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 Freeman Thomas's first show cars for DaimlerChrysler startle the crowds. But can they revive the ailing automaker? May 2001
In the summer of 1999 Thomas arrived at the newly merged DaimlerChrysler (DC) as "Vice President, Advanced Design Strategy," charged with the job of defining the future shapes, brand cues, and images for the company. He was joining an automaker renowned for design innovation (the much maligned minivan is widely credited with helping to save the company in the postbailout Iacocca era; the Prowler, Viper, and Ram truck upped the ante in the 1990s). But the car Thomas is standing beside is no sleek sports car, no whimsical compact. The Super8 Hemi reminds me more than anything of a 1950s Rambler station wagon. The front, with its crosshair grille, is almost snoutlike; the reverse-angled windshield is especially jarring. "We've gone as far as we can with raked windshields," Thomas explains. "It's time to go the other way." The Super8 Hemi takes its name from a planned update of the classic engine used in 1960s Dodge muscle cars, with its hemispherical combustion chamber. This concept car combines the space and comfort of the old American sedan with the interior space fiexibility of an SUV. Its doors open from the middle. The rear bench seats rise above the front in a form of theater seating. And the story line for this strange vehicle? "The panoramic windshield is about American landscape," Thomas says. "The car is about American space. It's American optimism--Fifties style--embodied in the bits of jukebox and diner architecture that shape a dashboard, which also contains modern technology: a Sirius satellite radio and GPS navigation systems. And it's about the family vacation with Dad." Thomas loves to rattle the cage. "This is a lot for them to deal with," he says with undisguised pleasure. "It's what happened with the Audi TT. Dismay...then it turns into religion." But the TT didn't startle viewers like this; I'd loved the TT right away. The Super8 Hemi I find rough, even crude. In a couple of days AutoWeek will come right out and use the word ugly for the bullish, boxy vehicle. Dressed in a tweed sports jacket, Thomas could pass for a history professor, and he is talking a mile a minute in several languages--Italian, French, German--about the cars. "Es hat ein...navigation unit," he tells a fan. Thomas has long waited for this day. Such opportunities come sporadically in a designer's career, punctuation to long periods of private work. He will stand for hours by the Super8 Hemi and the Jeep Willys, the first concept cars introduced during his tenure at DC. Soon after Thomas arrived, Chrysler's purchase by Daimler turned into a crisis, as sales slid, corporate cultures clashed, and cuts were announced. Design remains a Chrysler strength, but the stylish PT Cruiser was the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal year for the company. Recently it announced a staggering $1.3 billion loss for fourth quarter 2000 and expects to lose an additional $2 billion in 2001. Hard times and stringent budget cutting raise doubts about the future of Thomas's cars. A question hangs over the display stand: Will these concepts ever get built? "Not a snowball's chance in hell," says analyst James Hall, vice president of the consulting firm Auto Pacific. Even before its purchase by Daimler, Chrysler had been adding features to its cars that drove up their price at a time when consumers were unwilling to spend more for them. Rather than cut production the company decided to offer massive sales incentives in an effort to maintain market share. Even the PT Cruiser was fraught with problems. Built on a similar platform as the slow-selling Neon, it turned out to be too tall to be manufactured in the Neon plant. As that facility languished, a separate factory devoted to the Cruiser failed to keep up with demand. None of this seems to faze Thomas. He is more coach than player now--and he is constantly peppy, raving about "how much talent is out there." Thomas supervised the Super8's birth at the hands of Kevin Verduyn, who did the exterior, and Bill Chergosky, the interior designer. On his team are such able young designers as Bryan Nesbitt, of PT Cruiser fame; Eric Stoddard, who shaped the Crossfire concept for Detroit; and Jordan Meadows, who did the Willys concept, also for Detroit. A self-possessed young man, Meadows nonetheless seems somewhat in awe of his boss. "It's working with one of the great figures," he says. "But he's very laissez-faire. He just wants the design to be honest." The Super8 Hemi is one of four cars here that Chrysler is collectively calling "American inspirations." Asserting its Americanness is an implicit answer to the headlines about the crisis that has enveloped Chrysler. Along with the "All American" Super8 Hemi, DC is showing the Crossfire, billed as "Modern American," although the small silver sports car fiavors its patriotic themes with a touch of Bugatti. The Jeep Willys--"Pure American"--aims at "ecological harmony" and takes the theme "tread lightly," the motto of an advocacy group that cautions four-wheelers not to despoil the wilderness. Lightness is rendered in an injection-molded plastic body, pumped up on 20-inch wheels and designed to be built of carbon composite. The interior is all mesh and net--high-tech basketry with seats inspired by the Aeron Chair. The Dodge Powerbox designed by Mark Allen--"Conscientious American"--is a super low emissions truck inspired by the 1946 Dodge Power Wagon. It runs on compressed natural gas, which drives the rear wheels; a completely separate electric motor propels the front wheels. Since his arrival Thomas has been working to clarify the visual language of each of the brands. He has been immersed in car culture, spending time in such places as Fountain Valley, California, where customizers and hot-rodders gather on weekends, and at the Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise, which each summer brings cars of every shape and era to the Detroit boulevard where cruising began. In such scenes Thomas dips again into the vast and varied dictionary of American car culture, working out the visual languages for the brands under his watch. "Chrysler itself," Thomas says, "is Eastern, elegant, Deco--with the Chrysler Building as inspiration. Dodge is Middle America. Think Route 66, Dairy Queen, and the best backyard hamburger you ever ate. Jeep is the West, of course--the Marlboro Man of vehicles. It starts in the wilderness and only goes into town for supplies." Thomas speaks of each brand's "DNA," the basic visual cues which like genes express family links but in individual ways. "For Dodge," he says "one cue is the crosshair grille. For Jeep it's the seven-slot grille and round headlights; Chrysler, it's the egg crate and the wings. But you must add to these cues as well." There is always an element of surrealism at auto shows. But for DC, a union barely two years old, the weirdness quotient is especially high. The company hired Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, to read dreadful promotional copy for the company's new Jeep Liberty. Journalists note that last year's Chrysler press lunch included hot dogs; this year bratwurst is served. The latest merger joke goes, "How do you pronounce DaimlerChrysler? Daimler--the Chrysler is silent." One of the strangest rumors circulating at the show was word of a new Freeman Thomas concept car inspired by the Chrysler Building, in New York. The skyscraper with the famous radiator ornament gargoyles--the dream of Walter Chrysler--was completed in 1930, then sold when times turned tough for the automaker. Chrysler was planning to rent office space there in a triumphant return. But the rumored car never showed; the official line was that "the Chrysler Building car" had been "put on hold." This wasn't the first time Thomas had created a stir at an auto show. When the VW Concept One--which became the New Beetle--was rolled out at the 1994 Detroit event, it became an immediate sensation. Its popularity with the press and public eventually pressured reluctant executives into producing the car. Thomas followed that a year later, at Frankfurt, with the Audi TT. His most famous cars have their story lines: How J Mays and Thomas, working for Audi-VW in California, clandestinely conceived the Concept One as a way to revive the VW brand. How the three circles of the car's body and fenders echoed the three circles of Mickey Mouse. (They were seizing on something as American as Disney, in the memory of the old Beetle. The car was derided as a mere toy, but Thomas loved that: he once drew a sketch of the Concept One as a wooden model, complete with a string to pull it along the fioor.) How the now classic Audi TT sprang to life as a casual sketch on a small bit of paper, in the spring of 1994. And how after intense, secret work in a German village called Gamersheim, it emerged a silver shell fairly steaming with the virtuosity of sheer function--all aluminum cylinders--its lines like the junctures of plates in a suit of armor. The TT was evidence of Thomas's sense of automotive design history. It looked back to the Auto Union racing cars of the 1930s and Porsche RSKs of the 1950s--and to his pal Mays's AVUS show car, which had lent new drama to Audi, long known in Germany as an unexciting runner-up to BMW and Mercedes. But the TT's most playful touch was its seats: the soft shapes of whipstitched leather were a gigantic version of a baseball mitt, a globally recognized American touch--like a Pop Art easy chair. The 43-year-old Thomas would seem just the man to mediate between Germans and Americans. He is the child of an American father--an air force air-traffic controller who moved around Europe--and a German mother. Thomas has lived and worked in both countries for long periods and understands the car cultures of each. Because his father was stationed at different bases, he spent a lot of time on the road. At various times, the family owned a big Buick Roadmaster and a small Mercedes 190. "Growing up," Thomas says, "I got a certain sense of automotive space." He had moved back to the States before going to school at Art Center College in Pasadena, where J Mays (now design director at Ford), Chris Bangle (of BMW), and Grant Larson (designer of the Porsche Boxster) had all studied within a few years of each other. Thomas's obsession with cars was all-consuming even then. "Freeman's blood is not blood, it's gasoline," says car modeler Dave Morris, who worked with Thomas on the Concept One. "He's so enthusiastic about cars, sometimes you just want to turn and say--stop!" In 1983 Thomas went to work at Porsche, every designer's dream, where he'd often spend weeks designing a gas cap or wheel cover. But that level of attention to detail--the German discipline--stayed with him. He joined J Mays in the early 1990s at the Audi-VW studio in California, and the two hatched what has since become famous as a conspiracy to ripen the New Beetle idea before German executives could scotch it. The New Beetle and the TT became "halo cars," or "silver-bullet" products, changing the image of the companies around them. Thomas returned to California in 1996. He left the automobile business to join Mays in setting up an industrial design arm for SHR Perceptual Management, the firm that had helped create videos and images to sell the Concept One to the brass. The two seemed burned out on the auto industry. German executives isolated in Wolfsburg, Stuttgart, or Munich sometimes failed to understand the American culture that nonetheless fascinated them. Mays and Thomas were in a unique position to reconcile the two, but the effort had worn them down. "Ten percent of the time you spend on design," Thomas grumbled of car companies. "The other ninety percent you spend selling the design." Thomas returned to Audi-VW as head of design for Volkswagen of America before moving on to DC. Chrysler's willingness to encourage daring concepts, from the Viper and Prowler to the PT Cruiser, is legendary. "At VW you had to hide things," he says. "Here everyone wants more and more ideas." But days after Thomas's new concepts were unveiled, Chrysler announced the layoff of 26,000 employees, adding to earlier budget cutbacks. The company also scratched plans to move back into the Chrysler Building, and the car based on it may never see the light of day. But Thomas's past successes also came with struggling companies. The New Beetle helped Volkswagen reinvent its image and nearly triple its North American sales. The TT was part of a successful effort at Audi to bring a sense of excitement to a stolid company. As offbeat as it may seem, the Super8 Hemi builds on Chrysler's proven strengths. From the minivan to the novel "cab-forward" architecture of the Concorde/Intrepid sedans, Chrysler has done well in introducing whole new automobile types. Design remains its potential ace in the hole. "Ford has come on to challenge Chrysler's design leadership, but they're still strong," says Steve Girsky, an automotive industry analyst at Morgan Stanley. "I'd rather have great design and build a cost structure around it than vice versa." Thomas's goals have always been loftier than simply shaping cars that sell. He wants to create designs that transcend automobiles. "Like the movies," he says, "cars shape how we live our lives, where we go, what we eat, how we sit. Think of those 1950s cars and motels and diners and TV shows with guys driving down long straight highways." This is how Thomas justifies his obsession with cars--saying that subconsciously we're all obsessed with them. And what he says about the Americanness of the Chrysler brands could apply to him as well: "It's about driving down romantic roads, surviving in a new territory. It's about not staying where everybody else is." |
