From the original Press Release:

When a car company thinks lean, it’s usually about manufacturing – how to make more for less. But when car designers think lean, they’re thinking of something entirely different – a muscled surface, an athletic form, some tensioned panelwork.

Which is how Nissan Design Europe’s Design Director Stephane Schwarz happened on a striking sculptural flourish for the company’s new QASHQAI crossover.

Nissan Design Europe’s Design Director
Stephane Schwarz with the Qasqai

He was at home in his London flat, musing over the meaning of ‘lean’, prompting thoughts of the tensioned limbs of athletes. And that was the inspiration that produced the ‘bone-line’ that’s such a distinctive styling feature of the new QASHQAI compact crossover, creating a graphic signature that’s echoed by the twin bulges in the bonnet.

Schwarz humbly offered his domestic doodle to his fellow QASHQAI creatives. They liked it, and chose to start the crease from just behind the front wheel-arches, from where it gently rises along the QASHQAI’s flanks to flow in to the rear lamp clusters.

It may only be a fold in some metal, but it plays an important part in defining the QASHQAI as a crossover, reckons Schwarz, by providing the ‘shapeliness and sportiness that makes the car’s dual function clear.’ So there you have it – a defining line.

Schwarz’s flat might have been an incubator for the occasional idea – ‘a non-professional environment can be inspirational because you’re uninterrupted and can get to the essence more quickly’ – but much of the QASHQAI was crafted in a one-time British Rail maintenance depot in Paddington.

It’s the home of Nissan’s European design studio, an ideal birthplace, reckons Schwarz, for a car he describes as an ‘urban nomad.’

‘It is a car of contrasts for a world of contrasts,’ he says, ‘tough and compact for the city but sleek and agile for journeys away from the town. It reflects our personalities, our imagination.’ In other words, the QASHQAI has drawn on multi-cultural London for its inspiration – it is, after all, a European car, created for European buyers.

Nissan Design Europe - London - Interior

London’s melting pot also makes an ideal location for crafting a car that’s a vibrant blend in itself. The QASHQAI mixes the agility and comfort of a hatchback with the practicality of an SUV, and all in a fashionable wrapping.

So the QASHQAI is taller than your average hatch, takes up no more road space than a Ford Focus and looks distinctly sporty to boot.

‘It doesn’t shout at you the way SUVs do,’ says designer Schwarz. ‘It isn’t as aggressive, but it’s assertive in the way it sits on the road.’ How did his team achieve that trick? By fusing a light, elegant and sporty upper body to a tough, planted lower body.

The QASHQAI provides the high seating position that owners of 4x4s like. In fact, the cabin will impress not only for the view it provides, but also its satisfyingly high standard of finish.

Stand-outs include the high quality surfaces of the dashboard and the high-precision finish of the aluminium that highlights the wheel, instrument pack, air-vents and centre console.

Nissan Design Europe - London - Exterior

‘We’ve taken a lot of trouble with perceived quality,’ says Schwarz. ‘I like the fact that there is craftsmanship in it, even though we use so much technology.’

It’s a craftsmanship you’ll also find in the QASHQAI’s seats. Their panelling and stitching make them a more dramatic feature of the interior, besides underlining the car’s dynamic character with their sporty bolstering.

That same sportiness is echoed in the driver’s environment, the clustering of instruments and controls providing ‘a cockpit feel,’ he says.

Schwarz’s brief for the QASHQAI was to ‘Design a car for people who are tired and bored with traditional functionality.’

It’s a brief that clearly inspired him – even at home in his London flat.

Background fact: The QASHQAI (say it as Cash-Kai) are a nomadic desert tribe living near the Zagros mountains in south western Iran.

Note: Below we report some excerpts from the original Press Release - Exterior Design section.

From the original Press Release:

Exterior Design

“QASHQAI is an alternative to the norm. A fusion of different themes and concepts, it blurs boundaries and twists expectations. Is it an SUV? Is it a passenger car? Is it at home in the city? The answer is ‘yes’.” Stephane Schwarz, Design Director, Nissan Design Europe

Creating a car that refuses to conform to the norm requires equally non-conformist thinking. Inspiration for QASHQAI came not from other cars on the road – with two notable exceptions – but from culture, food, fashion, art, technology and other everyday influences.

Stephane Schwarz, Design Director at Nissan Design Europe and father of the QASHQAI project, explains: “We, as consumers, are changing. We no longer want to be pigeonholed… and that applies to whatever it is we are buying. We are looking for more creative expression in everything around us.

“We are also expecting greater duality from the things we buy: for example, we want warmth from a piece of equipment – a fusion of art and technology. These are very individual, hedonistic times and the first task we, as designers, had to understand was the mindset of the new car buyer.”

It quickly became clear to the team that the new car market was becoming more complex and that as far as many car buyers looking in the C-segment were concerned, conventional hatchbacks and sedans like the Volkswagen Golf and Ford Focus were no longer exciting enough.

“The car has become an extension of one’s personality and fewer people are prepared to be seen as conventional any more,” says Schwarz. “To cater for them, we started to create a new type of car.”

The Concept

Nissan Qashqai Concept (2004)

Work on QASHQAI began in 2003, with the development of a show car that broke cover at the 2004 Geneva Salon. The QASHQAI concept car showed that Nissan was prepared to break with convention with its next offering in the C-segment of the market.

The production version of QASHQAI differs from the concept in a number of important areas but retains its core crossover rationale. Like the Nissan Murano – along with the concept, the only car to influence the design development of the production version – QASHQAI has been designed to appeal to buyers on more than one level.

Its clear combination of sporting attitude with the space and ability offered by a typical compact SUV makes it stand out in a segment of the market full of worthy but dull rivals.

“We have adapted some of Murano’s stance and image for QASHQAI and there are one or two design cues common to both – the upswept side window graphic for example – but QASHQAI is far from being a clone of Murano. Like brothers, they both clearly belong to the same family but have their own individual identities,” says Schwarz.

Design development began in Japan – at the time, Schwarz was Associate Product Chief Designer at Nissan Design Centre in Tokyo, where he worked with product planning, marketing and engineering for various concepts before they reached final design selection for production. QASHQAI was one of those projects.

Once it had been given the go-ahead, the project moved to the newly opened Nissan Design Europe (NDE) facility in London where Schwarz and his team took up his current post in December 2004. NDE is home to more than 60 international designers, modellers and support staff, with a mission to design the next generation of Nissan cars for Europe.

NDE’s first ground-up project

QASHQAI is the first ground-up project to have been produced at NDE and follows work undertaken at the facility to turn the Micra hatchback into the recently launched Micra C+C coupé/convertible. And rather than being a car for just Europe, QASHQAI is to be sold globally.

As the word implies, a crossover merges contradictory design and packaging influences from two or more market segments into one vehicle. The key design elements that turn QASHQAI into a crossover can be found above and below the waistline.

The sleek silhouette of the cambering roof suggests sporting agility. Dynamically angled A-pillars meet the roof at its highest point at the top of the windscreen, from where it falls away, coupé-like, towards the rear. The roofline culminates in a subtle flick up into a small spoiler integrated into the tailgate surround. To ensure a light and airy cockpit, a large panoramic glass roof has been developed

The Design

QASHQAI’s sportscar-inspired glasshouse proportion accentuates the athleticism of the overall design: Schwarz likens the shape of the front and side windows to a visor on a crash helmet, again promising sporting performance. The side profile follows the movement of the roofline and finishes with the small upswept triangular third window first seen on Murano.

In contrast, the high waistline suggests an inner strength, which is accentuated by strong shoulders and pronounced wheel arches. Typical SUV features include the bluff, almost vertical, nose and the contrasting colour of the sturdy bumpers and side protection panels. Higher ground clearance than conventional hatchbacks also hints at SUV capability.

Complex yet subtle curves over the wheel arches and on the doors allow constantly changing reflections to soften what would otherwise be a comparatively large expanse of metal.

Dimensionally, QASHQAI sits between C-segment hatchbacks and SUVs. Sitting on a wheelbase of 2630mm, it is 1610mm tall, 1780mm wide and 4310mm long. While the wheelbase and width match average figures for all both types of rival, QASHQAI is about 100mm longer than a typical hatchback but 150mm shorter than a typical SUV. Similarly, it is taller than rival hatchbacks by between 100-150mm yet up to 130mm shorter than an SUV.

Greater ground clearance

Ground clearance is 200mm and the vehicle has approach and departure angles of 19.2 deg and 30.2 deg… better than a hatchback but unable to match the figures set by purpose designed 4x4s.

“These figures put QASHQAI in a unique position in the market place, offering more space than a hatchback at the same time as being more compact and manoeuvrable than an SUV,” says Schwarz. “As the figures show, it has not been conceived as a 4x4 and should not be thought of as one. The four-wheel drive option is mainly to provide better traction and more security in all conditions on the road.”

Contradictory impressions

“Throughout the design process we were looking to create contradictory impressions: a seductive car that turned heads at first glace yet was also obviously durable; a car with a fun to drive agility yet that due to its high seating position, would also provide occupant protection and inner strength.”

“And through it all we had to ensure the car remains resolutely usable. We benchmarked the most practical of its conventional rivals to ensure QASHQAI did not fall short in terms of occupant space and luggage room,” he adds.

“Contrasts that at first sight appear to be mutually exclusive are, in fact, what gives QASHQAI its energy,” says Schwarz.

(Source: Nissan)