature is the 2001 Thunderbird, which at a glance looks distinctly like the 1957 model of the same name. Others must agree, given the fleet of nostalgia-tinged new models coming from the likes of Chrysler, Jaguar and Nissan.

Yet retro is just one niche in a sweeping new product landscape. Twenty years ago, there were cars and trucks. Today there are cars, trucks, sport-utility vehicles, sport-utility trucks and minivans. The variety will only broaden. Henry Ford showed us that mass production based on a single design was the best way to make an affordable car. Even as vehicles became vastly more complex, that formula held fast because model changeovers were expensive. But computer simulation and advances in production technology and materials have dramatically driven down costs. Companies can now profit on production runs of fewer than 20,000, as opposed to the old threshold of 100,000.

That's a different world for auto companies, and Ford CEO Jac Nasser hired Mays as part of a grand strategy to revolutionize the tradition-bound carmaker and reposition car manufacturing as a consumer-driven enterprise. The world's second largest automaker controls seven brands, from the utilitarian Ford to the exotic Aston Martin. This spring Ford acquired Volvo; it already owns Jaguar and a controlling interest in Japan's Mazda. So the design chief is picking his way through them and hiring talent from Japan and Germany. His mission of the moment: to revive such sagging brands as Lincoln and Mercury, while adding new panache to Ford.

Mays is no gearhead. A passionate man who peppers his conversation with references to such architects as Mies van der Rohe and Frank Gehry, Mays first studied journalism but was spending so much time drawing cars that he ended up at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (Calif.). After graduation, Mays was hired by Audi, and Germany gave him a completely new feel for the world of art and design. He became a Bauhaus disciple, an admirer of the elegance of spare form. And he soaked up the tradition that gave us automotive works of art like the Porsche speedster.

What brings him from the Bauhaus to your garage is an unusual appreciation of the importance of marketing. In the mid-1990s, he became disillusioned with the "Teutonic order" at Audi and left. For two years before he came to Ford, Mays was immersed in the world of "visual positioning" for SHR Perceptual Management, a shop in Scottsdale, Ariz. Business at SHR is all about discovering the ways in which people's psyches offer clues to their behavior as consumers. Mays approached this science as art. "Audi was very elitist and actually not unlike the arrogance of what I'm doing now, for seven brands," he acknowledges. "The difference is that I now understand there's a large group of people out there who could give a flip about my high-design philosophy. They just want something that's important to them in their lives."

So Mays is always on the prowl for that something, often channel surfing late into the night, trying to divine who watches Dan Rather instead of Tom Brokaw, or why someone would watch Ally McBeal rather than Dawson's Creek. "It's fascinating to try and figure out who the tube is trying to sell to," he says.

The truth is, like an increasing number of his counterparts, Mays isn't simply a designer, he is a marketer too. The tradition in the auto business was to have the design gods speak and the marketing department listen. These days they talk to each other all the time. At Ford and Nissan, for instance, marketing researchers are fanning out around the country, asking questions and looking for ideas from the way people live. To get ideas for minivan development, for instance, Ford researchers asked people who didn't own them to create a collage of images that came to mind when they thought of minivans. The result was a mix of happy, smiling families. When minivan owners did the same exercise, however, the image that stood out was an agonized man driving a sword into his chest. The Message: Minivans are all about the stress and anxiety of juggling families, mortgages and work. So make 'em friendlier.

The big target market is tomorrow's customers--Generation X and Generation Y, with the latter known in marketing parlance as "echo boomers." Both groups like their freedom. To understand these cohorts, designers and marketers alike are learning their language, watching their television shows, listening to their music. At Ford, the process is called "brand imaging," and it involves asking a lot of abstract questions about what people are interested in and converting the answers into a new vehicle. Does that mean designers are being reduced to cultural translators, turning the fuzzy feelings of focus groups into metal? No, says James Schroer, Ford's vice president of global marketing. There's opportunity with low-cost, low-volume production to take some real design gambles.

Despite Nasser's passion for revolution at Ford, the challenge for Mays will be to make his high sense of style work in a tradition-bound bureaucracy. As Mays strolls through one of Ford's huge design studios, he reveals his antidote to the dullness virus. "Cars are not simply to get you from place to place," he says, looking at a clay model of an echoboomer vehicle that is part truck, part staff car. "They ought to be entertainment. We are sort of in the entertainment business."

The more Mays talks about his future designs, the more the entertainment becomes apparent. How about a sport ute with an easily removable sound system, for camping trips? Wouldn't it be nice, he asks, if the inside of your car turned sky blue, or the roof panel went translucent, just to suit your mood? How about the ultimate family car, for which everyone has a personalized key that adjusts everything for taste?

None of the Mays conceptualizing will matter until it makes it to the showroom. This month Ford introduced the Focus, a smart-looking small sedan that was rolled out in Europe to rave reviews last year. This fall Ford begins rolling out new models and concept cars at auto shows around the world. Expect a few niche busters and lots of product directed at echo boomers. There will be racy new baby versions of the popular Lincoln Navigator, and a revamped Mercury Mountaineer, not to mention at least one hybrid minivan-sport-utility vehicle built around a high-tech aluminum space frame. Then there is Mays' new Thunderbird, which may be in showrooms by 2001. Says he: "We're trying to design an experience." At the very least, that ought to make us care about our cars again.