A Car is Born: Design in Motion

It's all about six basic steps...and a lot of compromises.

Like all forms of creation, birthing a new car is messy, painful, beautiful, and full of bartering with unseen deities. The more you learn about the process, the more miraculous it seems cars are made at all. The exterior-design stage alone often involves several teams, thousands of drafters warehoused at so-called culture hives like Malibu and Milan. Figure it's an easy 10,000 people worldwide who doodle cars for a living.

And yet the average new car takes around four years to come to market. That measured pace isn't just because there are a lot of people involved. It's because failures cost hundreds of millions of dollars and can fast-track promising careers to the gutter. As a car designer circa 2013, you're going to be embedded in every stage of production, from napkin sketch to wind tunnel and final assembly. What designers do is pressure-packed, to say nothing of deliberately overwrought. This section aims to pull back the curtain.

Yes, it could all be easier. McLaren design head Frank Stephenson once argued that if you could homogenize worldwide safety and fuel-economy standards, you'd unleash a new era akin to "the goose-bump glory days of design." It's a nice dream, if a ways off. But in that spirit, and with more than a little whimsy, we decided to kick off our look at the design process with a few sketches from R&T advisor and Ford GT designer Camilo Pardo, above and below. Although not representative of any specific, real-world car, they serve to broad-stroke the steps that the big players use to birth an automobile. Be warned: It gets messy, and it's not for the faint of heart.