That's craptastic

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 at a recent forum in Detroit on automotive design. While many of the terms used internally by design teams are humorous, they also are useful to convey complex ideas quickly, designers say.

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.

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