Derek Jenkins on the art of automotive surfacing 

Surfacing sits at the heart of every successful automotive design, yet it remains one of the least understood aspects of the discipline. Dramatic crease lines and striking graphics often dominate the conversation. However, Derek Jenkins believes the real craft lies in proportion, volume and tension. Speaking to Car Design News, the Lucid senior vice president of design discussed the company's restrained design philosophy, how it is evolving for the forthcoming midsize programme, and why the pursuit of purity often creates the greatest engineering challenges.

Car Design News: Lucid has developed a very recognisable design language based on clean, fluid surfaces rather than dramatic crease lines or decorative detailing. How do you define good surfacing?

Derek Jenkins: I guess it's kind of a build-up. If I think about Air, Gravity and where we're going with our new midsize programme, there's still a foundation of traditional automotive proportion there. You've got to have the volumes over the wheels, you have to have some sort of fender movement and make sure the car is sitting correctly and has the right stance.

We tend not to be overly wedgy in our proportions. It's a little more streamlined. We always default to a bit more of this relaxed aircraft quality – a fuselage quality. That definitely comes from a traditional speed form. Think of a land speed car, a salt flats fuselage. We always use that as a starting point: round in the front and sharper in the rear, then work from there.

We're obviously very aware of the sharpness that's become popular across automotive design and we'll take elements of that where it makes sense. But we're trying not to add complexity to the forms. That's actually a tricky game because I like sharp cars too

Air and Gravity are very closely related. There aren't many hard crease lines. It's more subtle nuances in how we move from larger volumes to tighter volumes. We keep the line work very minimal and very subtle. It's more about tension than hard crease lines.

The aerodynamic component then becomes very scientific. There are certain things you simply know are going to work. You want the nose to be as semi-circular as possible, tighten the corners for pressure relief, reduce the windscreen inflection, taper the rear and sharpen the rear corners. Those become the parameters you work within.

As we move into our midsize programme, we're deliberately saying those cars shouldn't feel quite as relaxed and effortless as Air and Gravity. They should feel more intense, more athletic, more poised – ready to pounce. So we amplify the muscles, the shoulders and the stance because that segment demands a different character.

There are definitely areas where we've deliberately introduced sharper treatments to the fenders, the nose, the tail and even the shoulder volumes, which are more tensioned. But I wouldn't call them hard lines. They're still classic volumes. They're still sculptures.

We're obviously very aware of the sharpness that's become popular across automotive design and we'll take elements of that where it makes sense. But we're desperately trying not to add complexity to the forms. That's actually a tricky game because I like sharp cars too.

I think it's important that a Lucid retains its fluidity. If you get that right, those kinds of forms never really go out of style. Take the Porsche 928. It was born at probably the sharpest moment in automotive design, yet it looked futuristic through the late 1970s and 1980s and still looked contemporary when softer forms returned in the 1990s.

We rediscovered softer forms with cars like the Dodge Viper, the Mazda Miata and the RX-7, but the 928 had already been doing it for fifteen years. That's how I think about Lucid. We'll live through sharp periods and soft periods. The question isn't what everybody else is doing; it's what Lucid should be doing.

Even if somebody says there are derivative elements, I'd rather create the cleanest, most resolved version of that than simply put a bunch of shit all over the car just to be different. That isn't right for Lucid

CDN: Lucid's surfaces appear very simple, but simplicity is notoriously difficult to achieve. How do you know when you've arrived at the right solution?

DJ: We explore lots of different variations. Some themes become more complex before becoming more refined and distilled. Once we arrive at something we feel is original and ownable, that's where we want to be.

Ownability is incredibly important today, particularly with how quickly ideas can be emulated. We spend a lot of time developing unique front and rear signatures and unique solutions for tail lamps, spoilers, air intakes – the functional parts of the car that establish identity rather than relying purely on styling.

Every graphic element, every sharp corner, every treatment of the glass – we invest time making those things unique and purposeful. Even if somebody says there are derivative elements, I'd rather create the cleanest, most resolved version of that than simply put a bunch of shit all over the car just to be different. That isn't right for Lucid.

CDN: You often talk about the importance of shut lines. Many people see them as purely engineering features, but you clearly don't.

DJ: Designing around functional uniqueness is incredibly challenging because it usually comes with a production, manufacturing or cost challenge. We're trying to find unique solutions for things like openings because it's innate. The car has to have openings. Everybody does the shut lines like this so what if we do the shut lines like this? Then boom – the whole paradigm changes. The whole aesthetic changes solely because you designed the opening that way.

There's a functional reward to the opening working that way, but it's hard to manufacture. Those are the kind of challenges we've had to come to terms with, especially on our midsize programme where the intended volume of the car and the cost of the car won't allow these types of solutions.

We've had to look for unique identity elements separate from openings. That's been quite tricky because some of those features helped establish Lucid's identity in the first place.

I think we've found solutions where we still have it. In the case of the midsize programme, we still have a hood opening solution that probably looks pretty unique in the category. The tailgate has a very unique opening solution, as well as unique glazing and aerodynamic solutions.

There are plenty of cars on the road that don't really worry about the shut lines. They do a form and some graphics first, then sometimes it feels like the shut lines just end up where the engineers told them to put them.

At Lucid we just can't work that way. The form, where the shut line needs to go and the overall theme all have to work together. When I think about my favourite designs historically, all those things are intrinsically tied together.

The clamshell was one of those defining themes. Those were really defining the character of the car, but it required a great deal of negotiation to get there.

I find the augmented reality experience, where you can match everything point for point to an existing physical object, is a great tool for evaluating whether you're progressing in the right direction

CDN: How do you persuade engineering to support those kinds of ideas?

DJ: I think that's just kind of the designer's job. You have to set up the scenarios of with and without. If there are certain things that a design lives and dies from – your first, second and third read of the car – then you have to be very clear about those priorities.

If you're confident about that and you can show it with and without, then the engineers can understand the issue. They can see that we really do need to think about how the stamping comes down here instead of there, or how the flanging and structure need to change because that's what the design is demanding. If you can explain all that really clearly, then I think we can get there.

But it's never without risk. Larger panels expand and contract. They're harder to stamp. There's more spring-back. Those are hard lessons because there's always a trade-off. It never comes for free.

CDN: Modern digital modelling tools are extraordinarily sophisticated. Has that changed the way you refine surfaces?

DJ: We're obviously heavily digital like everybody else, but we still spend a tremendous amount of time in the clay model refining the nuances of shoulder tension, fender tension, corner volumes and just the feeling of volume in general. I don't feel like Lucids look overly digital by surface and construction, and that's because we do a ton of validating in the clay.

We still do a lot of freeform refinement at different phases to get certain parts of the car working exactly as intended. The digital tools certainly help with that, but I'm nowhere near replacing clay at the moment.

What we are working on is a virtual clay studio. At the end of our clay plate we have an area where we can put on the Vision Pro headsets and look at digital models right next to the clay models in an augmented reality environment. We can cycle through multiple iterations of the digital model while one of those iterations is identical to the clay model sitting beside it.

You're never fully satisfied. I definitely appreciate other people's design work more than my own because I don't have all the baggage that goes with the project

You can suddenly say, "Wow, those adjustments on the fender surface really work better on the digital model. Let's put that onto the clay." We're iterating in the loop.

Part of the challenge with traditional power-wall viewing or virtual reality is that you're looking at a data model, but there's no reference to reality. I find the augmented reality experience, where you can match everything point for point to an existing physical object, is a great tool for evaluating whether you're progressing in the right direction.

Imagine there are five designers working on a project and there are five different iterations. We can all stand there with our goggles on, look at the same physical object and compare five different proposals for exactly the same part. We can all immediately see that this area is working better here than it is there. It's an apples-to-apples comparison because you're never leaving the physical object behind.

That's what we're trying to do – close that gap with the augmented experience in the virtual clay studio.

CDN: You're known for being incredibly particular about execution. Does that ever become frustrating?

DJ: Sometimes that's tough. I'll be the first to admit I'm never satisfied with the build quality of our cars, to be totally honest. It's probably true of almost everything I've ever worked on, not just Lucid. There are always things that make me wince or cringe.

That's just part of the training. It goes with being in this position. You're never fully satisfied. I definitely appreciate other people's design work more than my own because I don't have all the baggage that goes with the project. I can just enjoy the object for what it is.