Notes Design

Walking through Calty, you're only hit occasionally by the importance of where you are: with all the palm trees, the chatty hosts, the leisurely lunches, and the clay-carving sessions, it's easy to forget that this is the North American design headquarters of the most successful car company in the world. The company that led the New York Times Magazine to ask in a cover story last year whether it "has evolved into the world's most sophisticated modern corporation."

For all that, it's not so overwhelming. The campus is modern and bright, but smallish. One of the media specialists joked that it's "hidden behind a church," and that's actually kind of right: a suburban mega-church with a one acre parking lot, but still.

The main studio is in Toyota City, Japan, of course, and there are sites in France, Michigan and elsewhere in Japan, but Calty has cranked out a lot of cars familiar to American drivers, especially lately: the "designed and built here in America" claim that Toyota makes about the 2007 Tundra, their presumptive F-150 killer, is because of Calty. So is the RAV4, one iteration of the Prius, and several of the recent Scions (see concept cars above, and more after the jump).