A car is the closest machine to being human. William F. Vartorella looks at next-generation cars on screen and how automakers and filmmakers work together.
To paraphrase Sir Jackie Stewart, a car is the closest machine there is to being human.
If we explore the traditional seven characteristics of life, cars nearly qualify: discrete systems (cells) working together, organizational hierarchies, energy consumption, environmental response, growth and reproduction, adaptation to their environments. We, humans have an estimated 3,000 thoughts/day. The modern automobile has 125 million inputs/second.
And in “I, Robot,” the line of demarcation narrowed in real-time, with the Audi RSQ concept car not merely “injected” into the film as product placement, but purpose- built for the movie. This wasn’t a passive “stunt double,” but a design-studio, futuristic, next-gen vehicle with butterfly-action doors, spherical wheels, a chameleon luminescent paint job, and all the bell-and-whistles associated with a young, hip car culture in 2035.
Cars are iconic in their own right. “The Beast” in “The Fast and the Furious.” “Eleanor” in “Gone in 60 Seconds. “ Or “The General Lee” in “Dukes of Hazzard.” They are a tool of the anti-hero: Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection.” We are a car culture. We are a film culture. It’s all Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with Italian cars the romantic world view and German cars, the classical view—art vs. science. But the love affair with cars, film, and the global automakers mirrors our own lives. We go to film to embrace the mistress; to the dealership to fondle the sports car and buy the micro-van. The parallels are there. And the cost to the automaker just to get you into the showroom to lust after the true fem fatale is estimated at $500 for that fling behind-the-wheel that might lead to a sale. Hollywood would have you believe that the love affair with the electric car is over; that hybrids are slow, clunky, design nightmares. And that the very nature of the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE), availability of relatively cheap fuel, and ear-seizing screams of tires and engines in full song are the essence of filmmaking. They are. We agree. But cars and car culture are changing.
Here’s the reality. Hollywood needs the youth market—Y Generation—which personifies cool, next-gen vehicles that evoke individuality and lifestyle. Studies China) demonstrated that tech-savvy “Ys” want fuel-conserving or alternative power cars. Some 57% preferred hybrids capable of using both electricity and petroleum, plus touchscreen control (73%). They may wear a pork-pie hat like Popeye Doyle, but the ride has to be rad. Chrysler figured this out with its recent Super Bowl, “Imported from Detroit” commercial that had a hip, dark underbelly vibe, film noire lighting, and Eminem.
And automakers recognize that the old motorsports model of “Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday” is more complex now and that they need film, social media, and a viral buzz to get new buyers into the showroom. We’re “Back to the Future” but, as Yogi Berra quipped, “The Future ain’t what it used to be.” This is especially true for “car chases,” whose Golden Age was likely the late `60s, early `70s when the “wow factor” was a high-octane cocktail of freeway mayhem, stunts at the edge of adhesion, and a penchant for mechanized “death.” Lest we forget, Philip D’Antoni went from “Bullitt” (1968) to produce “The French Connection” (1971), which puts him on the set of unquestionably two of the Top 10 white-knuckle car chases on anyone’s list. Then, there was former amateur racing driver John Frankenheimer, whose 1996 “Grand Prix” is still the racing movie standard. And his “Ronin,” whose last car chase was through the streets and tunnels of Paris employing some 300 or so stunt drivers. What makes “Ronin” especially poignant in the current context is the marques used (Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz) are all next-gen “green” car players, primed for the next big action-adventure. Director Ron Howard has been tweeting triumphant, re: his upcoming F1 paean to the 1976 Formula One season, “Rush,” which he described at Monaco in May as an alternative to a five-year television series. But to set the record straight, “The Blues Brothers” (1980) has allegedly the most expensive car chase ever, although Jake and Elwood apparently aren’t talking. The days of the sports car going over the cliff and becoming, almost by magic, your Dad’s ancient Impala, minus the engine, when it hits the rocks and bursts into flame are long gone.
In March, the author participated in an unprecedented global automotive event in which 600 of the best-and-brightest engineers, policy wonks, industry executives, and green gearheads met for five days to thrash out next-gen electric vehicles, as well as the continuum/ interface with hybrids.
Embedded was a “ride-along” mystery event at an abandoned airstrip with plenty of run-off space for a casual introduction to new, disruptive automobiles. The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and other tony film mags weren’t there. What was there were “the Beasts.” We aren’t talking about Grandma’s “pretty-in-pink” Prius. To get to the sign-in tent you had slink past a black, bad-ass Tesla. Then you strapped into, say, a hybrid BMW with a test driver in livery who, after the safety credo, asked if you had “a need for speed.” After a mind-numbing skid-pad demonstration, high “g-force” cornering with the scream of tires and acrid whiffs of burning rubber, the car accelerated to 148 mph. Pressed against the luxuriant leather, a voice said, “We can go to say, 160, but the braking will pin you to the belts more quickly than you may appreciate.” Discretion being the better part of valor, 148 seemed a nice compromise. And the film trades pontificate that the next-gen vehicles are boring, that the love affair is over? Bull. F1 Champion Sir Jackie Stewart said it best: “Cornering is like bringing a woman to climax.” As Steve McQueen once quipped, “Life takes on meaning at 160 mph.”
And that’s what Hollywood film and next-gen cars are about: it’s pushing the love affair to the boundaries, bringing passion back into the car chase without gas-guzzling dinosaurs polluting the environment. It’s about attracting a whole new generation of filmmakers and aficionados who are lean, green, brash, early-adopters who can find the cars in their garages mirrored on the Big Screen (or as close as their cell phone). Hollywood would have us believe that “performance anxiety”
crosses aesthetic boundary from the bedroom to the “distance anxiety” of electrics looking for a charge or the ego-boost of raw, visceral, sound-surround beating against your chest.
Time for a reality check: second-unit pros use every trick of the trade to “convince” us that we’re somewhere we’re not, playing “whup-ass” with a car with a $100K drive train, at speeds we can’t attain, with skills we don’t possess, and with testosterone or estrogen levels only super-heroes inherit. It’s rarely about stuntmen anymore: CGI and risk-adverse insurance rates have nearly killed the traditional car chase. “Date Night,” for example, in April, 2009, took several days to shoot a nine-minute sequence with an Audi R8 and a Ford Crown “Vic” taxi in short, multi-second bursts to achieve a three-and-a-half minute hair-raiser. Cost: insiders say $1-$2 million. Actor-racers like the late Steve McQueen (“Bullitt”) or Paul Newman (“Winning”), and James Garner (“Grand Prix”) actually had the skill-sets back in the day.
Inside the Mind of the Grand Prix Driver that drivers of all stripes and persuasions have psychological speed barriers that determine their skills and tolerances. 148 mph, for example, is very close to one of those barriers and is the limit the present author is prepared to tolerate. OK, so for the Hollywood film buff, like the NASCAR fan, it isn’t about “death”, but “death-defied.” There are two famous instances of high-speed octane shot on open city streets, without the requisite “permits.” The elevated train scene/car chase in “French Connection” and the mind-numbing, nine-minute adrenalin-junky escape flat-out across Paris— “C’était un Rendezvous.” Get a legal copy of this short, rack it up before you read the back story of how Claude Lelouch made this classic—and his arrest. The point here is it was shot on open city streets, in one take with the driver pedal to the metal (average speed 78 km/h) in a 6.9 litre Mercedes. In post, a throaty Ferrari 275 GTB soundtrack was superimposed to give the short its primal scream and illusion of much higher speeds (85 mph, max?). Why this example? We asked Christian Ruoff, publisher of CHARGED Electric Vehicle Magazine, who also was at the ride-along event described earlier.
WFV: Next-gen vehicles, especially the electrics, are perceived as boring, clunky, hardly emoting edgy style and street cred. If you were advising the helmer of a new film, what would you suggest?
CR: The Tesla Model S and Fisker Karma are obvious choices. Both are stunning, really fast and ooze elegance.
WFV: Fine, but these are hardly tuners with some hot rod DNA.
CR: I think it’s important to choose the right car for the plot. I was recently watching the FOX TV show “Fringe,” where main characters were driving a Nissan LEAF. In one scene they mentioned that they had 40 miles of range left, and I thought to myself “FBI agents would never drive that car.” The 80-100 mile range makes the LEAF a great car for the majority of us who drive to work, the store, and our friend’s house every week. It wouldn’t work very well for chasing murder suspects all over the tri-state area. A better choice would have been the Chevy Volt, about 40 miles of all-electric driving before the gas-powered range extender turns on.
WFV: I apparently didn’t get the “memo” that the Volt was wickedly quick and responsive, which the professional driver demonstrated easily, when I saw you last. What specific advice would you give to filmmakers, especially considering that EVs are “quiet, stealthy”?
CR: Modern electric vehicles are the opposite of boring. They are powerful and unbelievably fun to drive. The acceleration reminds me of those roller coasters that are suspended on magnets. Instantaneous silent acceleration, without the gear-shifting. It’s hard to understand until you’ve driven one.
WFV: The great French short, “Rendezvous,” switched from a Mercedes to a Ferrari “soundtrack” in full song to get the ear-splitting, visceral effect of a monster machine driven by a madman rushing headlong to meet his mistress at dawn in Paris. The sound is important.
CR: I suppose silent doesn’t work well in [modern] film.
WFV: Well, Charlie Chaplin might not agree. Also, with respect to hybrid supercars—the Jaguar C-X75 or the Porsche 918 Spyder — Hollywood could easily add exhaust notes timed to engine speed and acceleration. Carmakers have been debating quietly for some time about the need for interior and exterior speakers to “enhance” the driving experience (“dynamics”) for the car nut. Decibels in film are part of the arc of the character— especially when a car is the star, like in “Bullitt” (1968 Mustang GT 390 Fastback) or “Smokey and the Bandit II” (Pontiac Trans Am).
CR: I suggest the burst of wind sound effect used when Superman leaves the room in hurry.
Lest we forget, as few as five years ago, the average new car in America was getting fewer miles to the gallon than Henry Ford’s Model T got when it was introduced. During the same time-frame, BMW was working to nudge its H2R Hydrogen racecar using a non-boosted 282 hp, 6.0L V-12 to rocket to speeds above 186 mph. That gives Hollywood electric vehicles, maybe a cameo appearance with a high-speed hydrogen, plus the growing fleet of hybrid “tuners,” where a kid with a wrench, time, imagination, and Mommy-dearest’s credit card can build a rat-rod that is higher tech than the engineering of the U.S.-Soviet Space Race. We’ve come a long way, baby, since The Keystone Kops “invented “the genre or multiple generations of “Bond. James Bond” haulin’ ass with the bad guys. And once gasoline prices stabilize at $4/gallon, a paradigm shift occurs in the automotive industry, as while not everyone believes in “Peak Oil” (because of advances in extracting and producing petroleum products), “carbon neutral” is the new mantra, the “new black.”
So, if we were casting next-gen cars for a sequel to “Miami Vice,” “Tron,” or the next “Fast and Furious” franchise film what would we choose, in addition to the Tesla Model S and Fisker Karma? Cinch up your racing belts and think way, way outside-the-box for these “Magnificent Seven Rides.”
The 300-MPG-E classroom stunner, penned by a group now called “Minddrive”: Developed by seven high school students + adult mentors in Kansas City, MO, this high-tech, stylish roller is based on an old Lola Indycar chassis, looks like a LeMans racer and can achieve 42 mph—which gets it into the bottom range of “The French Connection” (the speed of the elevated train was roughly 55 mph). When tested at Bridgestone’s Texas Proving Grounds, it posted an equivalent of 300 mpg.
The Italdesign Quaranta from 2008.
This four-year-old hybrid concept is a single design line from nose-to-tail, coming close to achieving a slight curve over a straight line. This car, as noted by the critics, departed from the Lamborghini Gallardo that Fabrizio Giugiaro also designed and shares the DNA philosophy with Toyota’s Prius. It will do 120 mph and is roomy enough for a tight camera setup in the three-across cabin. 0-60 in less than six seconds. Great choice for any film depicting hedge-fund pirates, starring Don Johnson, or feckless Internet raiders.
Carbon-inspired bionics:
take lowly boxfish, for example. Mercedes-Benz engineers examined the shape of the boxfish in wind tunnels and water channels, exploring the traditional “water drop” shape which aerodynamicists gush over. With a “cd” of 0.06, experiments showed tiny vortices formed to stabilize the structure even in high turbulence zones. The concept vehicle had a top speed of nearly 120 mph, with a 0-60 in less than eight seconds, plus approximate fuel consumption of 70 mpg.
The rise of the machine and “personal-mobility,” “car-sharing” activities, and “The Internet of Things.” Bill Ford, Jr. embraces the view that all objects ultimately could be connected to the Internet, blurring distinction between objects and subjects. Ford’s vision is an exploration of vehicles on the road in the same way we look at tablets and smartphones—as part of a target-rich, globally connected telecommunications and transportation network. These will be intuitive cars, rushing to achieve Sir Jackie’s vision of the car as alter-ego “human.” Ford’s just-unveiled “B-MAX” was the first car to launch at the Mobile World Congress. This “micro-van” celebrates interior space and functionality. Great for the next European “heist” movie, where the arch-villain needs plenty of room for his Buck Rogers “ray gun.”
Grow-a-Car: for all the sod-busters out there, revisit Henry Ford and his soy bean car creations. Bill Ford made news in the European trades, when he indicated that the car as we know it will change and become highly-configurable. In short, using a skate-board chassis and Hollywood creativity, there’s the potential for “Transformers-meets-High Noon,” with some dystopian hero creating chameleon cars in real-time to take on the galactic gunslingers. And the cars will be recyclable. Great for that “coming-of-age” film, where the hero goes from the hot rod to the personal mobility vehicle all “wrenched” in her garage using the skate-board chassis.
Transportation credits as next-gen currency. With some seven billion humans on Planet Earth, there are an estimated one billion cars. With a projected nine billion residents by 2050— 70% in urban settings—four billion cars will be the norm. The result: congestion, regardless of wired solutions. This author projects the rise of a new unit of currency, “transportation credits” that will be traded internationally as a form of access to whatever passes for modernity in 40 years. CGI take note. Virtual Vehicles thundering through Cyberspace on financial “missions” become the futuristic vision of “Around the World in 80 Nano-seconds.” This is “Tron” on steroids.
With homage to Edward Bellamy’s book, Looking Backward 2000-1887, the final next-gen vehicle for film is an update of the 1910 Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout by “Victor Appleton”. In this classic children’s novel, Tom Swift invents a disruptive, new rechargeable battery with half the recharge time–enabling Tom to vanquish the other battery-powered race cars at the track. His EV was designed for speed and performance—100 mph and a range of 400 miles on a single charge. Tom’s aerodynamic convertible was painted a glossy, in-your-face purple. This was the vision for EVs 100+ years ago and deserves revisiting.
In a prescient essay, Arthur B. Evans has written about “The Vehicular Utopias of Jules Verne” (1999). In it, he articulates Verne’s penchant for what we here have called the next-gen vehicles. Film, an illusion as bold as any utopia, would not have ruffled Verne. And his next-gen Hollywood vehicle?
“ÂI believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable.” The Mysterious Island (1874).
In addition to film interests, Bill Vartorella writes on automotive technology trends, carbon offsets, and next-gen motorsports. Recently, he served on an electric vehicles (EV) start-ups panel at the IEEE first international EV conference. Bill’s activities include the Electric Vehicular Technology Society, American Auto Racing Writers and Broadcasters Association, and the “Chowder Society.” He has had stints doing “pace notes” for an amateur rally driver and as corporate associate sponsor of an electric, open-wheel race car. Bill is a past presenter at Grand Prix Business’s global sponsorship symposium. He is the co-author of Funding Exploration, the standard reference for nongovernmental financial support for science and engineering projects.
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