Tape Played a Major Role in 2015 Mustang Design

The same household good used for everything from wrapping gifts to painting bathroom walls was used to pull off some of those cool lines on the Ford’s new pony car.

“Great design is about proportions,” explains Kemal Curic, Ford exterior design manager. “From the beginning, we need to focus on creating the right structural lines – the skeleton of the car. Then our job is to tailor the vehicle body to enhance the figure. This is a process of editing every single line to find the perfect balance of concave and convex angles. We achieve this on the clay model, and tape is what we use to decide which lines to move.”

The tape, used in conjunction with the more high-tech 3D imaging, adds a higher level of precision to the design process, notes Ford.

“Tape gives us a defined line that is like a carpenter laying a level line on a building,” said Larry Pelowski, Ford master modeler, exterior design. “So when the designers put tape on the model, there is no question what their intent is.”

In fact, if the black tape used by Ford for clay models over the course of a year were stretched it would extend about 155 miles.