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The intellectual epicenter of this design cluster, which runs from Ventura down to San Diego, is the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Among car designers, no institution is more highly regarded. The Art Center exists in cozy symbiosis with the industry: working designers, such as Geza Loczi, who heads Volvo's studio in Camarillo, train students like Michael Ma, 26, a Vietnamese refugee who graduated this August and went directly to work for the Mercedes studio in Irvine. Ten of the 18 Southern California auto-design studios are run by Art Center alumni, and their staffs are dominated by fellow graduates, including Mazda's Mark Jordan.
The studios are small, usually consisting of 10 to 20 designers, most of them American (10 of 13 at Mazda, all 20 at Mitsubishi). Because their headquarters are thousands of miles away, the designers stationed in California exist in splendid -- and creatively productive -- isolation, relatively free from the kill-joy scrutiny of bean counters, marketing drones and engineers. "After a year in the U.S.," says Gerhard Steinle, chief of the Mercedes studio, "I see how important it is to be away from the factory."
The California design shops do seem blessedly free of the factory-like organization that prevails in Detroit and elsewhere. Designer Alberto Palma, 27, interned at General Motors in Detroit before coming to work for Toyota in Newport Beach. He found the GM experience "kind of stuffy. Everyone was divided into units for different aspects of design. Here we can sit down and talk about a project from ground up." Jack Stavana, Mazda's director of product planning and research who masterminded the marketing of the Miata, agrees. "Frankly," says Stavana, who worked for Chrysler for five years, "I needed to get out of Detroit, because there weren't fresh ideas there. We start with a fresh sheet of paper."
It is the Japanese companies that seem to take their Californians most seriously. Of the two dozen or so cars that have been largely or entirely designed in California over the past 15 years, most have been Japanese, notably the Miata, Honda's sporty CRX and Toyota's Celica. Mercedes, which set up shop only last October, plans to have a California prototype by the end of next year. The other Europeans are proceeding more timidly. The sort of California innovations Audi expects in the near term, for instance, are tilt- down steering wheels and dashboard coffee-cup holders.
The American automakers opened their studios in 1983 and 1984, and Chrysler's brand new LH model -- an intriguing would-be car with the wheels 10 in. farther back than standard to create more legroom and a stabler ride -- is mostly a California creative product. But, in general, Detroit has been typically cautious in handing design responsibilities to the Californians. Ford's chief designer, Jack Telnack, allows that the recent Thunderbird and Escort models have only been "influenced" by notions from their people on the coast.
The Miata, with its convertible top and intense colors, is the only product of the Los Angeles studios that exudes a distinct regional pizazz -- the first truly postmodern automobile, both a reinterpretation of and an improvement upon nostalgically recalled classic sports cars. Yet despite all the drafting tables suddenly clustered together, the Miata does not signal the emergence of a canonical L.A. style.