The Quest for Cool
Freeman Thomas is bombing down the express lane of the 405. As DaimlerChrysler’s vice president of advanced product design strategy, you’d expect him to be driving a company car--a Chrysler sedan, say, or a Dodge pickup, or a Jeep Wrangler like the one he uses every day back home in Michigan. Instead, his once-a-month visit to the company’s advanced design center in Carlsbad finds him in a generic rental car, and he’s not happy about it. Not because the econobox is beneath him. Not because it makes horrible thrashing noises when he nails the accelerator. Not even because it reeks of air freshener. But because it’s so, well, cheesy.
“It’s not a bad car,” he says. “It drives well. It’s got decent power. The exterior’s not offensive. But this interior . . . .” He looks exasperated. No, disappointed. He traces the top of the dashboard. “Look at this slope, like it’s been melted by the sun. Look at all these different shapes! If they’d chosen one shape and repeated it, the interior would have looked a thousand times more disciplined. I don’t mind that the sun visor doesn’t have a clip. That’s to save money. But all these different textures? That’s not about cost. That’s about somebody falling asleep at the wheel.”
Two years ago, the high-energy, high-concept, high-profile Thomas was hired to change the direction of Chrysler’s once-mighty design department and conceive a new generation of unconventional vehicles that would put the troubled company back in the black. Thomas, a Long Beach native and graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, was coming off a pair of stunning design triumphs. In 1994, he and J Mays--now the design chief at Ford--created the whimsical Concept One show car that morphed into Volkswagen’s oh-so-cute, my-how-chic New Beetle. The next year, he almost single-handedly produced the slick Audi TT, embodying a cool, rational Bauhaus sensibility.
Thomas’ fusion of sunny Southern California playfulness and austere European classicism has fueled a meteoric rise to industry celebrity. A little more than a decade ago, after a stint at Porsche, he was a self-employed designer making ends meet by teaching part time and contributing styling analyses to a fledgling car magazine. Today he’s one of the world’s hottest automotive designers at a time when designers have never enjoyed more prominence or influence. Now he hopes to use his position at Chrysler as a bully pulpit to promote a fresh approach to design that’s as much about marketing and brand image as it is about styling.
“In other companies, designers are basically handed a package and told, ‘Here. Put a pretty body on it,’ ” Thomas explains. “The way we do it, I’m responsible for creating the architecture. I work very closely with the advanced vehicle engineers. I work very closely with the production car studios. I work very closely with marketing. I work very closely with PR to come up with names and design the press packages, all the way down to the typography and the script for the videos. It all has to work together. At the end of the day, design is about communication.”
Thomas oversees three advanced design studios, two in Michigan and the third in Carlsbad, creating products for the Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep brands. Although he still does some hands-on design work, he focuses mainly on the big picture. “He’s an amazing ideas man,” says Jeff Teague, who worked with him at the Volkswagen/Audi design studio in Simi Valley. “He loves playing ideas volleyball. But he’s frustrating to play with because he always beats you. No matter how good your idea is, he always comes up with something better. He’s a golden asset for Chrysler. He understands how to strengthen a brand by building on its heritage. I think he’ll put new life into Jeep, for example, and make it an icon for generations to come.”
Thomas is 44 years old, with a wife and a 10-year-old daughter, yet there’s still something of the kid about him. Despite a few gray hairs, he has a pudgy face that gives him a vaguely cherubic quality. But his apparent youthfulness is more a function of his live-wire personality than his boyish looks. He’s got pep, lots of it, and when he really gets going, he can be almost manic, the words flowing in such torrents that he occasionally stutters over them.
Nothing energizes Thomas more than cars. “Freeman’s the most enthusiastic car guy I’ve ever met,” says Dave Cole, another alum of the VW/Audi studio in Simi Valley. “He has gasoline for blood. He eats, drinks and sleeps cars. They’re his life. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who knows more about cars, who’s more fanatical about them. His head is so full of information that he’s a walking encyclopedia. When he gets started talking about cars, he just can’t stop.”
The express lane ends, and Thomas reluctantly merges with traffic on the 405. (He’s an assertive driver who travels with a pair of stringback driving gloves like the ones Grand Prix champion Stirling Moss used to wear.) As he inches along, he passes judgment on the sheet metal crowding in around him: Thumbs-up for the new Nissan Altima. Mild thumbs-down for the Porsche Boxster. Major thumbs-up for a 1957 Chrysler Imperial with heroic tailfins. But he saves his biggest grin for a New Beetle scooting past in the next lane.
“I feel really good when I see people using the flower vase,” he says. “When I did the original sketch of the vase, J and I created a debate about it in the studio. Everybody else said it was foolish, it was stupid, it was unnecessary. J and I looked at each other and said, ‘It’s going in!’ We knew it was the gimmick that everybody would talk about. The history of the Beetle gave the vase credibility, and the vase gave the car a sense of humanity. These small successes are so cool.”
The New Beetle revived VW’s fortunes by conferring a vigorous new image upon a company that had all but fallen off American radar screens. Now Thomas is being asked to give Chrysler a similar make-over. It won’t be easy. The company has lost more than $3 billion over the past 18 months, and despite merging with German giant Daimler-Benz in 1998, Chrysler remains the weakest sister of the Big Three U.S. auto makers. Also, Thomas is an outsider with no experience with the byzantine politics endemic to that industry. On the other hand, he speaks German fluently, and he understands the Teutonic suits that Daimler-Benz exported to run Chrysler.
“He’s got the right tool kit, and he speaks the right languages,” says Jim Hall, vice president of AutoPacific, a firm that tracks the automobile industry. “He’s also a realistic designer, which means he knows how to come up with vehicles that appeal to the public without being obscenely expensive to manufacture. But he’s got a tough job ahead of him at DaimlerChrysler. We’ll just have to wait and see if he can make a difference.”
Harley Earl is the father of american car design. A flamboyant, larger-than-life character partial to two-tone paint jobs and linen suits, he cut his teeth fashioning custom bodywork for Hollywood stars of the silent era. In 1927, he joined General Motors and put together the world’s first centralized automobile design department. While running GM’s design staff like a feudal despot, he essentially invented the concept car, the full-size clay model and, yes, the tailfin.
By the time Earl went the way of his chrome chariots, it was possible to earn a degree in transportation design. Art Center was then, and remains, the most prominent of the schools catering to would-be automotive stylists; its grads run or have run the design studios of GM, Ford, Chrysler and several European and Japanese auto makers. Yet it was something of a secret sect, known only to initiates, and Thomas had never heard of it until he stumbled across a reference in Road & Track after finishing a four-year stint as a flight-line firefighter in the Air Force.
“I had no idea you could earn a living drawing cars,” he recalls. “So I got the address and I went up there, and it was a revelation--like finding your home. I said, ‘God, I’ve got to get in here!’ I didn’t have a portfolio; I had no art or design training at all. So I took a night class in industrial design to build a portfolio, and during those three months, I worked like a madman because I wanted to get in so bad.”
Thomas is the second of two children born to a career Air Force enlisted man and the German woman he’d married while he was stationed overseas. He can’t remember a time when he wasn’t fascinated by cars, and after the family settled in Southern California--the cradle of hot-rod civilization--his mania ripened into clinical automotive dementia. “We spent our afternoons riding around the neighborhood on our Sting Rays [bikes] looking at cool cars,” recalls Jeff Zwart, who grew up with Thomas in Cypress and now directs car commercials. “If we knew somebody had a Porsche, we’d sit outside his house for hours just to hear it drive up when he came home from work.”
At Art Center, Thomas immediately established himself as a standout student, winning the scholarship he needed to pay for tuition. Porsche hired him as a designer right out of school. (Actually, the company tried to hire him before he graduated, but a professor persuaded him to get his degree.) The pay was so parsimonious that he lived for years like a starving artist, sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a tiny apartment in Germany. Still, it was a dream job for a fresh-faced newbie with a magnificent obsession for Porsches.
Not only was Thomas working on the sort of exquisitely engineered machinery that was his personal inspiration--he now owns two vintage 911s and a 1956 Speedster--but he also got a chance to try his hand at design projects ranging from forklifts to auto show displays. “I love the idea of inventing a product,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what it is. Whether it’s a car or a piece of furniture, you’ve got a beacon of light, and you’re showing people the way.”
Ironically, as Thomas was learning his craft in Germany, automotive designers in the United States were being marginalized as never before. In the wake of the fuel crises of the ‘70s, the Big Three were fighting a losing battle with Japanese and European auto makers for domestic market share. With bean counters running the show, aesthetic excellence was the first casualty of war. But as the ‘80s gave way to the ‘90s, it became clear that consumers wanted more than bare-bones transportation. With this realization, American designers started getting some respect. Besides being lionized by the media, rising stars were aggressively courted by rival car makers hoping to catch lightning in a bottle.
“In an era when the competition is greater than ever, design is the most important differentiator in the marketplace,” says David Cole, president of the Center for Automotive Research. Adds Chris Cedergren, the founder of Nextrend, a market research firm: “If you build practical commodities that get consumers from Point A to Point B, you can make five cents per vehicle. But if you want to make real money in this business, you have to generate passion. And you generate passion with design.”
Chrysler was Exhibit A. After a decade spent cranking out K-cars and minivans with all the sex appeal of farm implements, the company hit pay dirt in the ‘90s with a stylish line of “cab-forward” sedans and a dynamic series of muy macho pickup trucks. But by the end of the decade, Chrysler products were again looking a bit dowdy. “I was hired to shake the place up,” Thomas says. “Design had stabilized and, in some cases, stagnated. Some of the stuff was very, very good, but some of it got old very quickly. My philosophical approach has always been more timeless: I try to extract the engineering foundation out of an idea. If a design is based purely on style, it’s not going to stand the test of time.”
The first batch of Thomas-inspired concept cars debuted last year to mixed reviews. The Willys, a robust variation on the Jeep theme, was a hit, but the throwback Dodge Super8 Hemi was widely savaged. “We’ll never see it in production--I hope,” says Robert Cumberford, a GM designer under Harley Earl who’s now the automotive design editor at Automobile magazine. “It represented a terrible misunderstanding of what ‘50s cars were all about.”
Tom Kellogg, who shared a design practice with Thomas in Irvine, also questions the timelessness of his former partner’s vision. “Freeman respects tradition, but he’s not very conservative,” says Kellogg, who’s best known for his work on the seminal Studebaker Avanti. “He’s high-intensity, like the new headlights. He’s a rap musician. His products have attitude, and that’s what people want these days.”
Thomas is remarkably sanguine about criticism. “When the TT debuted, it was very controversial. At the Frankfurt show, Larry Shinoda told me it was butt-ugly,” Thomas recalls, referring to the late design legend credited with the original Corvette Sting Ray. “But I’m not afraid of controversy. Now, I’m the front man for my design team. It’s my job to put my head on the chopping block.”
The DaimlerChrysler Pacifica Advanced Product Design Center is located in a nondescript building in a faceless industrial park more or less in the middle of nowhere--the perfect spot for a facility where all the good stuff is strictly off-limits to prying eyes. This is where Chrysler’s most speculative designs originate. (“Answers to questions that haven’t been asked,” says Thomas, paraphrasing the tag line of his employer’s new image campaign.) Designers sit on one side of the building, engineers on the other. Between them, forming the spiritual and physical core of the center, is the large, open studio where alternative visions of the automotive future take shape.
This particular Friday, the main attraction is a full-size model of one of the three concept cars Thomas’ advanced design team created for the North American International Auto Show in Detroit a few weeks earlier. The Dodge Razor is a sleek slice of silver whose sweeping roof line recalls the Audi TT. Surrounded by bold, futuristic renderings and bathed in the artificial white light of science-fiction movies, it is the dream machine supreme, an otherworldly styling exercise that may--but probably won’t--make it into production.
Thomas is riffing about the Razor, and the air is thick with designspeak--A lines, B pillars, door systems, millennials, authenticity, credibility, “inventing a new market segment,” “creating a new design language,” “igniting enthusiasm for the brand.” “Each concept car is its own movie,” he says, warming to a favorite theme. “Each one has its own cast of characters and its own script. The Willys2 is a movie about adventure. The Razor is a movie about youth.”
It’s not hard to imagine Thomas as a screenwriter at a pitch meeting. Although he wears the button-down uniform required of all DaimlerChrysler executives in Auburn Hills, he’s dressed down for his monthly visit to Pacifica in a black polo shirt, faded blue jeans, silver-tipped belt, black Armani eyeglasses and trendy Kenneth Cole bowling shoes. Behind him, several Pacifica designers--”Freeman’s all-stars,” one of them jokes--form a silent chorus. “Come on,” he pleads, eager to share the spotlight. “You guys can jump in here any time.”
Later, while he munches on a sandwich in a conference room, Thomas acknowledges that he’s a manager these days, not a wide-eyed kid with a portfolio bursting with wild ideas. He likens himself to a coach, a general, an editor who pares ideas down to their essence. He’s less concerned now with the radius of a voluptuous fender than he is with visualizing so-called segment-busters that redefine the minivan or the station wagon or the sports car. But he still sketches constantly. He travels everywhere with a notebook filled with graph paper, and he cranks out elaborate renderings in 15 minutes with a purple Pilot and a gray marker. The TT concept was sold to Audi execs on the basis of a purple sketch he tossed off on a 5-by-4-inch piece of scrap paper. “I still get down in the trenches,” he insists.
“There’s not a single car in there that I haven’t worked on myself.” He pulls a notebook out of his briefcase and opens it to a purple sketch detailing his own thoughts on the Razor. Nevertheless, the days when one of his drawings could make it to the concept stage, much less to the assembly line, are probably gone forever. “I’d be taking an opportunity away from one of my designers,” he explains. “I want them to be the heroes.”
Besides the sketches, his notebook also contains his musings on subjects ranging from potential car names to the signature qualities of the three marquees that compose the Chrysler Group. “Chrysler is East Coast,” he says. “It’s the American who goes to Europe and knows all the good restaurants. It’s Steve McQueen in ‘The Thomas Crown Affair.’ It’s the intellectual American. Dodge is the All-American. It’s Midwest and West Coast. It’s about Route 66. It’s about the drive-in movie. The Jeep is the vehicle that crosses the Rubicon. It pulls people out of holes. It was born on the mountain and it came down to the city. It’s the pure American.”
To make sure the company’s next generation of products reflects these distinct personae, Thomas has at his disposal 20 of Chrysler’s lean cadre of 55 designers. (Ford and GM have about 300 each.) Most of their ideas never get beyond the proverbial gleam in the eye. Others grow into scale models before they’re abandoned. The survivors are nurtured into full-scale models for in-house consumption. Even if they never get public scrutiny, they help refine the styling cues for the vehicles that make it into showrooms.
The best and brightest of Thomas’ ideas eventually become concept cars. These one-of-a-kind dream machines, typically built at the Gaffoglio Family Metalcrafters shop in Fountain Valley, then make the rounds of the auto-show circuit. If the response is positive enough, and if the numbers make financial sense, a concept car can be modified for production. (The Dodge Viper and 2004 Dodge Crossfire are two examples.) If not, well then, back to the drawing board.
Thomas’ trio of 2002 concept cars played exceptionally well at the Detroit show. Still, he says, don’t expect vehicles derived primarily from the work of his team to reach showrooms until 2004 at the earliest. But when they do, he promises, they won’t be hard to recognize. “We’re going to catch the competition by surprise,” he says. “We’re not going to do the cookie-cutter vehicles that everybody else does. Even a mainstream vehicle like the next minivan is going to be a segment-buster. That’s why having really clever designers is so important. Marketers can talk about creating segment-busters. But only designers can see them.”
Asked to describe what the final designs look like, Thomas falls uncharacteristically silent. Then he shuts his notebook and carefully slips it into his briefcase. After all, he wouldn’t want his crystal ball to fall into the wrong hands.
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Preston Lerner last wrote for the magazine about predicting the next Nobel Prize winners.
