DESIGN INTELLIGENCEJune 16, 2026·Mary

The clay is dead. So why is every studio still paying six figures to sculpt one?

For ninety years the full-size clay model was the single most expensive object in a car company that wasn't on the assembly line — two tonnes of oil-based clay, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a year of a master sculptor's hands. It was the moment the design became real — the first time the boss could walk around the car instead of around a screen. In 2022 Honda quietly turned that ritual upside down. The clay didn't lead the process anymore. It came last — as the thing you check the design against, after the decision was already made in a headset. The most divisive question in automotive design right now isn't a colour or a grille. It's whether the most sacred object in the studio is now a very expensive receipt.

The two camps, and why neither will blink

This is one of the rare design fights where both sides are senior, certain, and pointing at the same evidence.

The kill-it camp. Honda is the clearest public case. Announcing the VR workflow behind the 2024 Prologue EV, Mathieu Geslin, VR technology leader at Honda Design Studio, said the Prologue "was key to fully using VR in a data-led design process, with clay modeling as the verification tool" (Honda / PR Newswire, 13 Dec 2022). Read that twice: the clay is no longer where the design is found — it's where the digital design is confirmed. Hyundai's then-design chief SangYup Lee described a studio built around a VR room "the size of two basketball courts" where the team walks around a car that exists only as data, with colleagues joining the review "from their kitchens" — "a new process of car design" (Autocar, 10 May 2022). Bugatti runs largely digital-first with clay reserved for verification (Car Design News, 8 Aug 2022, upd. 2 Jul 2025). The argument is brutal and economic: a full-size clay weighs a couple of tonnes and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to build, and the broader sketch-to-clay-to-showroom cycle runs years (The Autopian, 5 Jun 2024). Every week you spend sculpting is a week your competitor spent iterating.

The never-camp. The people who actually sculpt clay say the kill-it camp is confusing form-finding with taste. Mark Sadler, a clay modeller at Bentley, put it flatly: trying to create something "that will grab somebody's attention and get the heartstrings going… you just can't do it with digital or VR" (Frank's World, citing the cost debate, 1 Feb 2025). Adrian Clarke, an ex-Jaguar designer, is blunter: "nothing can beat having a full-size representation of your design right in front of you… anything on a screen is just that; a representation filtered by the default camera settings" (The Autopian, 5 Jun 2024). Pratap Bose, Chief Design Officer at the Mahindra Group, says clay is "still very central to what we do," and that clay and digital now behave like "a permeable membrane" rather than rivals (Car Design News, 8 Aug 2022, upd. 2 Jul 2025).

The thing the headset will not tell you

Clarke's "default camera settings" line is the whole argument in five words, and it should frighten anyone signing off a car. A screen renders the surface the way the software decided to light it. Stand a real clay model under real studio light and the highlight — the light line that runs the length of a flank and tells you in half a second whether the surface is taut or slack — appears or it doesn't. That highlight is not a rendering preference. It's the verdict. The reason clay survives at six figures isn't nostalgia; it's that a wrong surface is invisible on a screen and unmissable in a room. The kill-it camp is right that VR finds form faster. The never-camp is right that VR can hide the one flaw a physical model can't.

Why this is really a decision problem, not a tooling problem

Strip away the romance and both camps are arguing about the same thing: at what point in the process is the bold design call actually safe to commit? Honda didn't abolish the clay — it moved the commitment upstream, into the digital phase, and demoted the clay to a check. That only works if the digital evidence is good enough to bet a multi-billion-euro programme on before you cut a single tonne of clay. If it isn't, you've simply moved the surprise later and made it more expensive — the worst place for a surprise to live. The real question every design chief is now answering, whether they admit it or not, is: how much can I decide before the model exists?

The market thinks the answer is "a lot." A widely-shared studio post this month framed mixed-reality review as replacing "weeks of clay-sculpting time with real-time digital surface modifications," letting teams "stand in the same virtual room" at 1:1 scale (Pramote M., LinkedIn, ~3 weeks ago — 94 reactions). The appetite to decide earlier is real and growing. The exposure is that "decide earlier" and "decide blind" look identical until the clay proves you wrong.

DEPIX exists for exactly that gap. Design Intelligence isn't a headset and it isn't a clay bay — it's the layer that lets a design chief pressure-test the bold call with photoreal evidence before either one gets expensive. Not a prettier render of a decision already made, but the evidence that tells you whether the surface, the stance, the proportion is right while changing it still costs nothing. The clay will tell you the truth in a year and six figures. The point of a parallel design team in a box is to tell you most of it this afternoon — so the clay, when you do cut it, only ever confirms a call you already trust.