the story of a secret prototype and the mystery of the Apple Car

The plane ticket had just arrived for him, bound for San Francisco. He had taken the essentials for the trip, the rest he would buy there. He was running through the halls with the phone slung over his shoulder and he had forgotten his suit at home. It didn’t matter, the man he was going to see was not going to notice that. “The email is from f** Steve Jobs, yes! Tell the team to be ready tomorrow, but we all have to talk first!”. For Bryan Thompson, in that May of 2010, the most important thing in the world was not to miss that flight.

He had a project on his hands with V-Vehicle, a mysterious start up who had just gone public after several years in anonymity, working on something different in the automotive field. It was a time when people began to think about the transition from traditional cars, and although they were considering natural gas – which is not a renewable resource – the directors of the venture capital company that endorsed the company were already in the electricity business. However, the most important thing about his project was not the combustion model.

A car that would change the automotive industry

Thompson had been working on a prototype for more than two years that wanted to shake up the automobile industry. VVC’s goal as a company was to create a smart and efficient vehicle manufacturing company fuel, light and ultramodern design. The materials would be cheap but high quality, and the price should be around $14,000 to challenge the industry.

The design team for that prototype was crazy. Together with Thompson, I was Tom Matanowho had more than 20 years of experience in designs for the automotive industry, working with top-level brands such as Mazda or BMW. Anke Bodackalso an expert in the industry, having worked for Nissan for more than 12 years and for an automotive company with the curious name of Next Autoworks Company (which was VCC’s name change several years later.)

What they achieved was to develop a body made of polypropylene and fiberglass that was 40% lighter than a conventional steel vehicle – with which the car would be more efficient – and which would also cost 70% cheaper to produce. The key was that this body was not made from a single “unibody” type piece, but in a technique reserved for the Ferrari 360 or the high-end Audi called “Space Frame”.

In the “unibody” model, the pieces are combined to form one but separately they lose their resistance. With the “Space Frame” technique, the piece does not depend on any other element to add resistanceit could be extracted from the car and the body would maintain its lightness and resistance: this made the Thompson prototype prototype could be “upgradable” by the user.

When the company went public, several of the Silicon Valley investors who wanted to put money into the project took a look at the idea. Someone tipped off Steve Jobs, whom he hired as an “informal advisor” and the Apple CEO’s eyes lit up when he saw what it was all about: he had to see it personally. He emailed Thompson: I’m Steve Jobs. Bring the car to my house”.

An afternoon with Steve Jobs and a secret car

Thompson went to Jobs’ house in Palo Alto with a small representative part of VCC and his project, it was just him and two other people. When Jobs walked out the door, the eyes of the Apple genius could not take away from the car even during the handshake. His daughter, Reed, went looking for him because a prototype of the iPhone didn’t work right. “Go back home” Jobs told him. And he sat on the passenger side of the car.

With Thompson as the driver, Jobs turned to the companions who were sitting in the back and made it clear: “Get out of the car. I don’t want anyone else here.”. That’s when Jobs asked how was the car built and what method they had followed to do it. The auto industry was like a new planet to him, and he seemed to have just landed there.

“I learned more about plastics with in all my years in design school or designing cars” Thompson said later. Jobs then explained to him what his ideas were about materials, perception and intuition In the design. Here we will find something that is still in Apple’s DNA: “Be honest with the materials, don’t dress it up” – he said, pointing to the dashboard. Almost what has happened with the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 Pro: turning something a priori considered a weakness into a strength.

At VCC they had manufactured the dashboard piece as a mix of fiber, synthetic resin composite and wood pulp, to give more of a “premium” feel. Jobs was very clear that if they also designed it as a single piece without mixtures, he would give a better feeling of high precision – which were the bases of the industrial design of the Apple design director at that time, jonathan ive.

He also suggested adding surface tension to the interior, similar to how he had done with the exterior. “A taut surface has the feeling that it is full of energy, like an animal ready to attack. It is something subconscious that gives the product a high quality and trustworthy impression.”. Thompson did not feel that Jobs was giving him the answers literally, but that I was pointing you in a direction which to follow

The interior of the first VCC prototype

Jobs was impressed that a small team like the one at VCC Without the corporate resources of a large car company they would have executed such a good and simple design. That was perhaps the moment where the “Apple Car” began to be possible in his head, and just as had happened with the mobile phone industry, to break out with strength and determination.

“It has a soul.” – Jobs told Thompson when they finished, just the words that a designer wants to hear. It was not a compendium of electronic parts and panels, it was something else – with soul. Like Apple products. On the return flight, Thompson he did not stop thinking about the words of Jobs and he came up with hundreds of new ideas that hadn’t occurred to him before.

Unfortunately, the VCC business – later Next Autoworks – failed due to financial mismanagement and tighter state budgets that did not allow that small company to compete in the industry. Thompson’s designs were bought by another venture capital firm in 2015, and the car-turned-electric was planned to be built under the direction of Tony Bonidy, who interestingly was the ex-head of NeXT Computer with Steve Jobs – although in the end it was not carried out. However, surely it served to detonate something inside Jobs and that perhaps he will still be alive inside some project in apple nowadays.