I had countless car design influences over the years. My earliest memory is of a royal blue late 70s Trans Am that I used to see going up and down the street as a kid. When we played “that’s my car”, I knew the sound before any of my friends even saw it coming. It was the first thing that told me cars were cool. The lesson here was, to this day, I have no idea who drove that car, or even what they looked like. It was all about the car.

Spaceships were a fantasy. Cars are real. I wasn’t old enough, but I wanted one. To stick to cars only, I’ll try to keep sci-fi references to a minimum. Futurism being a reality wasn’t a thing yet.

That Trans Am was a showstopper to us. Until I first sow the General Lee, from The Dukes of Hazzard TV show. It was original to me, in the sense that cars jumped things in cinema before, but this was a regular thing. The idea that it wasn’t just the best version of a car, it was that it did something cars don’t do. It wasn’t necessary to have a car that could jump over things, but what if you wanted to anyway. After I got my license and  anything with 4 wheels, my life’s mission was to drive around looking for cops to chase me, and ramps conveniently placed around the city to jump over a construction site, leaving the cops in the dust. I mastered hopping through the car window, instead of using the door. And I kept my mother’s belt arm good and strong for using her car as a guinea pig. The rest of the world didn’t want to join in on my Dukes dreams. I could convince the mayor to allow ramps all over the city. Back to being a kid, until…

I’ll never forget the first commercial I saw, introducing Knight Rider. It was obviously cooler looking, but what more can a car do, I thought. Any fan in those days has their stories. I’ll spare mine. The major influence from Knight Rider was that yes, a spaceship is possible, just not so much “space” and not so much a “ship” either. However it was that cars can be much more than just transportation. Any car can be built to do stunts. The difference was, Knight Rider had the “ramps” built in. Whether I could build one at the time wasn’t the point. The point was, it had been built, so it is possible.

I had seen Cannonball Run. The thought of that black Lamborghini, with an interior like K.I.T.T. seemed to be the ultimate. I could dream up all these cars. I never really thought I’d see a really cool car like any of those, in person. That all changed when one day, my dad, stops by…

There were cooler looking cars the the Delorean in the mid Eighties, not many, for sure. From the image however, you can tell it was by far the coolest thing in my neighborhood. He didn’t live with me, so the contrast was amazing. It was really something to be sitting in a very popular car from a very popular movie, while they were popular. The second contribution of that Delorean was that my dad also had a cherry red ’65 Vette that somehow seemed to get way more attention that the Delorean. I learned that I didn’t care what was popular, you just like what you like. I didn’t care that the Delorean was as slow as a scooter and uncomfortable. I could tell another kid we borrowed it from NASA and they would’ve believed me. It was that cool back then to me.

For years afterwards, my dreams were just dreams. Every car I sketched was some variation of a talking Lamborghini. I long since had a driver’s license, and stuffed stripped-down portable TVs into my dashboards and all. Discovering custom built fiberglass speaker enclosures showed me I could possibly hand build on another level. Nothing fundamentally changed my car designs until one day at my dad’s house, some show about future stuff, or something, was on. I’ve seen all the 80s TV and movie cars, vans, semis (Highwayman truck). As far as a vehicle type, it was supercar all the way. A clip on a concept vehicle by Renault call the Racoon. It wasn’t new at the time, but it was as big a leap from supercars to me as K.I.T.T. was from the General Lee. It was bulbous and I imagine not very attractive to most. But it was amphibious. Not like a boat with wheels, or a car with a hull. It looked like it was suited for, not adapted to, any terrain. Just like K.I.T.T. didn’t need ramps, this thing didn’t need to bring…

It hit me. Modal transportation was the way. Pack the most utilities in the most compact yet highly capable vehicle. From that day on, my designs evolved from supercars, to mobility assistants.