The Mazda Furai concept (pronounced ‘foo-rye’ Japanese for ‘sound of the wind’) is the latest in the Nagare concepts and celebrates 40 years of Mazda involvement in motorsport.
Created at the Mazda North American Operations’ (MNAO) studio in Irvine, California under the leadership of Franz von Holzhausen, Director of Design, the design team set out to create a car that blurred the boundaries between road-car and weekend racer to create a functional race car. The design team began by taking the successful Le Mans Courage C65 chassis and adding a closed cockpit and Nagare design elements. But while the four previous concept cars explored Nagare’s emerging design aesthetic, and featured core design elements such as the aggressive headlamps and unique five-point grille, Furai has each of its Nagare textures and details serving a functional purpose.
Where Taiki had been a visual interpretation of the flow of air, it fell to Furai to actually channel it. On Furai, Nagare’s ‘flow lines’ actually enhance the vehicle’s aerodynamic performance, by channelling and directing the air flow over Furai’s body surface. At the front, the air-flow package takes air moving under the car and directs it inside the body to the engine-cooling radiators, while the form of Furai’s side surfaces feeds air to the rear brakes, the oil cooler and the transmission cooler.
To come up with a new design identity for Mazda Furai, Laurens van den Acker and his design team had to condense and refine important heritage and brand identifiers into future design DNA. But what is design DNA? As its name would suggest, it’s not so different from a human genome. Design DNA is a name for the basic building blocks that makes a car recognisable. It’s a design element that ensures a car shares visual characteristics with other vehicles in the same family, while at the same time distinguishing it from other brands and other products. Essentially they are the visual features that a family of cars has in common – in this case the elements that make a Mazda look like a Mazda Furai.
Usually these elements include the look and shape of the grille, the roof angle and the shape of the headlights and even rear taillights. It can also mean a crease in a body panel, the shape of a window or even an unusual wheel design that is visually identifiable with a car brand. If these are the essential ingredients for a design language then the combination of them together, crafted expertly, and when well executed, should lead to a number of distinctive and brand-unique new cars. In this case the goal is to create a family of beautiful vehicles, all uniquely different, yet recognizably Mazda.
The responsibility for the successful worldwide introduction of Mazda design falls to four global design studios located in Irvine, California, Oberursel, near Frankfurt, Germany and Yokohama and Hiroshima, Japan all guided by Laurens van den Acker. This is an incredible challenge, not least in communication terms alone. As Laurens van den Acker is based at the firm’s global Mazda’s headquarters in Hiroshima, Japan, it means he spends a lot of time traveling between studios. All four of Mazda’s studios are playing a vital role in the supply of ideas for future design directions. At its simplest, each of the studios focus on the creation of products for their local markets. In Irvine, Mazda’s North American design studio works on vehicles and concepts for North America, under the daily direction of Franz von Holzhausen. In Frankfurt, Peter Birtwhistle’s studio focuses on vehicles for Europe. While back in Japan, Yokohama under Atsuhiko Yamada concentrates its energy on products for Asia, together with the design headquarters in Hiroshima which guides overall global design strategy and engineering integration.
The reality is rather more complex, with product origination in one geographic location via import from different global design studios and often destined for more than one market. The result is that each of the studios is effectively globally focused but with local expertise. This leads to an incredibly healthy environment of competition and rivalry in the global design team, but still with openness that ensures efficient working processes. Each studio works in three different areas, creating concept cars, crafting production vehicles and evolving a better understanding of how to improve future Mazda vehicles. All are aspects that will crucially affect design. But, arguably, it is the third aspect that is the most important as it asks ‘where are we headed and what do we need to do to get there?
It is usually this ‘third way’ that most impacts vehicle architecture and packaging. It starts with a philosophy and then leads to questions as essential as ‘how will we build these cars and what will we build them from?’ Usually it is the design studio located geographically closest to production design and advanced engineering and planning that spends the most time focusing on how and where to build a car. This leaves more time available to generate concepts and other ‘experimental’ work to secondary studios. These studios are vital in the development of cars, simply because they have more time to ask questions that their ‘client’, the design headquarters, may not yet even has asked. Under van den Acker, each of the studios are encouraged to imagine ‘further out’, to explore future ideas and concepts.
When Mazda Furai unveiled the Nagare concept car at the LA Motor Show, it was unlike any concept car seen before; due to its exterior form language of textured surface lines and dramatic, futuristic wedge-like shape. At first the car appeared to be a complete visual change from the trio of concept vehicles that had immediately preceded it Sassou, Senku and Kabura and no one, not even on Mazda’s design team, knew how big an impact their new design philosophy would make around the world.
The earlier trio of award-winning concept cars had all wowed audiences at the world’s motor shows in 2005 and 2006 exhibiting a new and energetic commitment to exciting and contemporary automotive design at Mazda. But with the introduction of the Nagare concept, everything shifted. It was as dramatic an introduction as any car company could hope for.
But why such a dramatic shift when the latest concepts had been so successful? Franz von Holzhausen, Director of Design for Mazda North America, explains:
“Mazda Furai has a strong line-up of products but we felt that, for the future of the Mazda brand, we needed to create a design language that reflected an emotional attachment to the cars, in a similar way that Zoom-Zoom represented an emotional attachment to the cars when in motion. The three concepts explored ideas that would become part of Flow design philosophy. Nagare really evolved from these concepts when Laurens suggested that we be even bolder and go further than we had before.”
Mazda Furai DNA the component philosophical parts from which a Mazda vehicle is constructed can be summarized in a series of adjectives: ‘Zoom-Zoom’, ‘young’, ‘stylish’, ‘spirited’, ‘insightful’, ‘emotion in motion’, ‘innovative’, all are adjectives that have, over the years, become directly associated with the Mazda brand. This is because Mazda cars have long been heralded for their exceptional functionality, responsive handling and excellent driving performance.
“We looked at all of these adjectives and wondered whether they were really being visually expressed through the design at Mazda,” Franz von Holzhausen explains. “Our cars were dynamically great and proportionally they were good but visually we felt that they needed work. It’s already time to prepare the design evolution of tomorrow. The Nagare concepts show the way.” The design team set out to discover something new and fresh for Mazda design; in terms of an aesthetic that would define Mazda, that visually communicated the brand and which would become something that Mazda could ‘own’ from a design perspective. Under Laurens van den Acker, the design team was challenged to capture Mazda’s driving spirit embodied in Zoom-Zoom by trying to capture Mazda’s essential brand characteristics visually in Mazda vehicles, even when they were stationary.
