Looking over at a chunky but sleek automobile in the minimalist white-walled design studio where he works, Paul Wraith says: “It costs about £300,000.”
It’s not actually a functioning road car but a full-size, visually realistic ‘hard’ model. It is the final stage of a design process that began as sketches on paper, included 3D CAD, manual clay modelling and 3D printing and went on to five-axis machining of model parts and laser scanning to feed physical details into the digital database. And the eye-popping cost he refers to is not the on-the-road price of the vehicle, thankfully, but that of producing the model.
When he also talks about trying to “tap into peoples’ emotions through the iconic brand”, you might assume he is involved in the design of some luxury marque.
But you would be wrong.
The place is Ford’s massive research and development complex in Dunton, Essex, and Wraith is Ford Transit exterior design manager, responsible for “everything you can see or touch” on the outer surface of all the vehicles produced by Ford with that venerable name.
The studio model is the final form of the Transit Custom van, which was developed at Dunton and went on sale in February this year.
On closer inspection the right-hand and left-hand sides of the model do not match. Instead, though the former represents the Transit with goods-carrying space and metal side walls, the latter shows the lines of the Tourneo Custom, a people carrier based on the same platform but with seats, trim and windows.
As such the model displays the way the vehicles were designed but also how the commercial vehicle market must be addressed today.
The vehicles are designed in parallel by the same team. Even in its purely commercial goods-carrying form the Transit has to meet passenger car standards of refinement of the Tourneo.
“The people who drive them are very discerning. It is not acceptable to think of the vehicles as just vans,” says Wraith.
Ford maintains several design operations around the world with, for example, passenger car design primarily in Cologne while commercial vehicle design is in Dunton, but that does not stop the two co-operating.
More than that, Wraith adds, every month or so Ford has an online ‘show and tell’ conference between its design studios worldwide at which key staff get to see and comment on all ongoing projects. This also ensures that any staff movement or transfer of resources between the design areas is easily assimilated.
This crossover between the Transit/Tourneo design teams is illustrated well through some of the finer details.
There is a slight recessing of the B-pillar on the Transit to allow for a sheer metal panel along the side of the vehicle, necessary, Wraith says, to allow a purchaser to display their company name or some other graphic without interruption.
Another point is the use of a distinctive “passenger car cue” in the positioning of one of three sets of turn signal indicators that all vehicles must possess at the outer edge of the wing mirrors.
It is, he notes, both dramatic and effective in that it makes the lights highly visible. Although the approach has been adopted for the new Tourneo it was never a realistic option for the Transit, says Wraith.
Van drivers, he says, are not averse to using their wing mirrors “like a cat uses its whiskers” – in other words to test whether a narrow entrance is navigable by the whole vehicle.
In practice that would mean a lot of smashed indicator lights and disgruntled vehicle fleet owners – who, of course, rather more pertinently are also the actual purchasers. So in the new Transit the indicator lights have been positioned in the mirror arms, a ploy that Wraith thinks is currently unique in any sort of vehicle although one that still largely satisfies the same aesthetic and functional objectives.
Wraith says the design team adapted the idea to the commercial vehicle world because it “really knows its users”.
Commercial vehicle market research, Wraith adds, can be every bit as intense as that for passenger vehicles, and significant use is made of focus groups.
One particular upshot of this approach resulted in a preference for lighting units to be as compact as possible to avoid what buyers regarded as excessive replacement costs for larger units.
Other such market feedback events may also feature ‘hard’ models of prospective new vehicles, designs that have very nearly reached the point of being ‘frozen’ for actual production. Feedback from these events is “treated very seriously” he adds.
If, for instance, some feature elicits a negative response, Ford needs to get to the precise root of the problem.
“Of course, we want them to say they like it,” Wraith explains. “But we don’t want them just to say that they don’t like it, without elaborating.”
When it comes to passenger vehicle design and development, Wraith says that a key element is the way that the teams responsible for exteriors and interiors interact with those developing the ‘hidden’ elements such as underbody structure and powertrain.
All teams work with different digital design tools – the former with the Alias surfacing software and the latter with the Catia 3D modelling system – but data can easily be shared between them.
“There is a common file protocol,” says Wraith.
But those computerised tools are also used in conjunction with other tools that produce physical models of projected designs.
Some are also digital, an example being stereolithographic rapid prototyping, although Wraith says that that technology has been used as far back as the 1990s and is not particularly new.
A much older technique is that of clay modelling, although the material used is in fact “more like plasticine”. This technique is quite adaptable to modern requirements for speed of iteration. The initial clay models produced during a development programme are at 40% scale and at that size a new surface can be created in “a couple of hours”.
A comparable alteration to a full-size clay model might take a couple of days.
Nevertheless Wraith says he is “really excited” about an experimental technology that Ford is currently developing in the US. The Ford Freeform Fabrication Technology (F3T) uses counterpoised robots to enable two styli to work simultaneously on both surfaces of a sheet of metal to produce a required shape.
Once it is available it should mean that prototype metal parts, capable of being used on driveable test vehicles, could be produced in a few days as opposed to the month it takes to machine a mould for a stamping process.
Any difference of opinion between the design departments, says Wraith, is usually resolved through “creative stress”. Unless there is real intensity of belief among all the people involved in a vehicle design project then it is unlikely to produce anything worthwhile.
“Vehicles are emotional objects and people are passionate about them,” says Wraith, but it’s clear where his loyalty lies. “Commercial vehicles offer colossal potential for innovation. They are one of the most interesting areas of the whole of the automotive industry.”