Design: Mazda and Volvo Try on New Genes March 9, 2007
Recent concept cars from two of Ford?s foreign subsidiaries are pushing the envelope, envisioning more expressive and more extroverted cars.
STEVE MATTIN has a problem with old Volvos: there are so many.
“There are millions of boxy ones out there,” Volvo’s new vice president and director for design grumbled in a recent interview. “We want to move beyond the box.”
One might assume that Volvo would view an abundance of old cars on the road as a rolling testament to the virtues for which it is known: durability and a functional design that transcends fashion. But Mr. Mattin wants to recast Volvo’s visual cues. “We want to evolve our design DNA,” he said.
Design DNA is a label for the basic visual elements that a family of cars has in common - the look of a grille, the angle of a roof, the shape of the taillights. These are what make a Ford look like a Ford or a BMW like a BMW.
Once, the husbandry of design DNA was intuitive, but these days, many designers are trying to delineate design traits exactly, even scientifically, like mapping genomes. Brands in the Ford family have been especially focused on this effort.
At Lincoln, for instance, seven distinct identity traits - from a split grille to horizontal-strip taillights - have been identified, and four or five must appear on future models. All seven traits can be found on the Lincoln MKR concept sedan unveiled at the Detroit auto show in January.
While Mr. Mattin is aiming for younger buyers and a wider market for Volvo - “We want to pump up the visual volume,” he said - another Ford brand, Mazda, is looking into the future for visual themes. Mazda has developed three hypothetical cars that chart a design direction over the next 13 years. The fact that those cars will never be built is beside the point - they only light the way.
At Volvo, Mr. Mattin isn’t seeking dramatic change. After all, it was his boss, Peter Horbury, the director for North American design at Ford, who outlined Volvo’s existing design cues in his earlier job as design director for Volvo. Rather, Mr. Mattin, who like Mr. Horbury was born and educated in Britain, sees an evolution.
As laid out in the XC60 crossover concept shown in Detroit, Mr. Mattin’s vision of post-boxy Volvos is of more complex and sculptural shapes. He envisions more expressive and, as he puts it, more extroverted cars.
Mr. Horbury began his evolution of the Volvo look by the giving the cars a pronounced shoulder, or catwalk. The catwalk is both an echo of 1950s Volvos and a way of softening the high, solid sides of the boxy Volvos that followed, whose sheer bulk and slab sides implied safety. Mr. Horbury gave the sides a high shoulder, rounding off the box in a way that still looked solid, though less utilitarian.
Now Mr. Mattin has angled the catwalk and reshaped the box as two wedges - a greenhouse atop a body - with sculptured sides. Mr. Mattin and his designers - Steve Potter is credited for the exterior, Justin Scully for the interior - accentuated the catwalk and other elements. Solidity, once represented by upright slab sides, is now signaled by expressive scoops into the body, with a depth implying thickness. “I want the cars to be recognizable as Volvos from twice as far away,” Mr. Mattin said.
To pump up the visual volume even at night, Mr. Mattin placed small lights beside the grille so the shape is visible in the dark; he also accentuated the lighting of the arched rear end.
Mr. Mattin, who spent his previous career at Mercedes-Benz in Germany, where he designed models like the small A-Class and the R-Class wagon, is highly aware of the way light changes in Sweden, with its seasonal variation of long days and long nights. He wants Volvos to have big windows that bring in light, and bodies instantly recognizable as Volvos during the long nights.
On the grille, with its diagonal slash of chrome, the logo that Volvo calls the iron sign is larger. For those who dozed through chemistry class, the ancient sign for the element iron is a circle and arrow. In biology, the symbol stands for male (though in American suburbs, Volvos have an image of being driven by women).
The XC60’s upright rear window is a new cue for Volvo, expanding on the similar one on the new C30 (and the P1800 of Volvo’s sportier past). Beneath the broad glass, Volvo is spelled out in huge, widely spaced letters, a virtual banner for brand identification - turning the design language back into written language. The same big letters also show up on the new V70 wagon introduced last week in Geneva.
- Posted in : Uncategorized, Mazda
- Author : arnold
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