Mazda concept design

Often these so-called concept cars are indeed just for show, in that they've provided the designers with a bit of fun while enabling the company to maintain the facade of forward thinking. Notable exceptions are those being shown by Mazda, an award-winning series stemming from the Nagare concept - a Japanese noun for “flow' and the “embodiment of movement”.

Heady stuff, but surely the car you and I will drive a decade hence will bear little relation to such science-fiction evoking conceits as the Taiki concept (which widened the eyes of visitors to the most recent Sydney show)?

Look closely. If you drive a new Mazda sedan or hatchback - and more Australians per capita do so than in any country other than Japan - you already are. “Nagare helps us communicate the values of Mazda in a future which is more environmentally conscious,” says Mazda's head of global design, Laurens van der Acker. He steers the brave new direction that will permeate all Mazdas from its smallest city car to its biggest SUV.

`It's about capturing the beauty of nature in sheet metal.”

He's a boyish 42-year-old Dutchman with an as yet tenuous grasp of Japanese (he speaks four European languages fluently). He has little knowledge of mechanics of cars and was so uninterested in them that he preferred his bicycle until the age of 24. He dreams of a future in which cars drive themselves for the sheer freedom it would give the people with pencils and modelling clay.

You could say he comes to his work unimpeded by baggage.

“What's wrong with beauty?” van der Acker says of the elemental aspect that is coming to typify the company's cars.

“I never put pressure on my team to say a design has to do something. That'd be German. We really set out to create a new aesthetic, frankly.

“Aerodynamics is an art, not a science.”

Since 2006 when the former Bugatti, Audi and Ford designer took over at Mazda's Hiroshima headquarters, van der Acker has become one of the world's most influential designers.

His team's work not on hyper-expensive luxury cars, but everyday devices that cost as little as $15,000 new.

“Everyone looks with jealousy at what Mazda is pulling off in Australia with eight percent market share,” he says.

“For me driving around here is like being in Hiroshima. The new and emerging cultures embrace us more than anyone else.”

While Mazda isn't a behemoth to compare with Toyota or Nissan, it is seen as being imbued with a dynamic cachet - a Japanese Alfa Romeo in some respects, van der Acker agrees.

The most obvious manifestation of this arrives here in June with the release of the second generation Mazda3.

The current version is the most popular car in the brand's history - not least among Australia's private buyers - and the most tangible sign to date of van der Acker's mission to communicate the aesthetics of Nagare to an affordable family mobile.

That he was in Australia to host a design symposium was in itself a cerebral departure for a mainstream auto brand. “At Ford we used to look back a lot,” he laughs. “Not at Mazda. They want something new. There is a place for retro design if you have that history.

“We don't have a lot of history. We have two icons (the perennial MX-5 roadster and RX-7 rotary coupe), but we're not burdened by 100 years of careful grille management. That's exciting as a designer. “People see the current Mazdas and the concept cars and they miss the connection. The bridge between these two extremes is the homework we're doing.

“Management can see the connection, otherwise it would have been us playing in the sand and showing off to our friends. Now it becomes a tool to create a better business, to express the values of the brand.” While van der Acker has an unusually broad canvas at Mazda, the parameters of an industrial designer are rigid: “Raymond Loewy, the designer the Coca Cola bottle, said the most beautiful line is a rising sales chart”.

And the challenges of car design are “piling up”.

“We really need technological breakthrough because we don't want the car industry to end up like the tobacco industry ended up, where driving becomes associated with negatives,” he says.

“That is my biggest fear if we don't solve these issues. If we could have a powertrain tomorrow that doesn't require depletable resources we'd sign up for it now.

“As efficient as cars are becoming there's still so much waste in them for various reasons that hopefully technology can solve. If cars didn't crash into each other we could have any shape.

“Imagine that - the weight savings, the efficiency. The freedom it opens up is tremendous. If we had production technologies that were quicker we could have individualised cars and signature series rather than 100,000 (demanded by economies of scale).

“Ultimately, philosophically you want to achieve a state of liberation where things become guilt-free. I like the idea of angst free motoring, because it is positive way to look at it.” Meanwhile this side of Utopia, van der Acker contents himself with what he calls “breaking the paradox” and points to the new Mazda3 as a case in point.

“To break a paradox you enter new territory where three negatives become one positive,” he says.

“It's kind of like cheating, we have all sorts of tricks to make things that are small look big and things that are square look round. Nothing is real in car design.

“It's not architecture where what you see is what you get. Car design is is in many ways about trying to hide things, like creating a car that's big on the inside, but small on the outside; a car that's bigger and lighter; faster and safer. You need to continuously challenge paradoxes to try and find new solutions.”

van der Acker's hands flash across an ever present sheet of paper, better to make a his point.

“I know that in my position I'm going to get an unfair share of the credit because I'm the top of the design pyramid,” he says.

“I wish I'd been able to say I'd designed the Taiki, that I'd made that sketch. But I'm happy that we've created that direction and brought that creativity and enthusiasm to it.

“I really like strategy, I like brands and what's nice about deisgn it's something you can do all your life. The greatest architects broke through when they were in their 50s. Frank Gehry has been doing wild stuff all his life but only when he was 55 or 60 was he asked to do the Guggenheim.”

Van der Acker shys from admitting any such ambition for himself, only saying wistfully: “`A little Mazda that changes the world - wouldn't that be nice?”