Drive

by Tim Falconer

  A few years ago, Shelby and Ford patched up their differences and J Mays, the company’s group vice-president of design and chief creative officer, introduced the Shelby GR-1 concept car at the 2005 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Before joining Ford in 1997, Mays was instrumental in designing the successful new Beetle for Volkswagen, but he also relaunched the Thunderbird, which generated more publicity than sales, and Ford no longer makes it. The GR-1, a two-seat sports car, also created buzz: “A perfect body with smooth, shimmering aluminum skin,” according to Mays, “the new Ford Shelby GR-1 concept is a rolling sculpture whose beautiful, flowing lines belie the raw, beastly V10 wedged under the hood.” While there’s no guarantee the Ford GR-1 will ever go into production, the new Shelby Mustang GT500 has been available since the summer of 2006.

  “There’s Carroll Shelby,” someone squealed. Others pointed cameras and cell phones at their hero, and a man with a media pass around his neck snuck up to Shelby, introduced himself and asked for an autograph. A burly guy with a Ford badge seemed quite unhappy and moved in to protect the celebrity, who signed the autograph and let the man retreat before he was roughed up by the hired heavy. To be sure, part of Shelby’s aura is his reputation as a racer, but his career ended long before that fan was born. Since then, Shelby has made an even bigger name for himself as a designer, even though it’s hard to imagine anyone pushing through a crowd to get an autograph from many other Big Three designers.

  With typically true aim, The Simpsons satirized American car design in a 1991 episode called “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” in which Homer discovers he has a half-brother named Herbert Powell who owns a successful auto company. Herb hires Homer as consultant, pays him two hundred thousand dollars a year and lets him design a car. The result, in an obvious reference to Ford’s Edsel, is “The Homer,” a completely over-the-top collection of features including a massive cup holder, tail fins, a bubble dome, shag carpeting, a horn that plays “La Cucaracha”—and a sticker price of eighty-two thousand dollars. The Simpson patriarch is thrilled with his design: “All my life, I have searched for a car that feels a certain way. Powerful like a gorilla, yet soft and yielding like a Nerf ball.” Soon, a crane replaces the Powell Motors sign with one that reads “Kumatsu Motors.”

  In the real world, the trouble GM, Ford and Chrysler now find themselves in is due to years of uninspiring design, not one colossal error (even the Edsel didn’t bankrupt Ford, which bounced back with hits such as the Falcon and Mustang). While the Big Three may have lost home field advantage and are still trying to sell some vehicles a lot of people don’t like, they also create some appealing cars and trucks. The one piece of advice I heard again and again: take the power away from the bean counters and marketers and give it back to the car guys.

  That may be too much to hope for, but back when I was in Detroit, at the beginning of my journey, Wayne Cherry, GM’s retired vice-president, told me designers would decide the fate of the automakers and would be among the highest-paid people in the industry. “Design is becoming so important to companies, so much the differentiator, so much the emotional connection with the customer,” he said, “that designers will have different pay scales.” And with more movement between companies, as well as competition from the film, entertainment and other industries, designers will receive signing bonuses, just like athletes. No single person creates a car, but once lead designers are paid and fought over like athletes and movie stars, fame is sure to follow. And Gilles’s celebrity status, though not quite in the Shelby stratosphere, suggests that Cherry’s notion is more than wishful thinking.

  A NATIVE OF INDIANAPOLIS, Cherry made his first trip to Gasoline Alley at the Indy 500 as a nine-year-old. Later, he worked at Oldsmobile and Chevrolet dealerships, raced a 1955 Chevy, studied at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and, in 1962, joined GM, where he was on the design teams behind the Oldsmobile Toronado and the Camaro. In 1965, he crossed the pond to work for GM subsidiaries, first at Vauxhall in England and then at Opel in Germany. He returned to the United States in 1991 and became design chief a year after that. Under his leadership, the company created a record number of concept cars—one hundred of them between 1999 and 2004— including the Cadillac 16, a stunner with a V16 engine that never went into production. Cherry, who was a leader in adopting computer-aided design technology, was also responsible for the Hummer H2, the SUV with a look based on military Humvees; the Chevrolet SSR (Super Sport Roadster), a retro-looking pickup with a retractable hardtop; and the Pontiac Solstice, a two-door convertible roadster. He retired in 2004, but not before putting the booster cables to the Cadillac brand and proving that GM could still make a sexy, big car that sells.

  Today, his own rides include a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce and a Ferrari, but his daily driver is the first Chevrolet SSR to come off the line. When I met him at GM’s Heritage Center in Sterling Heights, he was sixty-nine but looked and seemed younger. A tall guy with long legs, dark, thinning hair and grey sideburns, Cherry was full of enthusiasm; he talked with his hands and bounced around in his chair. My first question was: is it hard for designers to see their ideas actually make it to the road given that they have to deal with all sorts of outside forces, including marketing and finance people, government regulations and even environmentalists and safety advocates? He talked for seventeen minutes, touching on topics such as design in the 1950s and the importance of brands, before I pointed out that he hadn’t really answered my question. “Oh, yeah, what was it?” he asked, laughing. Our one-hour meeting stretched to two.

  Cherry, who now works with graduate students at the MIT Media Lab who are developing a city car of the future, was around when GM sold half of the cars in the country. He’s seen the highs and he knows the lows, for both the company and design. “In the early days, design was king,” he explained. “It was style over substance and science and everything else. Cinerama got bigger headlines than the polio vaccine. It was about visual things. It was about style.” The designers may have gone too far with all the fins, chrome and flash, but they toned it down a bit in the 1960s, and produced a great variety of styles and sizes, which may be why many people consider it the most tasteful decade for automobiles. Back then, cars were American and nobody thought that would ever change.

  While even people who weren’t aficionados used to be able to tell an American car from a Japanese one in the blink of an eye, now I hear plenty of grumbling that all automobiles look the same. But Cherry pointed toward the exhibit hall of the Heritage Center and said that, in retrospect, cars from the 1930s and 1940s looked pretty much the same too. Later, though, he admitted that, “Years ago you could always tell a French car, a German car, an English car, an American car. I hope there’s room for that today, but at the same time there will be cars that will be sold all over the world.” Even if national styles are a thing of the past, the emphasis has to stay on design in the global market. Today, all automakers can turn out reliable, safe cars with lots of gadgetry and features, so what separates one car from another is the design and brand reputation: “The way to communicate the equity in a brand, the consistency in a brand and the value in a brand, is visually, through the design.”

  The front of a car—including the grille, the headlights, the shape of the hood and the look and placement of the emblem—is typically the most distinctive. And automakers who let their designers fiddle too much with that DNA do so at their peril. When he was a kid, Cherry played a game with himself that a lot of kids did—trying to see how soon he could identify a vehicle coming toward him. “That’s brand identity,” said Cherry, who talks a lot about brand and brand equity, terms normally associated with marketing, but then he believes good design is about art, engineering and business. So a designer has to be an innovator despite being stuck between the engineers and the marketing department—a job that is not always easy. In Europe, strong brand identity evolves slowly over many years. The Mercedes is a good example of this unhurried evolution; the o
ld Volkswagen Beetle, which stayed basically the same for decades, may be an even better example. The look of North American cars, on the other hand, usually changes much more rapidly. “It is a different market here, and Americans are looking for something new and different,” said Cherry, who noted that when asked to recommend a restaurant, Americans will suggest a place that just opened while a European will recommend one that’s been around for ages. All that change makes it hard to maintain brand identity, though not all American auto executives cared about that. As a designer who worked for Chrysler in the 1950s told Chrysler Museum manager Barry Dressel: “Nobody ever told me, ‘Make it look like a Chrysler.’ They said, ‘Make it look drop-dead gorgeous, so people want to buy it.’”

  This constant search for the new means that designers must pull off a tricky balancing act. “The challenge for any brand of any kind of product is to keep it meaningful and relevant and not lose the brand’s visual connection with the customer,” he argued, while admitting that marketing departments and management are often only too happy to agree to radical change because they’re tired of the same old thing. “The idea is you’ve go to do something different and keep the essence of the visual cues of that brand. When you can do both, that’s when you’ve really accomplished something.”

  Cherry is particularly proud of rejuvenating the Cadillac brand with the introduction of the CTS in 2003. At the height of their popularity, Caddies were bold statements of luxury, but the definition of luxury had changed since the 1950s and the 1960s. Believing that people around the world respect America’s technology, he wanted a design theme that would communicate the luxury of the advanced technology in the vehicle. As they concentrated on this goal, he and his team looked at a lot of pictures of different types of beauty. They compared a photo of a stealth fighter with one of a Learjet, for example, and a shot of a watch with a lot of dials with one of a timepiece that was an elegant piece of jewellery. He also wanted to recapture some of the brand’s distinctive visual cues—such as the vertical lights—that had been lost over the years in the frenzy to come up with new looks. All Cadillac models now have vertical headlights and taillights and the characteristic Caddy grille. “I think we did a terrific job,” he said almost matter-of-factly. “It was a significant move for Cadillac, but it still went back to the basic values and expressed the equity that was in the brand.”

  Cherry believes bold is the way to go when it comes to car design, even if it means that not everyone will like the result. “Things that appeal to too many people don’t have as much impact,” he said. And, after all, not everyone wants a Cadillac. (I have to admit that though I’ve always thought of Caddies as glorified land yachts, I test-drove a CTS and fell in love with it.) No matter what the product is, Cherry said, “If you have your brand identity and it’s strong enough, and you’re revitalizing it consistently, you don’t have to follow design trends. Everybody else does. And so you’re never out of date, because it’s your look.”

  AN HOUR AFTER BEING IN—or near—the exalted presence of Carroll Shelby, I witnessed a very different scene at the Phoenix Motorcars event. Ed Begley, Jr., the tall, thin, blond actor who is one of Hollywood’s most dedicated environmentalists, had come to SEMA to speak on behalf of the Ontario, California–based company. But the audio equipment hadn’t arrived, and twenty-five or so media types were growing impatient. A woman who was with a TV crew went up to Begley, introduced herself and pointed out that the lining of his light grey suit jacket had ripped and was hanging below the hem. He thanked her and then asked another camera crew for some tape. Meanwhile, behind me, someone walked by, saw Begley and said, “Who is that guy? I recognize him.”

  Eventually, rather than watch the reporters move on to another press conference, the company asked everyone to move in closer and Begley spoke without the aid of a microphone. Pitching the Sport Utility Truck, a battery-electric fleet vehicle with a top speed of ninety-five miles an hour and a range of over one hundred miles per charge, Begley argued that we should all use the appropriate technology for our task. If he’s driving around LA, he’ll take his electric Toyota RAV4, but for longer distances, he’ll ride in a hybrid Toyota Prius: “You don’t need a sledgehammer to put in a carpet tack.” Begley, who had a Mustang when he was eighteen, has been driving electric cars since 1970 (they’ve come a long way since then, he pointed out) and cited three reasons why the technology makes sense today: it cuts pollution, reduces America’s dependence on oil from the Middle East and saves money. “It’s not just about the environment, it’s about the economy,” he said. “I came here in a hybrid car that got a real-world fifty-one miles per gallon. It cost me twelve dollars to get from Studio City, California, to Las Vegas. So forget the environment—it’s good for my pocketbook.”

  Green was a prominent theme at the show: Save the World Air, a North Hollywood, California–based company, held a well-attended press conference, though the passionate, articulate and attractive Erin Brockovich (the real one, not Julia Roberts who played her in the 2000 biopic) may have been a bigger draw than the technology, which remains unproven. Although the Environmental Protection Agency has already dismissed similar inventions, the company claimed that by using a magnetic field to reduce the viscosity of fuel, its EcoCharger products would reduce emissions, dramatically improve fuel economy and enhance engine performance. Whoever comes up with an effective and affordable way to make cars less environmentally damaging stands to receive untold riches. But the competition comes from around the globe. Despite the all-American theme of the show, it was impossible to overlook the increasing internationalization of the auto industry, which was evident at the booths and in the badges I saw on people—everywhere from Scandinavia to Israel to China.

  Other trends at the show included donks, rat rods and drifting. Inspired by hip-hop, donks are custom vehicles featuring touches such as oversized rims, expensive, overpowering audio and home entertainment systems and colourful paint jobs—and even fur interiors and rhinestone exteriors. Rat rods represent the opposite approach to car culture: they are inexpensive do-it-yourself hot rods usually assembled from parts from different cars and finished with crude or incomplete paint jobs. “It’s the creativity of the young person building the rat rod that gives the vehicle its character,” said Cherry, who sees them as proof that the passion for cars is as strong as ever, even among young people. “There’s no formula. They weld all sorts of pieces and bits of cars you’ve never even dreamed of to create these rat rods that are just phenomenal.”

  Finally, drifting might be best described as synchronized skid ballet. First popularized in Japan, it’s the art of controlling a car while it slides sideways. I watched a demonstration outside at the Motor Trend Proving Ground. Three hot-dogging drivers in souped-up, late-model U.S. sports cars—a Viper, a Mustang and a Solstice—zoomed and pirouetted around the parking lot to much cheering, hooting and whistling from the large crowd. The cacophony of revving engines and squealing tires was accompanied by smoke and the smell of burning tires. Soon, my skin was covered in a fine spray of tire dust. Down at one end, a bunch of fans were doing the “we’re not worthy” bow. Some American cars are as cool as ever.

  A hankering for even more horsepower dominated the trade show, in spite of all the companies hawking green technology, and that made me worry that our fanatical relationship to the automobile will evolve into something healthier even more slowly than I had feared.

  16 San Francisco Man versus the

  Internal Combustion Engine

  MY NEARLY TWO WEEKS of travelling solo ended on Thursday night, when my agent David Johnston flew into town. He may not be the famed Samoan lawyer of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I’m no gonzo journalist, but we finally left the blackjack table at 4:30 in the morning. A contractor from Red Deer, Alberta, named Garth sat beside me and acted as my consigliere, so I managed to make back all the money I’d thrown away at the roulette table and lost betting on my beloved Boston Bruins at
the sports book. We weren’t feeling exactly chipper the next day, and got a late start after a restorative breakfast. But I was happy to see Sin City, and all that car porn, in my rear-view mirror—and not just because we were driving into some dramatic scenery.

  Although I’d read sensible advice to buy gas before entering Death Valley, I didn’t heed it and ended up paying $2.95 a gallon for gas, the most I paid anywhere in the United States (the lowest was $1.99 a gallon in suburban St. Louis). Gas prices had settled back from the heights they’d hit during the summer of 2006 (in August, the average retail price of gas in the country was over $3 a gallon and I talked to people who’d paid as much as $5 in some places). Several folks I’d met along the way were convinced the lower prices were little more than a government plot in the run-up to the mid-term elections and that everyone would be paying more after November 7. And yet none of these cynics suggested they’d reduce their driving if the prices did start climbing again. This attitude reminded me of the old joke concerning Canadians and the weather: everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything about it.

  Except that drivers can do something. And a few are—even if they aren’t driving less, more and more people are buying hybrids such as the Toyota Prius. I hadn’t seen too many on my trip until I’d reached Denver, but I knew the Prius was particularly popular in San Francisco, where David and I were headed.