IF ONLY THE NEXT CARS COULD TALK

The architecture of Nissan Design International is best described as modern Maginot. Stark lines, flat planes, muted colors and neutral shapes. Nothing to distract the creative minds working behind smoked-glass windows and blind doors that hiss open to touch-tones just like on the starship Enterprise. * There are 18 such automobile birthplaces in Southern California where designers, stylists and careful thinkers wear hiking shorts and Gap T-shirts to work because collars and ties might manacle individual visions. So might regular hours.

Steeplechasing on mountain bikes and spiking volleyballs on company time, however, are encouraged. So are Ping-Pong breaks.

These places are intentionally secluded; one, in fact, was built and functioning for weeks before the local mayor found out--when he received an invitation to the formal dedication.

Chrysler Pacifica is just outside Carlsbad, while Nissan Design sits close to La Jolla. Ford is in Valencia, General Motors was in Newbury Park until June. Audi and Volkswagen chose the quiet obscurity of Simi Valley, while Mazda and Mercedes-Benz are tucked inside faceless industrial complexes in Irvine.

They invite no inspection, welcome few visitors and maintain tight security. Some air-freight clay models to decision makers in Frankfurt and Tokyo, avoiding industrial espionage by shipping in padlocked crates naked of company logos. Others are sited beneath the restricted airspace of civilian and military airports, where helicopters cannot spy on secret shapes in walled parking lots.

Because among these automotive forms are the cars that, breaking the profound, scary barrier of the millennium, will be on our highways in 2010.

“We’re certainly [working] close enough [to 2010] that we can’t talk about it,” says Jerry Hirshberg, carte-blanche creator and president of Nissan Design. Typical artist, he’s wearing a stone-washed, band-collar shirt over a faded blue T-shirt after a lunch of two sets of tennis on his center’s rooftop court. “I can say that when it gets to coffee table books telling us what we will be driving in the next millennium, well, they’re charming reading and a lot of fun. But a car in 2010 will look depressingly like a car. It will have wheels. It won’t fly.”

So echoes Ron Hill, chairman of the transportation design department at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, where students are constantly sketching deep into tomorrow.

“At Art Center we try to educate the guesswork and think the unthinkable,” Hill says. But barring scientific eruption or religious, economic, military or social catastrophe, he says, cars of the future will have “four wheels, four doors and carry four passengers from Point A to Point B by methods of the occupants’ own choosing.”

Hill and Hirshberg are primarily concerned with the shapes of cars to come. It’s their engineering counterparts who are tinkering with a trove of 21st century technology.

Among the new and startling:

- Fuel cells--contained chemical labs that convert hydrogen and atmospheric oxygen into electrical energy--are powering plodding prototypes from Germany to Osaka. Mercedes has one bolted aboard a step-van, and it generates sufficient electricity for a 120-mile trip.

- Flywheels and ultracapacitors, devices proven since Edison first tamed electricity, are finally being modified as on-board electrical storage units for automotive use. And gas turbines are being reexamined.

- Mercedes is polishing a second-generation cruise control that uses infrared sensors to automatically slow a vehicle should some churl cut in and slow to a dawdle.

- On-board navigators will talk to Global Positioning System satellites. Touch the square dashboard screen to call up a city, punch in an address, respond to audio instructions, follow visual directions from a moving icon and men will be forever freed from the humiliation of stopping at service stations to ask for directions.

- Falling asleep behind the wheel causes a third of auto accidents, so researchers are dreaming up a photoelectric device in the rearview mirror that would detect the fluttering eyes and falling pulse of someone about to nod off and sound an alarm. It could be the radio booming Alanis Morissette or a seat shaking like Northridge.

- Manual switching is poised to be switched off for good and replaced by voice activation. Say “start” and the engine fires. “Go left” and a turn signal blinks.

- As the past decade and a half brought air bags, anti-lock brakes, side-impact protection and improved fuel efficiency, nothing short of a Luddite administration can stall their refinement. Air bags in 2010 will be equipped with softer fabrics and less explosive charges. Titanium or composite or supersteel crash cages will allow us to survive T-boning by a Humvee.

- A tighter fix on aerodynamics and feather-light materials will create 80 mpg cars more slippery than a tactical fighter and weighing under a ton.

Unpredictable, however, is just how much technology will be lost in the translation to tomorrow. Car builders’ costs are passed on to customers. And no matter the desirability of the device, buyers will only settle for what they can afford.

Robert Eaton, chairman and CEO of Chrysler Corp., is wary of the price of progress. Particularly when a hefty percentage is rooted in legal and government intervention--air bags, anti-smog devices, side-impact protection and safety bumpers.

“Today, for instance, U.S. regulatory mandates alone add about $2,000 to the price of every Chrysler vehicle,” Eaton wrote for a recent European study of future cars. “Not all regulations are bad. But senseless bureaucratic directives and predatory litigation, unchecked, can and will derail progress in developing new generations of vehicles.”

There are those who persist in “blade runner” visions of the 21st century. Faith Popcorn, for example. The marketing consultant, author and futurist believes that cars will have removable sections, a motor home telescoping into a van and then a sports car, for example. Vehicles will start by thumbprints. Kids may be left in cars tailored for child care while mom goes shopping and baby-sits via her wristwatch television screen.

High technology may even satisfy those who believe that there is no replacement for the passions of driving, high speed and raw horsepower. Their surrogate, says Popcorn, will be virtual reality systems.

“All the feelings of speed and danger will be intensified, and virtual reality will be more real than real,” Popcorn predicts. “Your heart starts pounding, you start sweating. Somehow your brain will not buy that it’s safe.”

In reality, none of the real-world technology will require Buck Rogers as your copilot. Because it isn’t that fresh.

GPS navigation systems have been practical and inexpensive equipment on light planes and small sailboats for at least five years. In May, they became a $2,000 option on Acura’s new 3.5RL luxury sedans sold in California. Fuel cells have been routine for two decades of space shuttling; voice activation a communications standard for just as long.

Collision avoidance systems are airline realities. So are stick shakers that alert a pilot of diminishing airspeed and a potential stall. And no matter what cabin crews might want you to believe, a DC-10 carrying 300 souls munching on plastic lunches is capable of flying from LAX to Chicago and landing smoothly without anyone up front touching the computerized controls.

Nissan’s Hirshberg knows why so little of this aviation and space-age technology has been so long trickling down. It is a matter, as Buckminster Fuller once noted, of the automobile being mathematically the world’s most complex product.

“He did not mean the most complicated,” explains Hirshberg. “He meant in its interaction with other vehicles, in a changing environment, with the variety of people who use them, the automobile is the most complex product on the face of the earth.

“So this humble thing, which is the oldest product next to a washing machine, is probably the slowest changing product on the face of the earth. At least in the 20th century.”

But as machines shift into new gears for 2010, says Hirshberg, one quick and dramatic change will involve their packaging and marketing.

Other experts sniff a trend to colorful cars that owners can adapt to daily or weekend moods with a wardrobe of bright hues. One manufacturer is already preparing to build an accessorized car in partnership with Swatch.

Car ownership, says one executive, may be rendered obsolete by a radical program where dealers, instead of selling cars, will lease packages--a compact, a sports coupe, a luxury sedan--to better suit our week’s needs.

“The game becomes not guessing the future, but deciding what directions--based on what you currently know--look like they will have legs,” says Hirshberg. “What I tell my group is: ‘The most important responsibility for thinking about the future is catching up with the present.’

“We’re nowists, not futurists.”

Many of these “nowists” argue that the rapid acceleration of the next millennium cannot be underestimated. Today’s car engines, according to Chrysler researchers, have more computing power than the first Apollo lunar modules. Contrast the antediluvian 2kb memory computers of 1975 with modern notebooks with their Pentium chips, vast memories and rapid speeds. And remember the lightning advances in Nintendo, cellular phones and fax machines.

So automobiles of 2010, claims this school of thought, will represent quantum leaps. “We won’t be able to violate the laws of physics,” says Ron York, an advanced concepts specialist with General Motors. “But we’re certainly going to challenge them.” Others, however, counter that a resistance to technology subduing life’s freedoms seems to be surfacing, with consumers anxious to call a timeout. Ergo, visible automotive advances in the next 14 years may actually be less dramatic than the past 14 years. “I see evolution, not revolution,” says Alain Clenet, designer, automotive systems consultant and founder of Asha Corp. of Santa Barbara, and a thorough Frenchman. “What will change is the way we make cars and the materials used.” “We will use more composites in construction, even as structural units, until cars now weighing 3,600 pounds will be down to 2,500 pounds,” he adds. So, say the moderates, let’s consider the car of the future as a paradigm shift. Exponential growth is a given in these United States, where the vehicle population grew by 75% to 190 million between 1970 and 1990. More people, more cars, dirtier air and dwindling oil reserves will result in more and tougher government regulations. Electric, zero-emission vehicles were once considered part of the solution. But their popularity, even among the totally green, is flickering.

This year, the California Air Resources Board--crusader and world leader for cleaner transportation--dropped its mandate that would have ordered EVs to make up 2% of new car sales in California by 1998, and more by 2000.

Two years ago, almost a dozen electric vehicle builders were displaying their dreams at the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show. This year, that quiet cottage industry was down to two exhibitors.

Even in 1994, the year that bulged with electric vehicles at the Los Angeles Auto Show, Chrysler chairman Eaton said he saw no huge future for electric vehicles. Not as long as gasoline remains an inexpensive fuel. Not as long as smaller internal combustion engines become more powerful, cleaner and economical. “There’s also no political will to do anything about it,” he added.

And although heavily applauded by the largely uninformed, GM’s recently unveiled EV1 electric coupe is being talked down by industry watchers as an exercise in packaging and political correctness. Because its lead-acid technology is kindergarten and the car barely works in cold climates. “In my view, these [electric vehicles] will mainly be used for short urban journeys,” writes Ernie Thompson, chief of Britain’s Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, in a recent report for the Society of Chemical Industry (UK). “We have waited for this [battery] breakthrough for the past 25 years, and despite enormous research and development investments by manufacturers and governments, it remains elusive.” Smart cars and intelligent highways are still not considered a dumb idea. But research is moving slower than crush hour on the Ventura Freeway. Seers say it will take a bare minimum of $200 billion and the next 20 years to prepare for such automobility. And two decades beyond that before we get practical about hands-off motoring--the kind that will move people around like a Disneyland ride while overhead sensors read a bar code on their windshield and debit their Visa account for road usage fees. On the other hand, suggests Leon Mandel, the knowledgeable curmudgeon who is publisher of AutoWeek magazine, highly evolved people don’t see themselves as blobs of protoplasm to be shuttled along automated highways.

“The intellectual elite doesn’t realize our passionate attachment to the auto,” he says. “In 50 years, the highways will still be populated by fanatics like us.”

Art center’s Hill says there is no doubt that cars in 2010 will reflect heavy research into reducing automobile weight and fuel-sapping friction of a car’s slipstream and its mechanicals. Currently, they reduce the propulsion power of a single gallon of gasoline by more than 75%.

If there is a window into the future of motoring, it is through a little-known government program called Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. PNGV, formed in 1993, melded researchers from the auto industry’s Big Three with eight government agencies. “The ultimate stretch goal,” explains engineer Bob Mull, director of Ford’s PNGV effort, “is to triple the fuel efficiency of tomorrow’s cars while maintaining what a car offers today . . . transportation for six people and 200 pounds of luggage, with the range of 380 miles and all the safety that people want.” In addition, our 80-mpg vehicle must meet post-2000 emission and safety standards and be able to accelerate from 0-60 mph in 12 seconds. And cost no more than today’s midsize cars.

PNGV’s timetable is crisp:

A moving concept vehicle by 2000; production prototypes by 2004; production by 2008.

Which Ford has rounded to the nearest decade in christening a Styrofoam and fiberglass model as its six-passenger Synergy 2010 supercar.

If constructed largely of aluminum, guess its engineers, the car would weigh 2,200 pounds--one-third lighter than today’s midsize sedans. Aerodynamically, it promises to be 40% more efficient than, say, Ford’s ovum-inspired Taurus.

Synergy 2010 will have a rear-mounted, one-liter diesel engine, but not to power wheels. Instead, it will be mated to a generator supplying energy to four electrical motors driving each wheel. Alternative fuels for the generator might be methanol, ethanol or compressed natural gas. Or a fuel cell could be the answer. And excess energy--whether first generation or reclaimed from a regenerative braking system--would be stored in a spinning flywheel. Or in some space generation battery pack.

Chrysler’s offering to PNGV and the 21st century is a Dodge Intrepid ESX that looks like a logical styling extension of a 1996 Dodge Intrepid. The ESX has an all-aluminum unibody 600 pounds lighter than a steel skin. A three-cylinder, turbocharged diesel generator feeds 300 volts to a pair of electric motors mounted on the rear wheels. For surplus energy storage, Chrysler’s future goes back to the past and lead-acid batteries. ‘But this is a serious hybrid that we see approximating a PNGV car,” said Peter Rosenfeld, Chrysler’s man in the supercar consortium, when the ESX was unveiled at January’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit. But thanks to all those exotic materials and sophisticated technology, he warned, “we still don’t know how to make a PNGV affordable.” The future Ford Synergy 2010 isn’t any more affordable.

“If we made 500,000 a year [far above production for Ford Taurus], the cost of a Synergy would still be more than double Taurus,” says Mull.

An aluminum build sounds great--but aluminum costs four times as much as steel. Magnesium could be a replacement--but its shavings are combustible.

Fuel? Natural gas costs less than gasoline and is 60% cleaner when burned. But it only has one-fourth the energy density of gasoline, which means a storage tank about half the size of the car.

Electrical storage? Flywheels look good, but are expensive and spin at 100,000 revolutions per minute compared to the much lazier 7,000 rpm of an internal combustion engine. Flywheels also have a nasty habit of spinning into shrapnel.

If there is any key to resolving these difficulties clouding tomorrow’s cars, it will have little to do with research breakthroughs. Experts again say it’s a matter of adapting the existing and improving the rudimentary.

Says Chrysler’s Rosenfeld: “Our [PNGV] goal is to go from low-volume, high-cost aerospace and government-funded technologies, to high-volume, low-cost commercial products.”

But away from technology and back among those concerned with the glamorous and the touchable, there are experts who haunt world auto shows and see several trends pointing at 2010.

Not that futuristic cars set on turntables surrounded by dancing laser beams are any indication.

“For me, there are show cars and there are concept cars,” relates Hirshberg. “Show cars are for entertainment, large toys to attract people to the stand. But concept cars, theoretically, are dealing with issues.

“If an electric car, how will it look? If a truck, it might say we’re not restricted to the uptight, dour expressions that most trucks have.”

Hirshberg believes the industry is primed to enter the new millennium in a more relaxed mood. Wth increased awareness of the psychology and dynamics of existing in an automobile, he predicts a swing to more interesting and colorful interiors and accessories “tailored to human use . . . not things we adapt to, but things that adapt to us.” There will be a greater diversity of car sizing, he suggests, and a return to authentic purpose--until no longer will we drive trucks that handle like cars or cars advertised as having the utility of trucks.

“I think that [authenticity] explains the ridiculousness of buying a Humvee,” says Hirshberg. “Buyers can say, ‘Well, it’s real, folks.’ And that’s why the Jeep keeps going on forever. It has been real since World War II.”

Vince Barabba, general manager of GM’s Knowledge Network, sees little drifting from America’s automotive mainstream and our affection for five-passenger cars in the years ahead. But he envisions a steady march toward smaller cars with larger, more efficient, more flexible interiors keyed to timesaving activities.So instead of making two trips--one for shopping, say, and the other to the library--the car would “contain enough communications equipment [so] you could just go shopping and get information on the way,” he says. “It’s an issue of efficiency of space relative to size, and bringing some [increased] level of intelligence to the hands and minds and ears of the driver and passengers.” The American automobile industry, say other specialists, will continue to mine its heritage into the next century with niche vehicles appealing to smaller customer groups.

It started six years ago when Chrysler built a loud, uncouth, primitive, viciously fast roadster called the Dodge Viper. It was for a small club hungry for the crude efficiency of designer-racer Carroll Shelby’s Cobra sports car of the ‘60s. Viper, already in its second generation, is now offered as a coupe and Chrysler says future iterations will be around in 2010. Next year, the Plymouth Prowler will be satisfying the fantasies of a generation that missed a passion its first time around. With open front wheels and bustle-trunk, the two-seater Prowler is a ‘90s version of home-built hot rods of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

And in this age of engine management by microchips, agrees GM’s Barabba, “there are people who will say, ‘Gee, it would be fun to open up the hood and start tinkering again.’ ”

This return to basics and the driving experience is global. Mazda, in 1989, caught the first wave with its phenomenally successful Miata roadster, a blatant copy of free, fun, topless, British-built MGs and Triumphs.

Now German car builders are committed to making roadsters. BMW’s Z3 arrived this year, Mercedes’ downsized SLK convertible will be here next year, and the Porsche Boxster soft top by 1998.

“In 2010 I see a continuing of this trend of people wanting individual cars tailored to their needs and purposes,” says Gerhard Steinle, president of Mercedes-Benz Advanced Design of North America Inc. in Irvine. Here, creative juices are kept flowing by designers flying World War II air combat video games and racing radio-controlled sedans. Mercedes-Benz sedans, of course. Adds Steinle: “The three-box car just doesn’t offer enough. That’s why sport utilities are so successful. So people can have fun again.”

And even august Mercedes-Benz is ready to produce some new century nonsense. For 1998, the company is developing the Smart, a micro compact coupe and roadster in conjunction with the makers of those loony Swatch watches. And just like the watches, the car will be available in frantic hues with a variety of colored plastic pieces customizing fenders, doors and hoods. “It is a lifestyle vehicle, an adventure, a novelty,” acknowledges Steinle. “We thought we should lead, not follow, and we feel this concept is right for the century ahead.”

Two other German companies are putting their millennium money into smaller cars.

Volkswagen, in an extended panic over sagging sales and an even droopier reputation, turned to its Simi Valley studio and designer J. Mays before setting its course for 2010.

Mays knew that although many companies make motorcycles, the name Harley-Davidson carries the reputation in the United States as the premier machine. Likewise, Levi’s endures as the blue blood among blue jeans.

Now, quick, what image do people attach to Volkswagen? Right. The Beetle.

So in time for the turn of the century, maybe as early as 1998, Volkswagen will build the Concept 1, which picks up the Beetle story and styling where it left off. But this Beetle will be all 21st century and designed to eventually accept diesel, hybrid or pure electric power.

“We took on the role not so much as designers of a new vehicle, but rather as curators of an idea,” says Mays, now vice president of SHR Perceptual Management, a California-Arizona team of design consultants. ‘Like Ferdinand Porsche, we approached it from an engineer’s standpoint. What is absolutely necessary? No superfluous design or styling curves. Our project: design a car that brought together the past and the future.” Concept 1 is well-rounded, very cute and a little tubby. It’s a coupe and a convertible and close to being half as high as it is long. This new everyone’s car will cost less than $14,000 and, of course, it’s beetle-backed.

Audi’s TT certainly is different, and also very retroactive. (Its initials stand for Tourist Trophy, a historic motorcycle race on Britain’s Isle of Man.) Scheduled to go on sale in 1999, the two-place TT shows whimsy from polished alloy pedals to tan leather seats, thong-stitched like a baseball glove. That should appeal to seniors with a sense of history. Yet the Golf-sized TT also comes with all-wheel drive, roll-over protection and a 210-horsepower, turbocharged four-banger guaranteed to stir boy tigers and young lionesses. Like Concept 1, it’s unabashed plumbing of the past.

“It’s an advantage we have against the Japanese,” notes Charles Ellwood, design director of Volkswagen’s Simi Valley studio. “We have a history, they don’t. They’re making their history today.”

Tom Matano, head of Mazda research and co-parent of the Miata, agrees.

“Our heritage isn’t there in the emotional, social sense,” he acknowledges. But since dinky Datsuns first trickled to American shores in 1958, Japanese car makers have developed a heritage of providing dependable, quality cars.

“In the past two decades we have set the standards,” Matano adds. ‘Still, that doesn’t give us much to live on in the future. So our future will be a matter of realignment, reallocation of resources--and thinking hard.”

And, he notes, thinking hard about Mazda’s “core competency” of innovation, the off-center thinking that produced three-wheel trucks, the rotary-engined RX7 sports car and the Miata.

To stay ahead of the times, Matano forces his theories and interpretations to roam far in front of everyday life.

Follow his mind into its maze: “1956 Chevys had bench seats in the front for mom and dad with the kids in the back . . . the perfect family. Toyota is offering a bench seat with the Avalon, so is our body language indicating a need to return to family values?

“Was the popularity of bucket seats related to the divorce rate? Are pickups popular because they are the only vehicles with bench seats?

“There’s a gel on the market where you put your hand in, pull it out and there’s no residue. Can I use this? There’s a solidifying liquid that when you shock it [electrically], it becomes solid. Can we use this to make something like a beanbag seat for automobiles? Which would mean a seat becomes available to anyone’s shape or form.” In surfing today’s indicators for hints of tomorrow, Matano, Steinle, Barabba and others sieve all nuances. Young people are computer fluent before their teens, which means automobility is inherent to their thinking. Is there significance in young girls wearing short, straight black hair and combat boots? Why are a couple in the Price Club parking lot struggling so hard to load a swing set into the back of their minivan? Always a thousand questions. Sometimes never a productive answer. But because a designer saw that young couple in the Price Club parking lot, Nissan pioneered fold-down, sliding rear seats for its Quest minivan.

“It wasn’t futuristic thinking, yet people in the media called it that,” recalls Hirshberg. “They’ve said, ‘Wow, that’s really far out.’ We’ve said, ‘No. It is actually far in.’ ”

“We simply looked at how people were using things, saw they were having difficulties and decided to address it. So futuristic thinking is nothing more than closely and imaginatively observing the way people are living . . . and that, to me, is about as far into the future as we get.”

Matano currently is focusing on computer users who do not buy new systems, but are constantly updating and adding to the old. Transferred to automobile marketing, he says, it could create “the Ikea concept ... you get a base car, buy a kit, then customize your car by computer.”

Steinle’s key was cellular phones. Currently they are given away as inducements to subscribing to telephone services. Cable television is a paid service. So is Prodigy. That could translate, Steinle says, to a new generation of motorists “more interesting in using a car, not owning a car . . . and having the availability of a car for different purposes.” In Steinle’s 2010 scenario, a motorist might pay Mercedes-Benz a down payment and flat monthly fee for automobile service and a base vehicle. In town, the micro compact might be sufficient for several weeks. Then comes vacation time and a drive on Pacific coastal roads to Monterey. So the micro compact is traded for a convertible. And for a hot, boring desert drive from Los Angeles to El Paso, the ragtop is exchanged for a large, cool S500 sedan. At Nissan, 2010 is a concern of Hirshberg’s design context laboratory. It is not inhabited by car people, but by linguists, anthropologists, interior designers and writers who fret and worry.

“It is their job to inform the designer’s intuition,” he explains. ‘They are vast readers, experiencers, observers and communicators.

“Their end product is a communicated level of broad understanding. They paint the context around any issue. When we were designing a truck not long ago, they thought it might be very interesting to give us a history of the truck.”

A secondary purpose was to help Nissan management in Japan understand this odd American preoccupation with pickups.

So advanced concepts, says Hirshberg, is something of a misnomer. The team deals with the here and now. They are “catching up with the present by understanding what has been and what is really going on now and what are its implications.”

And if that fails, there’s always the Ping-Pong table, where minds will open as thoughts focus, just for a moment, on less rigorous things.

At Audi, slinging a baseball around is a popular therapy.

During one break, a designer happened to examine the glove he was wearing.

Hey, he said, it would be really suggestive of America at play and weekends outdoors if this exact leather and precise form of stitching were adapted to upholstery in the Audi TT.

And so it was.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

BRINGING UP BABY BENZ

New cars do not occur overnight. Nor over several years. The tiny Smart two-seater from Mercedes-Benz was more than a decade in gestation, traveling from wild idea to shelved sketches to its 1990 revival. Ten years earlier, says Gerhard Steinle, president of the Irvine-based Mercedes-Benz Advanced Design of North America, “we had in our drawers lots of ideas for doing [designing] smaller cars . . . two-seaters, 2.5 meters [eight feet] long, electric vehicles with storage for one bag of golf clubs.” But building a small, light car with the famed safety features of a large, heavy Mercedes wouldn’t be easy. And the public certainly wasn’t ready for a micro Mercedes. Buyers still wanted space, pace and expensive grace. “Yet by 1989 it was quite obvious that the environment had changed, and people didn’t want larger and heavier,” adds Steinle. So a team formed in Irvine beneath chief designer Benjamin Dimson.

Spring 1991 - Designers produce 300 sketches, which Steinle culls to 50 drawings pointing the styling in two or three general directions.

“All [cars] were very short, very high, with people not really sitting but almost half standing,” says Steinle. “Small wheels, but not cartoonish because we didn’t want people to laugh. We wanted people to take what we were doing very seriously . . . to show a totally different concept, a car for city commuting, not long-distance driving.”

June 1991 - A dozen final sketches are decided and dimensions drawn. But measurements make the car look boxy and too wide for its height and length. So seats are staggered, an idea resurrected from days when race cars carried a driver and mechanic.

November 1991 - Sketches become eight clay models, and at one-fifth scale they line up like a scene from “Toy Story.” Shapes are tightened here, softened there, with a suggestion of separation between the passenger compartment and lower battery box.

December 1991 - Full-scale drawings are made, says Steinle, to “show the details, the shape of the mirrors, the door handles . . . because when you look at a small model, your eyes cheat you. To fully understand shape and proportions, you need a full-size comparison.”

January 1992 - Clay miniatures are bubble-wrapped and padlocked in crates bare of company logos. They are flown to Mercedes’ headquarters in Germany to be examined by designers and engineers under Bruno Sacco, Mercedes-Benz’s senior vice president of design. Even at this late stage of development, Mercedes-Benz of North America, based in Montvale, N.J., is unaware of the project and its progress. Steinle explains that if the North American operation had been briefed on “what a crazy thing we are doing in the United States, they might try and stop us.” Concurrent with Sacco’s examination, work is completed on the car’s interior design; curves of the dashboard, positioning of air bags, finding surfaces to locate a sound system, on-board navigator and telephone. Says Steinle: ‘We wanted to offer our potential customers all the advantages they expect in a Mercedes.”

March 1992 - Sacco’s approved design is sculpted into full-size clay models. Since the car will be built as a coupe and a roadster, and aspects of each vehicle will require room for several workers, three mock-ups of interiors and four clay exteriors are created.

Both models are fine-tuned: A reduced window opening here. A reshaped rear pillar there. Models are painted in a variety of tones because colors have a profound effect on perceptions of shape and purpose. Which is why most Ferraris are red.

January 1993 - Sacco and his directorate arrive for the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show. They make a side trip to the Irvine studio and pore over the Smart models. They suggest that its side surfaces be broken by a groove to add to the impression of a passenger bubble, not a box. April 1993 - Germany approves the final shape and designers are authorized to build a running prototype. Once programmed as an electric vehicle, the car must be made to work with diesel, gasoline or natural gas fuels. Or with a hybrid fuel.

March 1994 - In Germany, Mercedes-Benz announces its partnership with Swatch and unveils the Smart micro commuter. It will be built in France. It will be marketed in 1998 as a vehicle to set new standards in fuel economy, emissions and buyer practicality.

“And we are not mentioned in the press releases, because everybody was under the expectation that the design came from Swatch and the technology from Mercedes,” grumbles Steinle. “It was quite disappointing. We felt a little left out.”