Design center elite
Despite its small size (120 graduate students and 1,500 undergraduates), Art Center alumni represent the cream of automotive design not only in the U.S. but Europe and Japan. However, the Art Center no longer wants to be just a supplier to industry, but a participant.
Former GM designer Dan Sturges wondered why in this computer age, when one CAD guy can make a car, why is change so difficult? "When somebody like Paul McCready can design a 78-pound bicycle/airplane, the Gossamer Condor, to fly over the English Channel, why do we need a 4,000-pound SUV to drive 1 mile to get a cup of coffee?"
For his part, McCready suggested the global energy solution might have to be a transformative green energy mobilization at the World War II level. McCready came up with the GM electric Impact, which was the father of the EV1, doomed star of Who Killed the Electric Car?, a refugee from a future that never happened. (The last EV1 squatted behind the audience, a streamlined red Lazarus.) He argued that a five-passenger electric sedan could handle the transportation needs of at least 60 percent of the population.
Wild card cars
Unfortunately, engineers like McCready — and his counterparts in the outer space business the Rutan brothers, whose fiberglass rockets and simple-as-an-explosion rocket motors employ nothing but the best of surfboard and firecracker technology — are not corporate collective types. NASA and GM do not let visionaries tell them what to do unless they are U.S. senators or someone with the bank account of Kirk Kerkorian.
As a result, the future tends to happen a long time after it is invented. Some 70 years ago Buckminster Fuller designed a car, the Dimaxion, that weighed only 1,600 pounds, carried 11 passengers and had a top speed of 120 mph. An apostle of Fuller, Jay Baldwin, described the American automobile's problem as what he called the reliance on CATNAP — "cheap available technology narrowly avoiding prosecution."
Baldwin is a down-home innovator. His highly functional low-tech Quickup Camper — a Ford F-150 pickup that appears to impregnate itself by way of an expand-on-demand shell — sat in the parking lot, a bastion of American green ingenuity among the Audis, BMWs and Hondas. Inside the Quickup are chairs, sink, potty, bed — with a ceiling high enough so that "you can get gymnastic at night if you feel like it." Ford gave Baldwin the F-150 for a dollar so he could work his magic, but he hasn't been able to market it.