YARIS & YARIS CROSS CMF DEVELOPMENT, A FANTASTIC EXPERIENCE

Yaris is pushing the record high sales in Europe. Yaris Cross is already getting a lot of attentions. Colour plays an important role for sales increase.

In 2015, I was given the challenge to work on the new Yaris. Firstly, I was excited and proud to work on it, as the Yaris is a big success in Europe, especially in France where the factory is located.

It was a fantastic experience, as I could start the project with a global perspective. I was in TMC as an ICT (Inter-company transfer). I took part in the advance discussions for the vehicle concept right from the very beginning. It was a very rich cultural yet design experience to share advance design creation with my TMC colleagues.

The Yaris project was focused on two main regions, Japan and Europe, so two different customer targets were defined. Emma, a 35 years old Parisian, was the European target profile. I used to be this person!! From this point, the goal was to design the new Yaris in order to match the essence of a young dynamic woman, as well as to promote the next generation Yaris, proud, standout and not shy of her past success.

I developed a body colour which is dynamic yet fashionable to match with customer expectations but also polarizing enough to be strongly recognizable. During the development, the colour was called “Coral”, but now the Product and marketing group has renamed it as “Tokyo Fusion”. This new name fits very well with the colour, as the tone is a fusion of different colours: red, orange and pink.

During 2017, while I was still working on the Yaris, I was also assigned to work on the Yaris Cross. What a new opportunity!! A brand-new vehicle for Europe needs to have a unique identity. ED² and TMEJ CMF worked closely together, and we started to think about a colour that could express an active and high-quality image that our target customers would really appreciate. Looking at the future colour trends, we saw that there was a growing tendency for gold and other precious metals, but we wanted to offer something a bit more natural. Adding a subtle hint of green to the gold direction, whilst also desaturating the colour to emphasis the metal like appearance, gave us this fresh urban yet active appeal that emphasized the surface form of the exterior. Brass Gold was the result.

As the first- generation Yaris was launched with a gold body colour, now the new Yaris Cross will be launched with Brass Gold. I hope this cheeky wink to the past successes will be a good sign for Yaris Cross!