I have a friend who is currently a mechanic. He dreams of designing cars and wants to know what field of study or engineering would put him on that track. I figured this required a factual answer. I am looking for some sort of major, like mechanical engineering or industrial design. Anyone out there have an idea which field would be the one for car design?
Thanks.
Does he want to design the look and feel of the car, aerodynamics of the car body, or stuff like the engine and transmission?
Mechanical Engineering has worked for me, but Electrical Engineering is also pretty good for a lot of folks. Depends on how much drive and common sense you have once you get a degree and start working in the field. Car design is varied. You can design conponents or do total vehicle design. People who do total vehicle design are the type of people who can conceptiilize various concepts without having to know all of the details. Conponent designers are usually experts in a specific function, such as brake design or suspension. The folks who actually do the up front sheetmetal design are more artistic than engineer. They are a specialized class of Industrial Designer and those jobs a are few and highly competitive.
Industrial designers work on the style and appearance of the car. Engineers (mechanical and electrical) work on individual systems, like transmission, motor, suspension, structure, HVAC, lighting, et cetera. And never the twain shall meet; each pretty much despites and denegrates the other as being worthless so-and-so’s who don’t understand how to make a car.
Not to dash the hopes of your friend, but for the most part, nobody designs complete vehicles, at least not at the production level. Indeed, in my experience with the automotive industry (consulting mechanical analysis) most engineers who work directly for the automotive companies to a lot of meeting sits and a small or negligable amount of technical work. At this point, most of the actual engineering work (and often, the conceptual styling design) is done out of house by vendors and consultants. If your friend really wants to be involved in the nuts and bolts of automotive design, that’s where he should look.
Alternatively, he could set up shop making aftermarket components or car kits. There’s a lot of competition but for successful entrepreneurs there’s a good margin. This takes a lot more than just doing engineering or styling, though. At any rate, with either an engineering or an industrial design degree he can certainly find work in other fields if the automotive thing doesn’t work out to his expectations, so it’s not like it’s a bust idea.
Good luck to your friend.
Stranger
The Art Center College of Design in Pasadena CA is one of the more prominent schools for auto design.
www.artcenter.edu/
Thanks for all the input. I will tell him about this. I haven’t spoken to him since I posted this topic, so I don’t know which aspect he’s truly interested in.
Designing a car takes literally hundreds of people from several disciplines. Even the artistic guys need some engineering background so they don’t end up drawing infeasible designs all day long. Designing a car is really much more about designing a system than designing a look.
I take part in the design process. My affect on the final design is limited to “yes I can build that” or “no, I can’t build that.” Based on that, the product changes (or doesn’t).
You, sir, are a prime wit. 
I remember once having a discussion with an industrial designer, who as fate and corporate politics had it was also my boss. “I’m a really good engineer, too,” he once told me, “except I’m not good with numbers an’ stuff.” To his credit, he was a reasonably good industrial designer, and only occasionlly sketched up things in one view that couldn’t be made in another. Then there was a friend of mine who worked at a motorcycle manufacturer. His first comment, on seeing a conceptual proposal for their new bike, was “Where in the hell is the engine in that thing?” According to the artist, it was the engineer’s effing job to figure out how to make it go. Like that’s hard or something.
I’m sure there are some environments where industrial designers and engineers work alongside one another without arguing like Ted and Peg Bundy, but I’ve never seen it.
Stranger
[QUOTE=Balthisar]
Even the artistic guys need some engineering background so they don’t end up drawing infeasible designs all day long.
[QUOTE]
Thanks for that. 
Drawing? How about making them into advance concept proto-types at the car show. Cars without A-pllars and with wrap around front glass that makes it impossible to get into the drivers seat without raising the roof. Wafer thin seats that could never pass crash test. :rolleyes: And oh yeah, the engine and transmission are often either missing or lacking.
The really advance level design guys appear to actually get paid a lot of money to dream of styling lines without worring about those petty little details. Let the engineers make it happen is their response. It’s like Stranger said, both groups point the finger at each other as idiots who don’t know how to build a car.
I have spent months and gotten into heated battles over trying to get 3 to 5 mm’s of space that wasn’t assigned to me by some industrial designer because it would violate his styling line. To address the OP, make sure your buddy is aware that much automotive design is fighting these types of battle in a quasi technical/political areana that is the automotive industry. If he can’t stand politics then he will not like working for or with a major automotive manufacturer.
Two posters have indicated they found something really witty and funny in this line. I am dumb and I don’t get it.
-FrL-
It’s an industry insider joke about what a “real” engineer is supposed to be. Some of the concept sketch’s look like they were drawn by a eighth grader in study hall and it would be hard to convince a lot of “real” engineers that they were not.
To be fair, if most engineers were called upon to perform the styling on a car, you’d probably end up with something like a mid-'Seventies-to-early-'Eighties Japanese car (before they started hiring Italian styling houses to show them how to win the American market). You’d end up with something boxy and uninspired…but boy would it go. I tend to think of Subarus–which I adore–as being premier engineer cars, 'cause they’re very well engineered but have styling that varies from indifferent (Legacy, Forester) to hideous (Baja, Impreza). Their one attempt at appealing to the style oriented market–the SVX–was a failure on a number of counts, and they seem pretty satisfied now to offer good-to-awesome performance in an innoculous package.
As Si Amigo noted, automotive stylists (and industrial designers in general) are dreamers who don’t generally bother themselves with the details of actually manufacturing the thing or fitting the internals. This isn’t, per se, their job of course–that’s what the engineers are for–but many automotive designers are unwilling, to a point of sheer ego-tripping, to allow even a milimeter off of their styling line to accomodate the practical requirements of fitting an engine and transmission. On the “new” (now cancelled) Ford Thunderbird, for instance, there was a requirement to reuse transmission components from previous designs as a cost savings measure. This dictated that the wheelbase be a quarter of an inch longer than was allowed for by the styling design. Now, a quarter of an inch over the 107 inches is nothing; it’s impossible to conceive that this would somehow completely wreck some styling design. Engineers have to cope with these sort of compromises all the time, and you “make it work” as a matter of course, but the chief designer on the Retro T-Bird threw a hissy fit that went all the way up the corporate ladder, over an effing .25 inches. To an engineer, this is an absurdity, as is trying to fit in powertrains, display modules, airbags, support pillars, et cetera into a design that makes absolutely no accomodation for them.
And as much as some designers are seriously pleased with themselves, I have to question their ability to be objective about the crap they spew out. There are things that look inherently right, and things that are blatantly wrong. Cladding on plastic body molding, for instance, kind of fit in with the whole 'Eighties superficiality, but the Pontiac Aztek was just an abomination awaiting an unreceived abortion. The recent hideousness that pains my optic nerves is the Toyota FJ Cruiser, which is supposed to invoke notions of the original and outstanding FJ-40 series Land Cruisers in an urban-and highway-friendly package. Instead, the thing looks like someone took an H3 and globbed on a bunch of extra plastic doo-dads in hopes of appealing to people who don’t know what an off-road vehicle actually looks like. Brush guards? Seriously? I’m not sure you could drive this thing across the lawn without dropping half a dozen bits of trim.
But I’m an engineer, and I prefer things that work over things that look good while sitting in the shop.
Stranger