Porsche Studio Finds a Place in the Sun

Porsche has joined the California crowd. The German performance car maker has opened its first U.S. automotive design studio in Huntington Beach--part of its Porsche Engineering Services unit.

But the new studio won’t be responsible for designing Porsches, at least not yet.

Its mission is to pick up design work for outside clients--work that previously had to go through the company’s already overloaded studio in Germany.

The new Southern California styling studio opened March 1 after Porsche acquired it from Samsung Motors, which decided last year to close the shop as part of a corporate retrenchment stemming from South Korea’s economic woes.

Studio director Neil Brooker, who held the same title under previous management, has brought back several of the designers who left when Samsung pulled the plug.

The new Porsche Engineering Services Styling Studio reportedly has already signed on one car company client and is talking to several others.

Although the company says it won’t be using the Huntington Beach location for in-house design work, August Hofbauer, chief executive of Porsche Engineering Services in Troy, Mich., echoes executives at Lincoln Mercury and more than a dozen other car makers when he says Porsche wants a Southland studio so it can tap the region’s “creativity and automotive enthusiasm.”