Nissan opens new design studio in Beijing

Delayed by the deadly earthquake that hit Japan earlier this year, Nissan Motor Co.'s new design center in Beijing finally received a proper opening this week, when global design chief Shiro Nakamura showed off the studio as a new source of ideas for Nissan and Infiniti.

Nissan Design China, as the Beijing-based center is known, "is not a studio to just generate ideas for China," Nakamura said in an interview with Car Design News. It's equipped to handle designs of show cars and production cars for both Nissan and Infiniti brands, aimed at customers in China, as well as around the world.

One task the Beijing studio is charged with is to develop car models that would sell well in China, the world's biggest market since 2009. That's a "critical" task, "but more important, we want the studio to generate designs widely accepted by the world," Nakamura said.

Nakamura said he wants the Beijing studio to produce ideas that would compete with Nissan's home studio near Yokohama and design centers in San Diego and London. That task falls squarely on the new studio's general manager and chief designer: Taiji Toyota, a Nissan veteran whose work as a project chief designer includes the Infiniti FX and Murano, among other cars.

By demanding the studio to compete with Nissan's other more-experienced design centers, Nakamura said he hopes to propel Chinese-inspired design on a global scale - a task he said the Beijing studio is already starting to achieve.

Nakamura came to Beijing this week to unveil the studio, housed in a low-rise warehouse-style building near Beijing's 798 art district. An opening ceremony had been scheduled for March, but the Yokohama-based automaker postponed the event in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami back home.

"Most people think we're opening a Beijing design studio because we want to create China-specific cars that cater to Chinese consumer likes and wants," the Nissan design chief said. "But we think we can tap China's growing competitiveness in design to come up with something unique that can make a global impact."

That's already happening: The chief designer noted that Nissan Design China recently beat the other company studios and is now designing "a significant part of the interior design of a car" due to be launched in two to three years.

The feat follows the studio's collaboration with the company's Japan design center in developing a "Compact Sport Concept" show car it displayed at this year's Shanghai auto show. It was not clear how much input Nissan's new designers were able to provide in styling the car, but Nakamura and other senior designers said in Beijing this week that what they did was to dispatch a few China-based designers to the show-car project in Japan to help out.

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By Jeffrey Nagaoka