Cliches may be cliches, but they are usually also true. The great nuggets of conventional wisdom about Southern California -- the easy embrace of novelty, an approach to creative endeavors largely unencumbered by tradition, a profound attachment to cars -- are not only apt; they have converged to form an extraordinary new center for automobile design.
Most cars are still dreamed up in Detroit and Turin, Wolfsburg and Tokyo. But virtually all the world's major automobile companies -- 18 to date -- have established design departments within an hour or two of downtown Los Angeles. The Japanese were first. Then came special think tanks run by America's Big Three. So far, an estimated two dozen production-model cars have been shaped by the new California design colony, including, of course, the delicious, almost perfect, and instantly successful Miata, designed by four young Americans (and a Japanese) working for Mazda in Orange County. Now the influx has accelerated, and even the Germans have deigned to establish Southern California design studios -- Mercedes last year, Audi last spring and, just last month, BMW.
Pleasant weather is only part of the attraction. There is a collective sense that to design for Americans requires understanding them viscerally, and a belief that Los Angeles is not just the wellspring of car culture but as close to Ur-America as any one place gets. More prosaically, Southern California represents the biggest automobile showroom anywhere: every year 3% of all new cars on the planet are registered in California, and most of those in Southern California. If you're to succeed in the U.S., you must sell in Southern California. And to do that, observes Peter Fischer, a marketing vice president at Volkswagen, "you have to see, feel, smell what these customers want." Says Mark Jordan, who was Mazda's chief designer on the Miata: "If you can excite the people in California, the rest of the country will take care of itself." The world's car companies have been drawn to L.A. by the same giddy promise -- a fresh start, anything goes -- that has always pulled in immigrants. Detroit has been creating cars its own way for 75 years. In Europe and Japan the conventional wisdoms can be confining, even stultifying. "We selected a place like San Diego for our design studio," says Gerald Hirshberg, Nissan's chief U.S. designer, "because it had no track record, no history. It feels like almost anything is possible out here."
But the rationale is not simply the need to meet the demands of the American car market or harness the spirit of innovation. From the homogeneous vantage points of Japan and Germany, the exuberant free thinking seems to be a function of L.A.'s slam-bang Anglo-Afro-Latino-Asian ethnic mix -- cultural democracy by default. "The Southern California area is like a melting pot -- there are so many different races," says Mitsubishi vice president Satoru Tsujimoto. "From those different backgrounds, there are many different values. So there are many different designs." For companies acutely conscious of their need to sell cars all over the world to people of wildly disparate sensibilities and experiences, California seems like an unsurpassed multicultural proving ground.