From the very modest beginnings, Calty Design Research has become dominant automotive design center firmly influencing Toyota vehicles designs. The Toyota FT-1 concept is the completion of Calty's history with sports car design.
The Japanese automaker established the first design center in North America. Toyota’s Calty Design Research began as a bold experiment on October 2, 1973 in El Segundo, California, the state's prosperous car culture. In the beginning, the studio was considered as a primary branch of Toyota's global vehicle design organization. Now, after 40 years, the Calty facility would play the most important role in some of the Toyota's most significant designs, and be crucial in company's movement towards regional autonomy for North American product expansion.
In the beginning, the mission was to serve as a laboratory for the new ideas, designs, providing an open field for materials, shape, form, exploration, etc. It's name is a combination of the words California and Toyota.
«El Segundo wasn't campus. It was one portion of a modest building in an industrial area. There were about six designers and 25 people total in support. Menawhile, we would hear that domestic studios had 300 modelers and 100 designers. The manpower available meant Calty designers had to know more about the package and the architecture of the cars since we only had a couple of studio engineers. Early on, there was an underdog feeling at Calty which helped make working there feel like a team effort,» said Doris Kusumoto, Calty Financial Manager.
Guided by the vision of Shoichiro Toyoda, founder of Toyota Motor Corporation and Calty's first Executive Vice President, Mamoru Yaegashi, the first studio started with Noritsuna Watanable as its General Manager. Watanable's aim was to organize a design and research the foothold in the U. S.market.
«Given the security surrounding vehicle design, we kept it as a hush-hush operation. Some locals thought we were a small manufacturing facility, or even selling t-shirts. Early on, it was so low profile, we were not allowed business cards» added Kusumoto.
In 1978, they relocated to a new location, the Orange County, California suburb of Newport Beach. That same year, for the first time, a Calty-influenced design, the iconic 1978 Toyota Celica Liftback, reached production. This design was studio's introduction of the sporty coupes.
Calty studio had more design responsibility. In the late 1980's Calty Designers committed more to the coupe form. The result became visible in 1992 Lexus SC400.
The size of Calty grew in 1990, tripling in size and adding new buildings, employing 65 people working in 85,000 square foot design space. The Calty team persists to work closely with planning groups at Toyota Motor Sales in order to help establish production vehicle concept.
Many skills like CAD, modeling, sketching, clay modeling, milling, painting bring concept models to life.
In 2004, Calty opened a design center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to cooperate with nearby Toyota Technical Center. The Ann Arbor facility target the local production design attempts such as Tundra, Avalon which are products designed specifically for the North American market.
In 2012, Calty joined the Toyota Innovation Hub in San Francisco. This facility in Silicon Valley was strategically located and was the key step in Toyota's global leadership to partner with innovative companies in technology, design and media.
«We want to transplant the innovative culture of the Bay Area to Toyota's in-house innovation team», said, Kevin Hunter, President of Calty Design Research. « It is critical time for the automotive industry to redefine itself in response to new technology, customer's expectations for new experiences, and the way industries are structured. «
The Newport Beach and Ann Arbor studios, and the Toyota Innovation Hube were guided by Hunter, since 2007. Hunter was Toyota's first North American design president. Under his leadership several key products were developed such as Scion Fuse, Lexus LF-LC, Toyota FT-HS, and now the FT-1. The future looks very bright for Calty.
«Key volume sedans such as Avalon validated the regional development strategy. Focusing the design and engineering in the car's primary market resulted in a very successful and appealing sedan tailored to the tastes of the region's buyers» said Hunter. «As for the future, we see FT-1 as symbolic of an evolution in our mission as we move toward designs that better balance key emotional and rational elements as part of our brand promise. Calty will be integral in the movement to bring more emotional, more satisfying and engaging Toyota designs to market.»
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