Motown pair's mission: Put pizazz into plain-Jane Kia and Hyundai lineup

[4doorGL]

<h2>Motown pair's mission: Put pizazz into plain-Jane Kia and Hyundai lineup</h2>

AUTOMOTIVE NEWS
Posted Date: 12/7/05
LOS ANGELES - Two born-and-raised Detroit guys steeped in the design culture of hometown General Motors are now point men for one of the auto industry's most interesting challenges: turning Korea's Hyundai and Kia into global styling leaders. The two, Joel Piaskowski at Hyundai America and Tom Kearns at Kia America, quit GM to develop break-the-mold vehicles for two brands heavy with Honda and Toyota look-alikes.

With no long history or design culture to draw on - Hyundai didn't build its first car until 1967 - the Korean company has borrowed styling influences from other automakers for each new vehicle. The result has been a dated, patchwork look across its model lineup.

But that will change.

Hyundai Group Chairman Chung Mong Koo has decreed that his two brands develop proprietary looks and start turning out sexier, head-turning cars and trucks. As a key part of the push, the automaker has invested nearly $50 million to build separate design studios for the two brands in Irvine, Calif.

The U.S. centers report to central styling in Namyang, Korea, but have been given broad autonomy to develop vehicles and to influence the design of global products.

Park Jong-Suh, who retired last year as the group's executive vice president for design and head of the main studio in Korea, has acknowledged that Hyundai is a company "that's still into experimenting with different ideas" from different sources.

"This is partly to do with Hyundai's short history and with Korea's relatively young car culture," he said in a 2003 interview. "But we now have the critical mass to usher in an era of originality."

Kearns and Piaskowski will play key roles in determining how that new era unfolds.

"We're creating our history," the 36-year-old Piaskowski says. "At more mature companies, the influential designs were happening 20 and 30 years into their history. I think that's where we are now."

How they started

Piaskowski and Kearns, 42, joined GM after graduating from the Center for Creative Studies (now the College for Creative Studies) in Detroit, the launching pad for many a career in automotive design.

Kearns preceded Piaskowski at GM by three years. Piaskowski began working for Kearns on several Pontiac projects, and the two became friends.

Having come of age in the cruisin,' muscle-car culture of 1980s Detroit, both men shared a passion for all things automotive. As kids, both spent hours doodling and sketching cars. But only Piaskowski seemed destined from the beginning to become a car designer.

His father, Gerry, who retired from DaimlerChrysler in 2001 as vice president of design after a nearly 40-year career, fired young Joel's ambition through the years with a steady diet of auto shows, car talk and car books. In high school, the young Piaskowski took Saturday classes at the Center for Creative Studies to prepare for later admission there as a student.

Kearns's future in the business was nowhere near as obvious. But at the urging of his mother, a fine-arts graduate, Kearns took an industrial design class in junior college. Encouraged by his instructor to visit the Center for Creative Studies, Kearns did - and got hooked.

"That was it. One visit really did it for me," he says.

Kearns, who spent 17 years at GM, oversaw the current Cadillac CTS and the GMC Envoy. He also had key roles on the Cadillac Vizon SUV concept, which was the basis for the current Cadillac SRX, the Cadillac DeVille and Chevrolet Impala redesigns, and the Chevrolet Monte Carlo freshening.

Piaskowski's hand can be seen in the Opel Corsa, Buick Lucerne and Chevrolet Colorado pickup. His 12-year career included stints at Chevrolet, Pontiac and Buick; the Opel design center in Russelsheim, Germany; the Isuzu design center in Fujisawa, Japan; and the Suzuki design center in Hamamatsu, Japan.

Piaskowski left first

Piaskowski was the first to leave GM. After a year of discussions with Hyundai, he was named U.S. design chief for both Hyundai and Kia in January 2003. He recalls being attracted to Hyundai in part because of his dislike of the Santa Fe SUV, which had been shaped largely by the U.S. design team.

Although he thought it ugly, "That vehicle specifically showed the design world that Hyundai is not afraid to take chances," he said. "That's what was intriguing to me, that design was going to be something that was influential in the advancement of the company."

When word came in 2004 that Kia America would get its own chief pen and, in 2006, its own design studios, Piaskowski says he knew who to call.

It wasn't the first time Kearns had heard from Hyundai. He had spoken with the Koreans two years earlier about the job Piaskowski wound up taking. But he hesitated, he recalls, because of uncertainty about their commitment to design.

"I had been talking with Hyundai, but I guess I was a little more skeptical than he was," Kearns says of his buddy. "But after he'd been there a year or two he called and said, 'Come on in, the water's fine.'"

In January 2005, Kearns was named design chief for Kia Motors America.

Despite the Koreans' reputation for a strict top-down management system, both men agree that the U.S. designers have a lot of say in the final product.

"They're definitely open to ideas and thoughts," Kearns says. "It seems like they really are interested in American culture and listening to what the American design team has to offer."

But Kia's small size has required some big adjustments on his part, Kearns says.

"At GM you have specialists in every field. If you have a problem, you can just pick up the phone and get an answer," he says. "Here you wear a lot more hats."

Piaskowski also notes that the Koreans have a tighter design schedule than he was accustomed to at GM.

"We design cars much faster here than what I was used to," he said. "At the same time, keeping a tighter time constraint in the design process keeps cars fresher so they don't get watered down or neutered."

Until Kia's stand-alone studio opens next year, the two companies will share the staff of 42 designers in Irvine. Although that can mean one designer working on vehicles for both brands, Piaskowski says it need not lead to sameness. Both Hyundai's HCD8 coupe concept and the radically different KCD-2 Mesa, an SUV from Kia, were styled at Irvine under his supervision, he points out.

The aggressively sleek HCD8 sport coupe has generated especially favorable buzz since it debuted at the Detroit show in 2004. As the basis of the next Tiburon scheduled to arrive in 2007, many wonder if the HCD8 is a signpost to a future unified Hyundai design language.

But Piaskowski and Kearns say their goal is to create unique styling languages while avoiding a "Russian doll" look of small-, medium- and large-sized cars of similar designs. Thus, no one specific design element will define the look, Piaskowski says. Rather, a vehicle's design will be based largely on the market segment it enters, and styling will be either more aggressive or toned down, depending on the market.

Kearns says his job will be to try to differentiate Kia's vehicles from their Hyundai platform siblings.

"I want to put more emotion into the brand," Kearns said in an interview at the time of his appointment in January. "People have thought of Kia as an appliance, bought on price."

Different inspirations

The two find their inspiration in different ways.

Piaskowski says he takes a holistic approach, drawing on influences as they come to him. "Keeping your eyes open as you walk through life is very important because you never know what is going to inspire you," he says.

Kearns' approach is more pragmatic. Noting that design is a "powerful communicator," he says he starts "with what we're trying to say with that type of vehicle." He concentrates on what he wants people to think about the car and the brand when they see a design, and goes from there.

Both designers say they admire the outgoing BMW 3 series, especially the M3 version. "It was clean and pure without trying too hard," Kearns said. "Those are the things that excite me as a designer."

Kearns also likes the new Lexus GS sedan. For his part, Piaskowski says he pauses every time he sees the Mercedes CLS, which he likens to a "sketch on wheels."

Piaskowski's inspiration takes form in the redesigned Santa Fe, which is scheduled to debut in 2006. The vehicle is about 7 inches longer than the current Santa Fe and will have three rows of seats.

Piaskowski says he believes that the cars he and Kearns are designing will influence their replacements for years to come. That's one of the great rewards of his job.

Says Piaskowski: "Having that drive, that passion, to make beautiful products that customers will enjoy for years to come is one of the most appealing factors of designing automobiles."

James R. Crate in Detroit contributed to this report

From: http://www.autoweek.com/news.cms?newsId=103726

[TAK82]

This is great new's and about time too...hyundai and kia have been too vanilla for too long..