Dear readers, you’ve been reading our stories on motorcycles, cars & commercial vehicles that make their way into the Indian market. You and I both know now what features it packs at what price point but, surely, we never actually knew what goes in behind making a brand-new vehicle from design stage to production…
Well, Tata Motors thought of giving us an opportunity at understanding this. We, and a few other media publications, were invited by Tata Motors to their Design Studio in Pune, Pimpri plant. We were given an actual crash course at designing a Vehicle at this state-of-the-art facility. Tata Motors globally has 4 design studios, including Pune. They have one in Italy, one in Coventry, UK and another in South Korea. All these work in sync to create world class designs of products, under the leadership and control of Mr. Rudrapratap Bose, Tata Motors Design Head. This is quite an initiative from an Indian manufacturer, to let in a bunch of media journalists into places where even Tata employees need access to enter, to actually make us experience what it looks like working there. Though they had it all cleaned up, we actually experienced what the team goes through. To put it in a single line, we tried our best to design a car and a truck in an hour, which ideally takes at least 46-48 months of rigorous creative work.
The visit began with Mr.Rudrapratap Bose taking us through the DNA of Tata Motors Design with a presentation. He explained the 20-year journey Tata Motors Car division has been through, and how they have managed to synergize their strengths to build a successful car brand today with world class products like the Tigor, Tiago, Nexon and the recently launched Harrier. But we all know this, right?
What we didn’t know, was that Tata Motors is now working with a new design approach & philosophy called ‘Impact Design’ with an objective to inspire and win customer mindshare. Working with the new philosophy for last 3 years now, Tata motors will launch products on 2 separate platforms, the ALPHA and the OMEGA. The ALPHA will cater to all the in-house Tata products, and the Altroz is the first car to be launched under it. The OMEGA platform is already out there, the Harrier is based on the Land Rover’s D8 concept which is the inspiration behind the OMEGA platform. The upcoming H2x will be based on ALPHA, while the 7 seater Buzzard will be based on the OMEGA platform, and Tata Motors will use these platforms at least for 2 upcoming decades.
This helps in achieving greater economies of scale, having a similar platform for different products making it easy to cater to.
Just to give us an Idea of what the whole process looks like, we had the media fraternity divided in 4 teams with 1 design expert for each team and 1 hour to design a car or a truck. The Tata motors expert, appointed to our team, was cool as a cucumber in handling us journalists, and he explained to us how it works. We began with settling down on a common idea on what the truck should be capable of, what features our truck has to have, and then to have them, how should it look and what features be accommodated into the design.
An expert in design and sketching, our Captain of the Boat quickly drew our words on paper as vivid ideas kept on surprising him, from a central cockpit, to a wide full open circular windscreen. Further to this, the man himself, Mr. Rudrapratap Bose went through our designs, and selected the best car and truck design to take us deeper into the design process. Ideally, the Marketing guys and the Design guys sit together in the process of ideation.
We went ahead into actually making a clay model of our design, to see how it actually looks in reality. They use special heat sensitive clay to create the sketch into reality. Half face of vehicle is designed in clay, depicting every detail, curve and bend drawn on paper, after which it gets digitally scanned to digitally create the exact other half and to give it the final touches. All this takes 48 months in the 20th century, and we went through all of it in 3-4 hours of time spent at the Design Studio.
It further goes ahead into prototyping and real-world testing which goes on for another year or so. Parallely, vendors are found, suppliers tied up. All this is a vastly extensive process across different verticals, which often misses out to get limelight. The real heroes behind a movie are the ones who make it that good, and not just who act in it.
To make it simple for you, here is the process a product goes through before coming into production, which can take easily around 5-6 years for the complete process.
IDEATION – DEFINE PURPOSE/FEATURES – SKETCHING – CLAY MODELING – DIGITAL SCANNING – FINAL DESIGN – PROTOTYPING – TOOLING & VENDOR CREATION – PRODUCTION.
Next time you plan to judge a car and comment on something wrong with the design of a car, stay calm and relax. There are capable professional people handling the task for us. It indeed has been a learning experience for me and everyone who attended the workshop, and Tata Motors, we can’t be more thankful for giving us this learning opportunity!