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| Canada shaping auto future |
May 1, 2007 |
Canadian designers, execs and software developers are reshaping the cars that dirve our streets
By Michael Bettencourt
“A set of Japanese dishes, a Swedish chair, a German appliance, an American car, a French dress: each of these terms conjures up an image for us,” wrote Simon Lamarre on his blog about life as a rock-star car designer. The Canadian is a lead design chief at Volvo in Sweden. “We attach certain images — or perhaps design expectations — to certain countries.”
Noticeably absent from that list is a design staple from his home country. Canada may be the second largest country by land mass, but its 30-plus million people and branch-plant automotive industry are relatively small players on the global automotive and design scene, or that’s been the case, anyway. While the process of bringing to life vehicles that will shape neighbourhoods and generations alike takes place largely in countries outside Canada, there’s a small but growing sphere of influence coming out of this country. This process is subtly injecting Canadian flavour to vehicles meant to appeal to buyers around the world.
Born just outside Montreal, Lamarre is perhaps the highest profile Canadian auto designer right now, in charge of the all-new Volvo C30 hatchback that went on sale in April. The car is a radically youthful departure for Volvo, the Swedish company of “boxy but good” design fame.
The C30 is designed to take on the popular and updated Mini Cooper in North America but especially in Europe, where Volvo estimates three quarters of all C30s will be sold. Lamarre is fluent in English, French and Swedish, and his official bio also lists a working knowledge of Italian, Spanish and German, language skills that helped him pitch the car and Volvo’s more radical design path at the car’s international media launch on the Balearic island of Mallorca, just off the coast of Spain. Volvo sells vehicles in more than 100 countries around the world and on every continent, so the C30 is just about guaranteed to spread Lamarre’s Canadian-tinged design DNA around the globe.
Lamarre returned to his hometown for the Montreal auto show in January, feted as the local boy turned international auto industry hero. He provided his old professors and current industrial design students at the L’Université du Québec à Montréal an inside look at the design process.
“They were probably shocked to hear that the two skills I considered important in a designer were the ability to negotiate and the ability to sell (your designs).”
Chrysler Group design vice-president Ralph Gilles sold a successful design as head of the “baby Bentley” team for the Chrysler 300 full-size sedan. That car became a smash sales hit when it was introduced in 2005. This led to accolades from magazines such as Black Enterprise and Time, with the latter dubbing him the “king of bling.” Gilles was born in New York city to a family of Haitian background and grew up in Montreal.
The legend of Gilles began at 14 years old when an aunt sent his automotive sketches to former Chrysler chairman and pitchman Lee Iacocca, saying he should watch out for young Ralph one day. A surprisingly encouraging reply came from Chrysler’s head of design at the time, suggesting three design schools. He ended up attending one of these, the industrial design powerhouse Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, renowned for producing leaders at some of the top automotive design departments in the world.
From there, he joined Chrysler in 1992, and was promoted last year to vicepresident of Jeep/Truck and Component Design, which means he does mainly trucks but also has a hand on the car side. He has also taught at the school, encouraging design students from around the world to push the boundaries while at school — before facing the more constrained corporate design world.
Gilles, now in his 30s, and Lamarre are the youthful corporate faces ushering in fresh design perspectives.
Home grown execs and tech
Over in the executive suites are the highlevel bosses who don’t usually design cars but do select the looks that go to production. Here Canada is also well represented, with well-known executives such as Windsor, Ont.-born Chrysler Group CEO Tom Lasorda, who is often in the news given Chrysler’s recent financial woes, Australian-born but Canadianraised Lexus of Europe vice-president Karl Schlicht and Fiat Group CEO and Italian- Canadian Sergio Marchionne.
Even the advanced 3D imaging software that helps such executives study, rotate and visualize production details for these vehicles can often be traced to Canadian roots, as can the software used by designers. Alias design software is used by every major automotive manufacturer in the world and although financial issues have bounced company ownership around for the past decade or so, it was founded in Toronto in 1983 and still houses an almost Star Trek design visualization studio in Canada’s largest city.
The company was bought by California-based industrial design software giant AutoDesk early in 2006. Richard Jones, vice-president of Alias Design Products, said the key to the AliasStudio software’s success is that it first creates surface model designs that can then be transferred to the engineering department for feasibility study and production, while its Showcase software works to ease the all-important selling and refinement of each design, the process Lamarre preached to those UQM students. Alias has also won an Academy Award for special effects generated with its Maya 3D animation program, used in blockbuster movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean, King Kong, Cars and Superman and in software video games such as the Full Auto, Tom Clancy and Prince of Persia franchises.
“In the previous design world, just 10 years ago, the (auto) design process would take anywhere from 12 to 16 months,” Jones said. “Now, with digital sketching, they’re down to about six months.”
Bright future
Alias is now sponsoring the World Automotive Design Competition, held at the Canadian International Autoshow for each of the last five years. This spring, auto design student Matthew Finbow, who attends Humber College in Toronto, will be among 11 of the first batch to graduate from an industrial design degree program in Canada that specializes in automotive design.
Until now, car designers typically came from design colleges and universities that offered studies in industrial design, with grads more likely to work in product packaging, computer goods or furniture than automobiles. Of the participating 18 design schools that entered the contest this year, both Humber College and L’Université du Québec à Montréal made a short list of the top five design schools, with Finbow taking third place for one of his designs.
Ken Cummings, director of Humber’s auto design program and a former auto industry designer himself, says the Toronto show realized early on that design was a major motivating factor in the fiercely competitive automotive world.
“We emphasize that every day during classes: we’re not competing only with each other [for competition wins and jobs] but we’re competing with the world. Design is world design — people like things or don’t like things around the world.”
World Automotive Design Competition results: Photos of this year’s entries can be viewed at: http://www.autoshow.ca/2007summary/
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