Rebel with a Cause

Freeman Thomas has a track record of innovative car designs – the VW New Beetle, the Audi TT, the Chrysler 300 – that have helped bring their respective brands back from the brink.

“Ford works really well when it’s got its back against the wall, and no time is more important than right now”

Now he’s the Director of the Advanced Engineering Design Studio at Ford. Can his designs save the troubled auto giant? Senior Editor Ben Thompson catches up with a design legend to find out...

Car design is full of contradictions. Making revolutionary new products in an extraordinarily conservative industry is no easy task, and designers themselves are often seen as mavericks in a world of suits and tight margins. Freeman Thomas is no exception. “I guess I’ve always been a bit of a rebel,” says the man charged with designing the next generation of vehicles at Ford. “I’m the outsider’s insider. I have a rebellious California attitude, but it’s combined with some refinements.”

It’s an apt distillation of his approach to design. Having graduated from the famed Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California back in 1983, Thomas has been at the cutting edge of automotive design ever since. His first job was at Porsche, and he subsequently held influential roles at Audi, Volkswagen and DaimlerChrysler before joining up with former colleague J Mays – now Group VP and Chief Creative Officer at Ford – in 2005. During his career, he’s been involved in the design and development of a number of iconic vehicles that have gone on to become modern classics, such as the Audi TT, the New Beetle and the Chrysler 300.

It’s an impressive CV, but he now faces what is perhaps his biggest challenge yet –reinvigorating the granddaddy of them all, Ford Motor Company. It’s a tough assignment: the ailing automaker has been restructuring since 2001 but is losing big money and won’t return to the black until at least 2009. The view from Detroit is that the car giant’s costs are too high and its product-range both too wide and too mediocre. Ford has too many non-performing brands, say the experts, a suspicion that is backed up by cold hard facts: the automaker’s stock price has fallen nearly 40 percent in the last five years and its share of the US and global car market continues to drop.

Nevertheless, there is a recognition at Ford that the one surefire way to make money again is to give the company’s designers a freer hand to excite and engage buyers – and this is where Thomas comes in. “It all starts off with a great story,” he says. “All of the companies that I have really connected to have been companies that have a genuine history to them, a genuine philosophy, and a product that reflects our cultural lifestyles. Take the Chrysler 300 as an example. It was a brand new architecture, but it looked at the history of the Chrysler Ghias, the original 300 series, and somehow there was this kind of connection that felt really authentic. I think that’s why I’m at Ford – because Ford basically put America on wheels with the Model T, and created some pretty amazing icons throughout the last century. They’re not all necessarily connected, but each one of them is undeniably a Ford, and they’re spearheading a unique, original market segment.”

The marriage of style and engineering
The idea of looking to the past for tomorrow’s designs is one that has served Thomas well in his career to date; he describes it as using a familiar face to showcase new ideas. But don’t be fooled by the retro stylings of his best work; Thomas is constantly challenging the accepted way of doing things and looking for alternative solutions to common engineering and design problems. He’s also a stickler for marrying great design to great engineering. “The time I spent at Porsche as a new designer just graduating out of design school showed me that there was a real need to reinvent the way we approached design,” he explains. “I felt that product design had moved from an engineering focus to a styling focus, that we’d lost a certain balance. The classic Porsche and Jaguar cars were traditionally great engineered products first and foremost; the way those vehicles looked was the work of brilliant engineers with great aesthetic sense – they had charisma in that you just loved the way they looked, but as you sliced through the car like an onion, everything was justified, and everything was accountable. And so I really came to believe in the importance of collaboration between engineering and styling; there has to be transparency between where one finishes and the other one starts.”

When Thomas was at Porsche, he felt it had become predominantly a styling organization rather than a design organization. In a bold move for someone only six months into their first job, the young designer gathered all the directors together and showed them an idea that involved having designers, engineers and modelers work sabbaticals in each others’ disciplines in order to get a holistic idea of the way a vehicle should take shape. “What was happening at that period of time (and still is happening in some companies) is that engineering would just give you a platform package and ask you to style a pretty body on top,” he says. “If you do that, you end up with a vehicle that has a very shallow story to it. You just have something that looks kinda cool, but doesn’t have a philosophy.” He cites the Model T as a great example of a car development story that was about so much more than just the car itself. “It was about the whole assembly line process. It was about minimalism. It was about durability. It was about the whole culture that was around it. That’s what Ford is founded on.”

As Ford’s Director of Advanced Design, Thomas helms the advanced engineering design studios in Dearborn, Michigan, and Irvine, California, working with different groups that use the studios as skunk works. “We’ve got teams of engineers working hand-in-hand with the designers, and it’s a really transparent process. I’m working closely with advanced product creation, which is the hard nuts-and-bolts engineering,” he adds. “Those are the people that really can make a car or a vehicle work and be durable.”

He also works with the Science Research Laboratory looking at the latest technologies for hybrids, aerodynamics and new types of construction technologies for lightweight, strong and safe materials – all of the elements that will be key ingredients in the car of the future. “I’ve got individuals with PhDs from MIT, Cal Tech, backgrounds at NASA – people that you would create the space program with. We’re not tied to a particular manufacturing process. We’re not tied to a particular vehicle segment. We’re looking at it as a complete clean slate and we’re only constrained by actual engineering.”

One of the work streams he’s currently working on is looking at a hydrogen fuel cell future. “We’re asking a lot of questions,” he says. “What’s the smallest size that you can make the fuel cell? Where’s the safest place to locate it? What type of pressures would it involve? What type of battery technologies do we have? What kind of electric motor technologies do we have? What about regenerator breaking? What about construction of the body chassis? What about the braking? What about the tire systems?”

Reinvigorating the product line
It’s this commitment to integrating great styling with the best engineering that Ford is hoping will reignite desire for its products and turn its fortunes around. As well as looking far into the future at the cars of tomorrow, however, Thomas has more pressing issues at hand – reinvigorating the current line-up. Naturally, Ford already has commitments and investments in place to build off existing platforms, and one of the things he is looking at is how the company can be innovative with these platforms. “When I was at Audi, the TT was based off the Golf platform,” he says. “And that’s a great example of what you can do with an existing platform. If you were to sort of nip and tuck it and do a couple things and were able to render it out the right way, you could come up with something completely different.”

A second area of focus is how to create a family of ideas off a single platform. With new CEO Alan Mulally promising to reduce the number of engineering platforms at the company, this could be critical. Already, Ford is moving away from its traditional model of producing different solutions for each one of its key markets – America, Europe and Asia. “We’re working less regionally now and much more globally,” he admits. “We recently appointed Derek Kuzak as our global product development guru, and Derek is very talented – he’s been developing very efficient, well-proportioned platforms for Europe, and is now looking at the whole portfolio of platforms.”

So does this spell the end for some of our favorite brands? Thomas thinks not. “It’s a more global approach in many ways, but there are still products that have enough market segment and enough market potential to have a regional impact – like the F-Series truck, for example. The F-Series truck might not fit well within a European environment because of its size and the way it’s structured, but it works really well in America because our environment and our demands are different. Could a Ford Transit and a Ford F-Series truck survive together? Absolutely. Different kinds of customers, different kinds of reasons.”

The digital revolution
Of course, the biggest driver in terms of speeding up product development has been the technology advances made in recent years. Technology and innovation have always been a part of Ford, but Thomas is committed to doing this in a way that has value for the end customer. “You can’t just do technology for technology’s sake,” he says. “It has to be something that relates to the customer. Apple has been really innovative in this respect. They’ve taken known technologies – a computer, an mp3 player – but it’s the way they’ve packaged and marketed those technologies that have made them successful. They really speak to people.”

In terms of its newest designs, Thomas reveals that a number of them are already being piloted, with some interesting results. “We’re already in the market with a few products right now, and one of the things we’re finding is that design is really important as a communicator of technology. The vehicle has to look different, and it has to reflect the technology for it to resonate with our customers. And so that’s one of the things that we’re really working on – creating unique vehicles that inherently look more aerodynamic and different from today’s car.”

And this is what Thomas hopes to achieve at Ford – to build upon over a century of innovation and design to develop products that customers feel a connection with. He concedes it will be hard work, but is positive about the road ahead and believes Ford already has a historical precedent for working well under pressure. “The development of the original GT40 was really one of the zeniths in the history of Ford,” says Thomas, referring to the time in the 1960s when Henry Ford II vowed to beat Ferrari at its own game and put the processes, money and resources in place to develop a competitive product. The Ford GT Program was completed by a skunk works team of designers and engineers in record time, who created a specific process and factory to build the vehicle. “It was the first use of computers to calculate weight, structure and aerodynamics, and this was in the early 1960s,” he says. “Those guys really pushed the envelope in terms of what they were doing, and I think historically Ford works really well under pressure. It works really well when it’s got its back against the wall, and no time is more important than right now in terms of being able to deliver another breakthrough program that is going to be not only green and innovative, but also profitable.”