Auto Designers Reveal Insider Lingo

DETROIT – Like many professions, automotive designers have developed their own internal lexicon that helps them communicate more quickly and efficiently with each other.

Ralph Gilles, Chrysler Group vice president-Jeep, truck and component design, is partial to “the J.C. Whitney look,” which he says means, “when something looks added on to the car, it looks out of place, it looks like an afterthought.”

Another Gilles classic is “puffilate.”

“When we sit there and review a surface and we think it’s too hollow or flat, we say we have to puffilate that,” says Gilles, part of a recent forum here on automotive design. “My father would be horrified to hear that.”

While many of the terms used internally by design teams are humorous, they also are useful to convey complex ideas quickly, designers say.

“The idea is that we speak our own language, but that language is a very important shortcut to expressing what we want,” Gilles says.

Pat Schiavone, design director-cars for Ford Motor Co. in North America, offers up a few of his favorites, as well.

“One is ‘unobtainium,’ and that is a designer type of material you can shape in any way or fashion. It has virtually no cost, and it really helps us to get our designs forward. However, the engineers just despise that,” Schiavone says.

“And I also love ‘looks like an RV.’ Anything where I don’t like the trim, or if it feels like it’s not bolted on correctly, or it doesn’t have the fit and finish, I say ‘man that reminds me of an RV. That ain’t working for me,’” Schiavone says.

“Go-daddy styling,” a spin-off from Ford’s “Bold American Design” concept, which the auto maker has been promoting as a key component to its Way Forward restructuring plan, also gets bandied about Ford’s design studios, Schiavone says.

Some of the terms are a bit more derogatory.

When a design is fundamentally awful but has been well presented, Ford Design Manager Kevin George calls it “craptastic.”

“Goiter” is another George favorite, which he defines as “an unexpected bulging of the clay that, although previously invisible, (becomes) visually magnetic by virtue of being pointed out by one’s boss.”

[email protected]