#HTE

Infiniti’s Car Designers Look to be Having a Helluva Lot of Fun

Last year Infiniti produced the Prototype 9, a retro-futuristic concept based on 1930s racecar designs. This year their creative team is again flexing their design muscles with the electric Prototype 10, which continues with the future-past theme, albeit advanced by several decades; this car takes its cues from 1960s roadsters.

Introduced last week at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, the Prototype 10 is the first project produced under the direction of Karim Habib, Infiniti’s new Executive Design Director. (The Prototype 9 project was led by Nissan’s Senior Vice President for Global Design, Alfonso Albaisa, whom we profiled here.) “For us, Prototype 9 evoked the thrill and drama of early open-wheeled racing, and Prototype 10 represents another passion project for our designers,” says Habib. “This idea of ‘looking back to go forward’, and combining the inspiration of an earlier aesthetic with future technology, lets us show how excited we are about the era of electrification.”

Speaking of electricity, what’s really shocking is how quickly the car was designed and produced–the development time was reportedly just four months. This was accomplished by exploiting time zones and essentially yielding a 24-hour work cycle. Habib is based at Infiniti’s design center in Japan where, at the end of the workday there, he could pass the baton to the company’s UK-based designers. Fabrication took place in yet a third time zone, at Infiniti’s North American design base in San Diego.

As the Prototype 10 shows, it is an exciting time to be a car designer. Cutting-edge digital tools and teammates spread across the world have allowed them to work as never before, and the mandate to create vehicles visually distinct from combustion-engine cars has provided a thrilling leeway to designers. (Read our interview with Jaguar’s Wayne Burgess on their I-Pace for more on this subject.) As Infiniti explains:

Where the Prototype 10’s unbroken, skyward-facing surfaces reflect the uninterrupted nature of electric motor power delivery, the bodywork itself is punctuated by geometric lines. These lines reference the shock of sudden acceleration enabled by a powertrain, which can instantly deliver 100% of available torque with a push of the accelerator pedal. Straight lines give added definition to the grilles at the front of the car, and the side strakes that plunge into the rear wheel arches. The cooling ducts in the open-air cockpit – one behind the driver, one in place of a passenger seat – are also characterized by their sharp geometry, with their very structure appearing to take the form of an electrical pulse. The upright fin behind the driver’s head carves into the rear deck of the car, with razor-sharp forms also evident in the design of the triangular rear light.

“Our electric vehicle architecture represents a turning point for our design teams, a chance to present alternative proportions with different shapes,” says Infiniti President Roland Krueger. “This new design language prioritizes clean, efficient lines with which we can articulate a new, confident design language.”