Despite all the technological advancements in the car design industry, clay models remain an essential tool for car designers. They allow for hands-on creativity, serve as physical prototypes, provide better visualization, and are a traditional and effective approach to car design.

Cars are still prototyped with clay for several key reasons, despite advancements in digital design and 3D modeling technologies:

1. Tactile Feedback and Realism

• Clay models provide physical interaction, allowing designers to touch, feel, and see how light interacts with the vehicle’s surfaces in real life. While digital renderings and CAD models are highly detailed, they lack the tangible quality needed to assess the proportions and contours of the vehicle in the real world.
• Physical models enable designers to immediately assess and adjust the vehicle’s shape, curves, and overall appearance, which is difficult to replicate on a screen.

2. Iterative Design Flexibility

• Clay is incredibly malleable, making it easy to adjust and refine during the design process. Designers can quickly make changes, adding or removing material to tweak the vehicle's features. This flexibility helps in visualizing different design directions without needing to restart from scratch, which is harder to achieve in digital models.
• Fast revisions are particularly useful in vehicle design, where even small changes to lines or surfaces can have a significant impact on the car’s overall look.

3. Accurate Full-Scale Representation

• Automotive companies often build full-scale clay models to give an accurate depiction of the car’s dimensions and proportions. Seeing the car at its true size allows for better assessment of factors like ergonomics and aerodynamics, which are crucial when the vehicle is being tested for production feasibility.
• In contrast, scale models or digital renderings can sometimes mislead designers when it comes to understanding how the vehicle’s design will look in the real world.

4. Collaborative Visualization

• Cross-functional teams—designers, engineers, executives—can all view and evaluate a clay model together. This shared experience enhances communication and decision-making, helping teams finalize the design faster.
• Clay models are especially effective for executive reviews and when seeking client feedback, as they provide a more complete and immersive representation of the final product.

5. Light Reflection and Surface Quality

• Clay models allow designers to see how light reflects off the surface of the vehicle, which is critical to evaluating the car's aesthetics. The way light interacts with the model helps in assessing surface continuity and ensuring that lines flow smoothly across the vehicle's body.
• Digital tools often lack this real-world interaction with light, making clay essential for the final approval stages of design.

6. Tradition and Skill

• Clay modeling remains a tradition in the automotive industry, and many designers take pride in the craftsmanship involved in creating these models. The hands-on nature of clay sculpting helps designers develop a deeper understanding of form and function that is hard to replicate with purely digital tools.
• While some carmakers have integrated digital milling to rough out shapes from CAD models, these are usually finished by hand using clay to add a final level of precision.

7. Complement to Digital Design

• Although digital design tools like 3D CAD and virtual reality have advanced, clay modeling is often used in conjunction with these technologies. For instance, 3D scanning of clay models can be imported into digital tools to further refine the design, blending the best of both worlds.
• This hybrid approach ensures the accuracy of the digital model while maintaining the aesthetic subtleties that can only be achieved through manual sculpting.

In summary, the continued use of clay prototypes in automotive design provides a unique tactile experience, design flexibility, and a collaborative tool that digital technologies cannot fully replace. While cars are increasingly designed digitally, the physical representation offered by clay ensures that the final product is visually and functionally optimized.