For 50 years, Toyota's SoCal design house has taken artisan approach

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — Fifty years ago this week, Japanese small car maker Toyota opened a fledgling design office in Southern California to help their products better meet American tastes.

In those early days, it was mostly Japanese designers and a few Americans working in a small office in nearby El Segundo, Calif., struggling to move the needle against four much larger, entrenched Detroit-based automakers.

Thanks in no small part to another, much larger global event that also started 50 years ago this month — the 1973 OPEC Oil Embargo, which spurred demand for fuel-efficient autos — Toyota's timing could not have been more fortuitous. And in the intervening decades, that small design office expanded to underpin the growth of Toyota and later Lexus to sales heights in the U.S. that would have seemed inconceivable in that era of wide ties and bell-bottom jeans.

From the 1978 Toyota Celica to the 2024 Toyota Tacoma, Toyota's Calty Design Research center, which moved to nearby Newport Beach five years later, has crafted vehicles for the Japanese automaker with a decidedly American feel. For 41 of those 50 years, designer and Detroit native Kevin Hunter, now Calty's president, has deftly helped guide the journey.

"I had always thought I would work for one of the Detroit companies when I got out of school" in 1982, Hunter told Automotive News during an exclusive tour of the Calty facility in September. "And then I had heard about Toyota setting up this design studio, and it seemed really intriguing to me, the notion of designing with Toyota designers [from Japan] and American designers working together in California. That sounded really cool."

From the outside, Calty looks like yet another underutilized commercial office space, with poured cement walls, an expansive glass-walled lobby and a tranquil outdoor water feature, tucked well off the road with a Baptist church and a U.S. post office as neighbors.

Yet behind the high walls, the forms and shapes of tomorrow's Toyota and Lexus vehicles emerge from the work of scores of artisans who sweat every detail and search for inspiration wherever it can be found.

Take Calty's LCF concept car, which sits in its lobby, and which became the Lexus LC500 coupe.

"I just love it, because it's the reason we all became designers, to make something beautiful — sculpture or something — that I think will be rather timeless as well," Hunter said. "We started that project from nothing; we had no package, no platform. Our message from Toyota, from Lexus was just 'design a beautiful car,' and we just approached it from that point of view, just making something really sculptural, with beautiful proportions, a front-engine, rear-drive car that really has that low-slung sort of beauty that you expect in a car."

Many things have changed at Calty over the last five decades, including some of the foundational methods, tools and principles used to develop vehicles as varied as the Toyota Celica, Toyota Tacoma and Lexus LC.

Designers once competed for workspace near sources of natural light, to best put pen to paper. Now, Hunter said, most spend their days in artificially cooled darkness, manipulating electronic images in either two or simulated three dimensions while computers automatically and effortlessly do much of the previous era's heavy lifting.

To show off what is possible with the latest electronic design tools, Hunter and his team of designers at Calty put together a special in-house project for the studio's 50th anniversary: a small, four-seat, semi-autonomous EV off-roader they call the Baby Lunar Cruiser concept that is styled to evoke the earliest Land Cruisers.

The Baby Lunar Cruiser concept remains only in digital form, including its airless tires, full-width viewscreen, automated digital trail spotter and tank-like, twin-joystick steering system.

"Because we're creating something as an advanced study, it's not an end-all, be-all," Hunter explained. "We can work more quickly in digital and present something rapidly to Toyota and have a review and evaluation about a product. Production is a much longer, much more rigorous process from beginning to end."

While digital design may be cutting edge at Calty, other things have remained the same, Hunter said: The pride of creating rolling art, the in-depth study of form and flow, the sense of accomplishment at seeing a vehicle that was once just an idea rolling down a Southern California street with a consumer happily sitting behind the wheel.

"It's just a source of pride, to know that you've had an impact," Hunter said of seeing one of the vehicles his team worked on doing its job out in the real world.

Other parts of the design process have simply evolved. Instead of artisans spending weeks or months crafting full-size clay models from scratch, a giant milling machine now does much of the rough work over a single evening. Clay modelers still do most of the finish work by hand, Hunter said.

"Everything we do, I think, is an artistic endeavor. And I think we all embrace that really holistically, the way we approach our work," Hunter said.

Toyota established a beachhead for automotive design in Southern California in the early 1970s, and most other automakers followed suit. There's good reason for that, said Hunter.

"There definitely is a different vibe and a different mindset in California, and I think it gets into you. You absorb that — that spirit of just trying new things. There's just an openness to the way things get done and the way people are in the environment," Hunter said. "It just really lends itself to having an advanced design studio here, and Toyota was the first."