Satoru Nozaki

Toyota industrial designer responsible for the 2000GT exterior design in project 280A, developed with Yamaha Motor.

Satoru Nozaki (野崎喩) was a Japanese industrial designer, born in 1929 and dead in 2009. He was from Karatsu, studied at Tokyo University of the Arts and joined Toyota. Yamaha identifies him as a Toyota product-planning designer and records his studies at Art Center College of Design in the United States, where he developed grand-tourer concepts used in the 2000GT’s exterior work.

Toyota began project 280A on 1 November 1964. Toyota sources name Jiro Kono as project leader, Nozaki for design and Shinichi Yamazaki for chassis. Toyota stationed its core staff at Yamaha; GAZOO records that Nozaki, Yamazaki and Takagi worked in Yamaha’s drawing office from Tuesday to Friday from mid-January 1965, completing the design drawings by the end of April.

For the exterior, Nozaki prepared a half-scale dimensional outline from his Art Center concepts. Yamaha records that the outline was photographically enlarged to full size and converted into a wooden body buck; the process used neither lettering nor a clay model. The first prototype was completed in August 1965 and a second appeared at the Tokyo Motor Show that October. The production model went on sale in May 1967; production ended in 1970.