10 million units sold in 25 years. The Toyota Yaris achieved the millionaire record by revolutionising a segment. Auto&Design presents the design story of the car, which appeared in issue 115 in 1999.
Most Japanese car manufacturers have tried, but only Toyota with the Yaris has managed to create a car with an all-European design. When Nissan launched the Micra six years ago, it presented it as a car designed on the old continent, but in fact it was conceived in Japan with clear European marketing input, and with the advice of Franco-Dutch trend expert Lidewij Edelkoort.
Above all, the second factor contributed to the pleasing and quite unusual look, but despite these efforts the Micra is not convincing as a car of thoroughly European design. Similar origins are to be found in the Nissan Primera (the exception being the Wagon, designed by Carsten Aengenheyster of the German studio), the Mitsubishi Carisma, the Toyota Carina E and the more recent Avensis.
They all have a Japanese design modified in detail to adapt it to European taste, and this has so far been the role of the European design studios of Japanese manufacturers, which it would be more appropriate to call monitoring centres. After these timid attempts – and in line with the general trend away from world car strategies in favour of regional model policies – Toyota felt it was time for a change.
In 1994, the EPOC (EuroPean Office of Creation) centre in Zaventem, near Brussels, was commissioned to study a project called the New Basic Concept (NBC), initially considered an advanced design research plan, but with a future European role. Head Tadao Otsuki, recently appointed Vice President of EPOC and surrounded by design talent from all over Europe, chose an innovative approach, and this is where Sotiris Kovos comes in. The 33-year-old Kovos, a lifelong car enthusiast with a particular interest in rallying, studied sociology before attending Coventry University and later the Royal College of Art.
There he created a state-of-the-art taxi, the ‘Taxica’, which is very narrow and tall, with room for only one passenger, to enable taxi drivers to drive through the narrow streets of southern European cities. He came to EPOC in 1994 and proposed to study European customers’ opinions on car design in the field before starting NBC design. So, together with his colleagues, he visited the cities of Europe interviewing dealers and buyers, talking to people on the street and observing drivers’ behaviour in traffic. He ended up concluding that the perception of beauty varies from country to country.
“In general, the human mind is attached to a product, as personal taste is usually reflected in the appreciation of design, and the public grows up with certain essential ideas about shapes. The angular ones are often considered threatening, as opposed to the soft ones, but each society has its own criteria of judgement: Swedes have a different sensitivity towards blondes than Italians, people of colour evaluate other people of colour differently from white people. We wanted to find out what Europeans think differently about these concepts in both a positive (harmony, elegance and balance) and negative (aggressiveness) sense. The results of the research allowed us to analyse the psychology of customers regarding the beauty and functionality of design,’ explains Kovos, and gives an example. “When researchers noticed the widespread habit in southern European countries of parking by bumping into other cars, it was decided to equip the Yaris with bumpers in two easy-to-replace sections. “This”, he continues, “is a typical result of our personal observations, which contributed to the formulation of the general concepts of practicality and equipment”.
Full article in Auto & Design no. 115
