Sculpting the new hero - Design process of CUPRA Terramar

The process of creating a car begins with a sketch. Alberto Torrecillas, exterior designer at CUPRA, takes a sheet of paper and draws the outline and shapes of what has become the brand’s first electrified SUV, the CUPRA Terramar. But until the design freeze is achieved, those same lines have been outlined, tweaked, and literally sculpted over and over again, until the perfect proportions are created.

Sporty proportions. In one of the restricted access rooms of CUPRA’s Technical Centre, Alberto analyses the full-scale CUPRA Terramar in one of its preliminary stages, prior to the version we’ll see in the final design. From one side, it’s vinyl wrapped to resemble paint and looks like a realistic model. But from the other side, it’s a completely exposed, earth-coloured mock-up made with more than five thousand kilograms of clay, automatically milled using precise parameters and then manually polished, with every detail of the surface sculpted to millimetric precision.

Craftsmanship that complements technology. Even though the latest technologies and digital tools are a key part of the design process, making full-scale clay models is an essential part of the validation process.

Feeling the model’s surfaces. Another reason why this stage is so important for the design department is that it enables them to touch and feel each of the exterior surfaces.
Instant feedback and accuracy. Another added advantage is that it’s fast. Clay is malleable and simple to use, and you can immediately see any changes when the design is meticulously tweaked.

The outcome of this story that unfolds combining paper, digital technology and clay is a sporty SUV that adopts the new design language to break into the fastest-growing segment in Europe.