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Mom Gets Insider Look at Toyota’s Calty Design Center
Dec 01 2009 by Lori Hindman
Designing cars is a highly secretive business. No one wants images, specifications or any information to leak out to the press or even worse — the competition. So, it’s a big deal for a journalist like me to be invited to Toyota’s Calty Design Center. However, the people at Calty are so secretive that they wouldn’t tell me what I was going to see there until the day before my arrival.
The Calty Design Center in Newport Beach, Calif., is one of Toyota’s two design houses in the U.S; the second is in Ann Arbor, Mich. They also have two more in Japan and one in Nice, France. These five facilities are responsible for coming up with designs for everything Toyota makes from concept cars to production models. The 2011 Toyota Sienna (above) — a car that’s right up our family-friendly alley — was designed at Calty.
The Calty studio opened in 1973 and was the first major automotive design studio in California. It’s nestled in an out-of-the-way office park in a deceptively large building. It has the usual offices and meeting areas, but it also has a large clay modeling room as well as indoor and outdoor display areas, complete with turntables set into the pavement for viewing and finetuning designs.
When I walked into the design center, a woman welcomed me and asked if I had a camera phone. When I said, “yes,” she asked for it and put a sticker over the lens so I couldn’t sneak any photos. You’d think she didn’t trust the press or something.
One of the trip’s highlights was the clay modeling room where life-sized car designs are created through a combination of mechanized milling and hand sculpting. Toyota hires their clay modelers with little to no experience and trains them in their own technique. We got to work with a master who showed us how using the medium of clay allows the designers to literally play with an idea. They can build a life-sized version of a design and see how it looks in the light. If something doesn’t work, they can change it — shave a bit off here and add an edge there. They use a special kind of clay that gets soft when it’s warmed and can be painted, so it reflects light and creates shadows just like a real vehicle would.
Sounds like a fun job, right? Well, lucky me, I got to try my hand at it. I had the opportunity to sit down with a lump of clay and some tools and create a vehicular piece of art. We’re mommy-friendly here at MotherProof.com, so I made the next great minivan. I shaped. I scraped. I tried not to laugh too hard at myself. Because it was funny and it was fun. Don’t worry; I’ll definitely be keeping my day job.
