Design - Freeman Thomas

A VW Microbus putters by. It's pale green. "Color is so important," says Thomas, his voice drifting off. He returns with an odd, TV connection. "The show Rowan and Martin's "Laugh-In" was part of that culture, part of the hippie culture. And the Microbus was part of the hippie culture." And if you let your mind drift for a minute, you can see the same Microbus-color green in the background of the "Laugh-In" set.

There is a whole parking lot filled with various versions of the Corvette. Thomas admires old dashboards, old convertibles. He comes upon a red 1978 Corvette, dating from the era of the molded plastic body. "It has a kind of sleazy feeling to it, doesn't it?" he asks. "You can see the person driving it without the person being there. He's headed to a brothel."

Thomas approaches an orange 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona. With its streamlined front end, muscled body, and sleek tail, it has the purity of an American icon. This is a car that knows what it's about -- and expresses it. "That's just incredible, isn't it?" says Thomas. "It encompasses all of the great things about America."

Freeman Thomas on Cars and the Environment

If you're driving a Prowler down Woodward Avenue in Detroit, you're a part of the environment, but you're also influencing the environment.

There are two identical Picasso sculptures of a head that I've seen. One is in a California museum, one is in a French museum. You can touch the one in France, but you can't touch the one in California.

So the one in France has this tactile emotion about it. It has smooth places, because it's been touched. The one in California is more sterile.

The sculpture in France is like Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater house: It expresses the environment.

I could see a whole TV show being created about the Prowler. Just the Prowler and a couple of guys doing something every week.

The world of people who design cars for a living in the United States and Europe is small. There aren't that many companies, there aren't that many jobs, and there aren't that many stars. Many car designers -- including Freeman Thomas -- have graduated from Pasadena's Art Center College of Design. Designers tend to know each other, or at least know of each other.

In that world, Freeman Thomas is known for a couple of quirks. He loves Porsches. Porsche was his first employer out of school -- in Germany -- and Grant Larson remembers that for a while, working at Porsche was a kind of exquisite torture. Thomas was working for his dream company, Larson says. "The poor guy was a total Porsche fanatic -- but he couldn't afford one." (Thomas now owns two Porsches.)

Thomas can talk about cars literally all the time. In 1989, he teamed up with Tom Kellogg and David Weston to form a three-man design firm. Says Kellogg of the experience: "We talked mostly about cars. I brought up a lot of other subjects, but he wasn't really interested in anything else."

Jesse Alexander, a photojournalist, documented some of the work that Thomas and his team did at VW/Audi in the company's Simi Valley, California design studio. "We would drive to Los Angeles together," says Alexander. "We would talk cars the whole way down, and the whole way back. We didn't talk about politics, or the big issues of the day. Thomas just totally thinks about cars. I'm sure he dreams about them at night."

"I'm really into cars too," says Larson, who now works for Porsche as a designer. "I'm, like, really into them. For a car nut to get tired of talking about cars, well, it could only happen if you're with Freeman Thomas. It just shows his passion. He's one of the most extreme car enthusiasts I've ever met."

Thomas is always sketching cars. He has a simple, rough, freehand style, using whatever ballpoint pen is around. He uses lots of lines and cross-hatching -- capturing the mood and the shape, rather than the details. Sketching helps him think, helps him experiment, helps him explain.

The Audi TT literally started out as a Freeman Thomas sketch on a cocktail napkin. "I have been drawing cars almost forever," he says. "It's my passion." Thomas won his first car-drawing contest when he was in the first grade. "It was a drawing of a fire engine," he says with residual pride.

In college, Thomas would sit and do his drawings while listening to a Walkman. Coming through his headphones, according to a friend, were the sounds of cars at the racetrack. No commentary, no sportscasters calling the action -- just the full-throated, full-throttle sounds of engines roaring by.