Ford designers turn their hands to architecture

Ford Australia threw the doors wide open this week to its recently refurbished FAPA Design Centre — a relic of decades gone by, but now lovingly restyled internally by the very people who work inside it, the local vehicle design team.

Welcoming journalists to the design centre, Ford Australia president Bob Graziano described the media event as "a revealing look behind the curtain here at Ford Australia."

Outwardly hard to pick from its earlier look, which dates back to 1969, the design centre is much more open inside and features a simple, fresh style in the modern idiom — thanks to the design team headed up by Craig Metros, the bloke responsible for the look of the T6 Ranger.

While the results are certainly an improvement, like most accomplishments by Ford Australia these days it's a showcase of shoestring efficiency.

By poaching staff already on the payroll, "costs were significantly lower," says Anthony Picchioni, Chief Engineer for Design Technical Operations in Asia Pacific and Africa. And that's as much as anyone at Ford will say about the cost of renovation.

Mr Picchioni revealed that the number of staff housed in the design centre has tripled over the past 18 months ("Right now we're around 160 people"). Even if the local product is selling slower in Australia, there seems little doubt that Ford Australia's design and engineering results are highly regarded throughout the company globally.

The design centre has taken its place as one of three such facilities around the Ford world — the other two being in Dearborn, in the American state of Michigan, and Cologne (Köln) in Germany. Together, the three design facilities effectively give Ford around-the-clock design capability for large-scale projects. Broadmeadows oversees annexes in India and China as well and a car can be designed here with simultaneous input from seven different locations around the Ford world.

While the Aussie design centre is less grandiose than its counterpart in Germany, like the Cologne and Dearborn centres, it has its own Virtual Reality Centre.

For its analytical CAE (Computer-Aided Engineering), the company is heavily reliant on supercomputers, machines that, in two to four hours, can handle data processing that would take nine months on a desktop computer at home. The numbers are staggering...

The Virtual Reality Lab is a windowless room where designers can don goggles and gloves to develop a feel for a prospective design. Driver and passenger can sit in a buck, comprising two seats and a steering wheel; everything else is VR — including the occupants' hands operating the controls. It's an opportunity to see how the car will come together in real life (inside, as well as outside), before the company even gets started on clay models.

And yes, they do still work with clay, but these are machine-produced, using an exotic device known as a Taurus mill. It's large and noisy, as it hoes into a chunk of clay to fashion something that looks like a vehicle.

One of the decisions made during the renovation led to Ford moving its brace of Taurus mills out of the design centre's studio, so they wouldn't interfere with the work of the designers. Each mill takes just one day to produce the side of a full-scale vehicle model in clay. A team of clay modellers would require a week to do the same.

The design centre also features a massive 'Powerwall', providing what Bob Graziano described as "cinema quality" graphics on a screen measuring six metres wide by three metres high and delivering resolution four times that of a high-definition TV. Designers can stand directly in front of the screen and point to details of the car without casting a shadow that would distract. It allows the designers to review vehicles in full scale CAD before a prototype is even built — either as static images or animations/simulations.

And one of the most impressive displays ever must be Ford's CAD animation of a Ranger being assembled, in detail as fine as 2mm — but it really needs a cinema-quality, 6x3m high-res screen to achieve the full effect.

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