Design Gets Personal: Styling Goes in Many Directions as Car Market Splinters

Design Gets Personal Styling Goes in Many Directions as Car Market Splinters
At Ford Motor Co.'s Lincoln Design Center, designers cluster around a computer monitor that shows a 3-D rendering of a new concept car debuting next week at the North American International Auto Show.

Clutching a video game controller, one designer executes a three-point turn on a virtual Main Street while the others watch. But this is no video game.

They are studying how different wheel designs look in motion.

"When I started out, we were actually starting with pencil and paper," says Gordon Platto, chief designer on the concept for Lincoln's new flagship sedan. "(Now) we can build 3-D models just as quickly."

Platto and his team designed the new wheels in less than a month and completed the entire car in record time.

Designing cars quickly and distinctively has become every automaker's best chance of standing out in the sea of new vehicles flooding the market.

Today's consumers demand vehicles that are original, functional and individualistic.

One-size-fits-all and follow-the-pack design is dead -- or a least it should be.

Vehicle design used to be something spoken of in terms of broad trends that evolved slowly, over time, like some tropical tortoise.

The stately, aerodynamic designs of the 1930s morphed into the streamlined icons of the 1950s, just as the austere boxes of the 1980s finally yielded to