Most consumers associate Toyota vehicles with reliability and efficiency, but innovative, evocative styling isn’t really considered the company’s strong suite. However, new global design chief Dezi Nagaya wants to put the company’s long-held tradition of conservatism on the back burner in favor of a more aggressive, passion-inspiring approach.
“ Toyota has been criticized for being quiet and nonoffensive, of having too friendly an image while lacking emotion,” Nagaya said during an interview.
“We are going to be more dynamic, more masculine, sportier, with a more obvious design theme and a face to represent the company and the brand,” he said. “We have eliminated emotion. We need to pump that up.”
But the 50-year-old Toyota veteran, who is one of the creators of the Lexus “L-Finesse” design language, needs to walk a fine line with future vehicle designs. He said that Toyota needs to take a more emotional approach to styling, but at the same time a deep-rooted conservative component of the company’s leadership must be appeased.
Nagaya is also assuming the difficult task of creating a unified corporate design language while avoiding the “small, medium and large sausage” phenomenon seen in some German automotive lineups where cars look much the same save for size. He hinted that sharing a certain number of styling cues throughout the lineup could visually link vehicles while giving ample leeway for unique elements specific to each vehicle.
Finally, future Toyota vehicles will be designed on a sliding scale of emotion and rationality. Even the Camry could begin to move in the direction of heightened emotion, albeit ever so slightly.
“The Camry has a wide selection range with customers who don’t want something too aggressive,” Nagaya said. “But it has the responsibility of being the highlight of the lineup.”
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