How to make a (Mazda) concept car
Wednesday, 8 November 2017
Mazda's current thing is styling. The Japanese maker never tires of talking about its Kodo design ethos, which it says is all about giving life to sheet metal. 'Soul of motion' as the tagline goes.
Kodo is right across Mazda's current passenger-car and SUV ranges, and at this month's Tokyo Motor Show the company revealed the second iteration of that look with the Kai and Vision Coupe concept cars.
How do they come up with this stuff? During the Tokyo Show we got the chance to find out by taking a quick Bullet-Train-trip to Mazda's design headquarters in Hiroshima. Then things got a bit weird.
Just about every carmaker says it designs cars differently to the others. Mazda says it does things really, really differently.
**READ MORE:
* New-generation Vision Coupe sees the light of day
* Kai concept is food for thought on next Mazda3
Company executives say that the traditional model does not apply - where a designer creates a shape, a clay modeller tries to make it and then engineers try to build it.
Mazda says its process is more about collaboration.
Modellers are just as important as designers, and if the company decides to turn a concept-car into a showroom model, engineers and factory executives get involved right from the start to figure out the best way to actually make it - and whether small changes can be made to the design to improve production quality.
The company calls this 'co-creation'.
The weird thing is that a new Mazda design doesn't actually start with anything as prosaic as a car. There's the idea of a car - the company might be working on a new design for a small hatchback, for example - but a new Kodo-model starts with an art object created by a clay modeller.
'A production car entails a lot of restriction,' explains Hiroshi Kureha, head of the Mazda Design Modelling Studio. 'So we make art objects to express a design without being tied down by those restrictions.
'This is different to the conventional design process, where designers and clay modellers work to make a scale model, evolving 10-20 of them and eventually creating a full-size version.
'Our modellers are also creators, so they come up with their own proposals of form. They are often in battles with designers, but this works well because it forces designers to raise their quality and modellers to raise their skills.'
We saw three different objects at the design studio. The first was clearly a cheetah, which Kureha-san says has been the 'Bible' piece for all current Kodo cars.
There were also larger and smaller pieces that inspired the current Mazda6 and Mazda3 respectively.
'The Mazda6 [object] is more expansive, the Mazda2 more compact. But you can see they are alike, even though they were created by two different people,' says Kureha-san. 'We share these philosophies'.
Mazda says it still insists on hand-crafted design. This year's Kai and Vision Coupe were the first Kodo concepts where computer simulation was used to shape panels, to get an accurate representation of how light would reflect on the complex shapes.
But Mazda says its modellers are skilled and accurate enough to work within tolerances of half a millimetre, which is why they use the world's hardest clay.
They use a massive range of shaping tools, which Kureha-san says allows them to work with 'tremendous speed and precision'. Some are off-the-shelf, others are hand-made to the specific requirements of individual modellers.
'Normal clay can shrink 1-2mm,' says Kureha-san. 'That means a shape can become distorted when it's moved into digital form. Our clay has zero-shrink, which allows big movement but also precise and fine detail which could be lost with softer clay - because our modellers are working to within that range.
'This allows us to take a clay shape to production.'
The arty stuff doesn't stop when a car is finalised. Mazda also encourages design inspiration by creating themed products around Kodo design principles.
That could be anything from a sofa (yes, a Kodo sofa really exists) to a bike.