Industrial designer Jean-Marie Massaud has worked in many different areas of design since graduating from Les Ateliers University for Industrial Design. He has designed everything from a perfume bottle for Cacherel to the Volcano Stadium in Guadalajara, Mexico. So how did he come to design Toyota’s latest ME.WE concept car? We caught up with the designer at Le Rendez-Vous Toyota on Paris’ Champs Ellysees to find out.
How was the collaboration with Toyota initiated?
“Toyota came to me because they’d seen a symbolic synthesis of what they envisioned for the brand in my work and they thought I would create something along those lines for them. I arrived and said that I wasn’t interested in creating something futuristic. I wanted to create a product for today, something that was interesting and intelligent. Popular cars can be intelligent because they correspond to the needs of people in an era.”
So how exactly did you collaborate?
“They gave me free reign because they wanted to be surprised. And we developed a partnership where we exchanged ideas, notably with Laurent [Bouzige] as he was chief designer on the project.
“I developed a car that answered the question ‘If I could have only one car what would it be?’ It was the response of a designer that doesn’t work in automotive design, without the constraints of marketing or
segmentation.”
Can you describe the ME.WE’s raison d’etre?
“If a car is reduced from being a status object and an accumulation of constraints then it needs to be pleasant to use. This means that I needn’t choose between a station wagon, a cabriolet or a small city car. One car has to provide all of these qualities, perhaps not in terms of look, but in terms of feeling.
“For example the windows that lower all the way, along with the windscreen, to breathe in the air so you use the air conditioning less. Maybe you’ll only drive 50 km/h in the city, not because that’s the limit, but because you’ve got the wind blowing in your hair and it gives you a sensation of speed, as if you were on a scooter.”
“It was more to appreciate the cruising aspect of the automobile rather than the idea of keeping the windows up and air conditioner on whilst blasting music and isolating yourself from the rest of the world.
“Almost every contemporary car has painted metals or chromed plastic pieces in the interior. This isn’t true for high-end luxury products. But for us we did the opposite. Everything that’s color is synthetic materials and all of the metal is really metal because it is part of the structure. It wasn’t done for the look but the functionality.”
