Nineties Concept Cars Part 1---- Ghia's Ford Focus Concept: the Future in the Rear View Mirror

As part of our largely-ignored Future in the Rear View Mirror series, we're going to look at concept cars from the 1990s, a period when we began to see some original thinking from designers looking for organizing ideas that were less restrictive than the Giugiaro-originated wedge which had taken over by the late 1970s. That wedge, like the transparent glass prisms of International Style architecture, had originally seemed liberating, but began to wear out its welcome when applied as the answer to every design problem.  When sorting through ancient photo files of car shows I found the shot below from the 1993 Pebble Beach Concours, and said, "Whoa, that's a real piece of design..."

And it was a real piece of design, a breakout effort by Taru Lahti for the Ghia Studios and parent company Ford, executed just two years after he graduated from design school. The first thing you notice are the organic, undulating surfaces, vaguey recalling aquatic creatures.  In the overhead view below, note how the ridges atop the rear fenders bend inward, bifurcating when they reach upward to cocoon the cockpit.  Note also how the outrigger, tendril-like side rub strip shown in the photo above wraps around the rear of the car and retreats into a circular hole, again, like something you might find on a wandering crustacean at the beach.  Also, have a look at the tail lights, a cluster of tiny red circles that looks like a child threw a handful of fiber optic jujubees at the car…There's more to notice, too, like the central exhaust opening and the oval license plate recess...

You never quite stop noticing details on this car as your eyes move over it, and your eyes do move, because the details reinforce the visual movement inherent in the form.  Below, you can see how the surface of the center console between the seats wraps over the rear deck to form a shallow recess which echoes the shallow gully at the tops of the rear fenders.

In the head-on view below, you can see the asymmetrical nostrils in the nose, another organic detail. The overlapping headlight circles, like the tail lights, are fed by fiber-optics from a central light source.  The front air dams, which so often looked like afterthoughts on cars of this period, also appear as though they grew out of the form.

The relentless build-up of arresting details reinforcing enveloping, organic forms continues in the interior.  There are surprises, too.  The undulating silver surfaces which surround the driver's seat never meet over the instruments where you'd expect them to form a hood. Instead, the circular instruments are displayed like pearls inside an oyster shell.

Not even the rear view mirrors can escape Lahti's attention to detail, with wiring and structure separated to reinforce the biomechanical theme. Did I say mechanical? The Focus was actually a drivable car, based on a shortened Escort RS Cosworth platform that never came to the USA.  As in the RS Cosworth, a turbocharged inline 2.0 liter four channeled 227 horsepower to all four wheels, and as the car weighed under 2,100 pounds, performance was memorable. But like the great designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, who commented that Lahti's creation was more a work of art than a mere car, we remember the Focus Concept mostly for its designer's unwavering attention to form and detail.  As a work of art, it was, well…focused.

By now you may be wondering why you've never heard of Taru Lahti, and if he's ever designed any other cars.  The answer is that he designed the Contour, an award-winning concept car from 1991, and that its translation into production cars was a textbook example of what can be lost when translating the forms and details of show-stoppers into cars you can buy in a dealer's showroom. But that's a story for our next installment...

Photo Credits:

Top:  the author

2nd thru 6th:  Ghia Studios