SCOTT G. TOEPFER, SIDD FINCH

From the April 2016 issue

The ripe, golden apricot fit perfectly in my palm. “That’s the future of the automobile in your hand,” says Nygârd Lünd. “Didn’t think it would feel fuzzy, did you?”

Not any more than the bro hug I just got from this billionaire in the midst of a tour of his backyard orchard. But that’s where I found myself the target of a spontaneous embrace, the fruit still in my hand. Lünd, the six-foot-eight 47-year-old currently grabbing me, wants to reinvent the world, which predictably enough starts with completely reinventing the car.

“Have you ever seen one of those science-fair demos where some kid powers an electric clock with a watermelon or whatever?” Lünd asks. “Well, we’ve taken that idea and magnified it.”

I first spotted him six months ago; before that, no one but those in his close circle of associates even knew he existed. In my own moment of spontaneity I had thought to drive by the Honda Proving Center of California (HPCC) in the Mojave Desert near California City. I once took a Ferrari F355 up to 180 mph there—the fastest I’ve ever gone—so the place means something to me. Yet despite the 4255 acres of prime vehicle-testing assets, Honda walked away from HPCC back in 2010 and it had been for sale for the last few years.

SCOTT G. TOEPFER, SIDD FINCH

I drove along the access road past the jack rabbits and tumbleweeds until what once was the administration building came into view. Beyond the chain-link fence was a cluster of white vehicles: four box trucks, two pickups, and a pair of enclosed car haulers off in the distance. That’s an awful lot of hardware for a place where nothing was supposed to be happening. Shambling between the guys in jeans and golf shirts was the man who would later hug me. He was wearing his usual bathrobe, which, not yet knowing him, I mistook for a coat. He was making the gestures of command as what seemed like a car emerged from the back of one of the carriers. It wasn’t much more than a hazy black shape from where I stood. If forced to describe it, I’d say it looked like the back halves of two matte-black 1972 AMC Hornet Sportabouts welded together and left to unevenly melt under a heat lamp. I raised my iPhone and got off one photo before I was spotted and the vehicle was hustled back into its trailer cocoon. Suddenly, a third pickup was headed my way down the access road, and the guys inside looked mean. So I bolted. I might have even forgotten about the incident, as my spy photo was too short on detail for anything beyond lobbing wild guesses about the goings-on behind the fence.

They didn’t know that when they tracked me down last month. The call came from Dale Carmichael, who I would later learn is Lünd’s “left-hand man” (the billionaire is actually ambidextrous but insists on using the phrase opposite convention). Carmichael was polite but determined to know if I’d seen anything that might compromise the secrecy of Lünd’s operation, and I was able to negotiate some tentative access.

It was decided that I would be invited to Lünd’s home, in the town of Atherton, the Beverly Hills of Silicon Valley. It’s where billionaire homesteaders knock down huge mansions to build monstrous ones. At Carmichael’s direction, I was to meet him on a residential street corner.

“Can I help you?” Carmichael says as I pull up in my old Toyota Tundra. He speaks with the faux friendliness that comes from a career in public relations, standing alone in the road, the sort of undersized white guy who probably came out of the womb business-card first, wearing khakis.

“I’m with Car and Driver,” I reply.

“You know this whole street is private property,” he says as he climbs aboard, pointing for me to make a left turn. “Piltdown Road, but any evidence of that name is long gone.”

He smiles, then smirks, then continues, “It doesn’t even show up on Google Maps.”

More a lane than road, Piltdown is about three blocks of broken pavement and mossy sidewalks lined with a dozen large, ranch-style houses that look as if they were all built during one weekend in 1967. I drive to where it ends in a cul-de-sac. We get out and walk up to house number 1255, where I am told Lünd both lives and works. I notice that my phone has lost contact with the cell network. When I check to see if there is any Wi-Fi around, more than 60 networks show up, none of which are accessible. Carmichael purses his lips and says: “I’ll need the phone this time. Nothing personal, but Nygârd doesn’t like being recorded.”

I am offered an original iPod hooked to a pair of Noble Audio Kaiser 10U in-ear monitors in trade. “Please listen to this,” he explains. “The boss doesn’t want you overhearing any stray conversations.” What I am subjected to is French singer Françoise Hardy at full volume. Carmichael says something to me I can’t hear until I remove one of the earbuds. “The boss is kind of obsessed with Françoise Hardy. You know she was in Grand Prix with James Garner.”

The door to the house swings open, and I get my first sight of the superhuman Nygârd Lünd. Who, at that moment, I still didn’t know was Nygârd Lünd. Or who Nygârd Lünd was anyhow. He is in the ­process of painting his toenails. Carmichael says in his implacably calm voice, “Mr. Lünd does not wear shoes.”

The house is full of people hunched over laptops, hunched over drawing tables, or hunched over lunch. No one seems to be talking to anyone else, so I’m not sure why Lünd was panicked about me hearing anything. We walk to a back patio that overlooks a large greenhouse and an orchard, where he motions for me to pick the aluminum buds out of my ears. I introduce myself.

“I’ll call you Pearley!” he chortles a little. I’m okay with that, since it’s my name. “I’m Nygârd.”

He looks me up and down before stating: “I guess you’re about as good as anyone to tell the world what we’ve been working on here. It’s totally badass. I swear, you’re going to love this shit.”

I’m trained not to embrace shit too quickly. But I’ve also been taught to seek out the badass.

SCOTT G. TOEPFER, SIDD FINCH

Lünd is hardly the only mogul who has bought up his own neighborhood to ensure privacy. But he’s the only one who has turned those houses into a leading-edge research-and-development facility.

According to a June 1992 article in Wired, Nygârd Lünd emigrated from Norway in 1987 to attend the computer-science program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He soon found himself at the center of what would become the World Wide Web, counting among his peers one Marc Andreessen, who would co-develop Mosaic, the first internet browser. Lünd was instrumental in defining the early parameters of the internet. As a student, he served as a kind of modern Thomas A. Watson to Tim Berners-Lee’s Alexander Graham Bell in creating the “404 Not Found” error message that you see whenever you hit an internet dead-end. Lünd won’t say whether every 404 error makes him a little richer, but he also won’t deny it.

Carmichael pulls his boss’s left ear down to his level and whispers into it. “He tells me I shouldn’t show you anything that we don’t have secure intellectual property rights to,” Lünd explains. “And that’s a lot. But I’ve still got plenty to show off.”

With that he walks me through the back door of the garage. When the lights go on, what’s before me is an advanced version of what I saw being unloaded at the Honda proving grounds. It’s made of a milk-choco­late-colored carbon-and-silicon ceramic and sits atop four 22-inch composite wheels. And there is no windshield, nor any windows. “I’m bummed we’re still using wheels,” Lünd explains. “We’ve changed everything else, but as long as it’s on wheels it still looks like a car. Mostly. But what else could we do—design a flying car?”

Except that this is just a mock-up, I am told. “But it’s logical for it to look like this,” says Lünd. For the moment, he’s calling it Françoise after his favorite French singer. “I’m sure we’ll end up naming it something stupid like the FTA-390 or EI-EI-O,” he says. “The market fairly demands it.” Lünd tells me he was going to call it the Prunus, but decided that would be kind of stupid. “So for now, it’s Françoise,” he says.

SCOTT G. TOEPFER, SIDD FINCH

Since that short article in Wired, nothing has been written about Lünd, which is as he wants it to be. He likely qualifies for the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, but he says he has gone to great lengths to ensure “they keep overlooking me.” Neither the Wall Street Journal nor the New York Times shows anything about him in their online databases. But Lünd has been in Silicon Valley for more than 25 years, a naturalized American citizen since 1992. His wealth magnified with low-key but prescient investments, he has also built a network of friends in places high and low who help protect his privacy.

Lünd is hardly the only mogul who has bought up his own neighborhood to ensure privacy. But he’s the only one who has turned those accumulated houses into a top-secret, leading-edge research-and-development facility, with each home dedicated to one particular engineering discipline. Each also houses many of the engineers. “To our left is design and ergonomics,” Carmichael points out, while Lünd ducks into one of the structures. “All the powertrain engineers are on our right. We’re doing nothing but computational fluid dynamics three doors down across the street. The supercomputer in there is so powerful that it’s cooled by an air-conditioning system that takes up most of the house next door.”

Carmichael mentions that most of the heat-exchanger components in the cooling house came from the Seattle Kingdome before it was imploded back in 2000. When I ask, shocked, whether than means they’ve been working on this project in secret for more than 15 years, Carmichael pastes on another of his strange facial expressions and says, “Remind me to make sure Nygârd shows you his orchids.”

Lünd rejoins us and resumes explaining his creation. “It looks like carbon fiber, but it’s more like a carbon-reinforced silicon-glass extrusion. To oversimplify, I put some sand and carbon in one end of a machine and out through a die comes a warm, thin sheet of tacky stock. It’s kind of like a high-tensile-strength Frito. The sheets can be layered and pressed into practically any shape. Plus it doesn’t need paint, and it deforms in a controlled, predictable way. So it’s great in crashes. And you can wax it with olive oil. Swear to God. It shines right up.”

They tell me a Chinese factory is making monocoque tubs out of the stuff right now. It is as light as carbon fiber, easier to work with than aluminum, and cheaper than steel. “We can stack them up like Dixie cups and ship out of Shanghai to anywhere,” says Lünd. “We won’t have an assembly plant per se, but a dispersed production model. Bringing in the best stuff from around the world and assembling it near where the end-user resides.”

SCOTT G. TOEPFER, SIDD FINCH

The Françoise is electric, with a motor inside each wheel, and an organic lattice-over-substrate power-storage system that leaps beyond lithium-ion batteries or whatever else LG is brewing up in its labs. “Every ion is my friend,” Lünd avows. “It’s almost a matter of willing each subatomic particle to do what you want. I haven’t gotten past the laws of physics yet. But I’m getting pretty close.” With that he takes a fistful of pistachios out of one robe pocket and cracks open a couple and pops them in his mouth. He puts the empty shells in the other pocket.

“Yeah, that’s fascinating,” I say. “But how do you see out of it?”

“Oh, you’re going to dig this,” he gushes. Instead of a conventional windshield, the prototype uses a thin film of “correlated metals”—conductors such as strontium vanadate, which can be either transparent or display whatever information is needed by the driver. There is no traditional dashboard or instrumentation. It’s like the view screen on the Starship Enterprise. “I’m not even trying to do autonomous driving,” Lünd says. “I’ll let Google and Apple drill down into that rathole. But with the correlated-metal display, I can put anything I like in front of the occupants. If I do go ahead and buy Google’s autonomous software, I can use the screen to play movies in VistaVision.”

Lünd has been using the spent fruit from his research to grow them, magnificent flowers with massive blooms so colorful they practically rip through your eyes.

But whatever great leaps in material science that Lünd is pioneering, it’s the bio­electric energy-storage system that is most astonishing. The energy to power his car is stored in genetically engineered hybrid versions of the South African Super Gold apricot. Originally a cross between the Peeka and Palsteyn varieties, the Super Gold was first released in 1986. With its high sugar content, the meat of the fruit is structured almost like a battery cell and is capable of holding a charge. “Plus apricot pits have cyanide in them to regulate electrical discharge,” Lünd explains. Applying a charge at somewhere near 14 volts, the fruit will keep generating electricity by consuming the sugars that are already there.

“I have to deal with the reality of thermodynamics,” Lünd says. “But the Super Gold pit will regulate the sugar consumption so free protons and electrons will resonate in a steady state. Once the apricot is charged, the only challenge is getting electricity back out.”

The charged apricots are held in a tank of electrolytic fluid (think: Gatorade). As their charge is released through the lattice grid of copper and superconductive wiring at the bottom of the tank, the apricots get lighter, shrivel up, and float to the top. Once spent of their charge, it’s a simple matter to skim them off the top and reload the tank with fresh fruit. “Right now Françoise will run 240 miles at cruising speeds on a few dozen apricots,” says Lünd. “And then it only takes four minutes to swap them out.”

As promised, I am shown the orchids. Lünd has been using the spent fruit from his research to fertilize them, magnificent flowers with massive blooms so colorful they practically rip through your eyes. My tour of his hothouse reveals flowers in glorious oranges, purples, and reds that seem four or five chromatic steps beyond nature. “I’ve been reluctant to enter any of the orchid shows,” Lünd says. “But I think by the time the Pacific Orchid Exposition comes around in February 2017, I’ll have some potential champions.”

Leave all that for the flower magazines. What I wanted was access to Françoise. “We don’t have a complete car yet,” Lünd explains. “And I’m not going to let you photograph some half-ass prototype. But I can give you a drive so you can get a feel for where we’re aiming.”

The mule is actually a vintage Mercedes 300D, equipped with in-wheel motors and a few large boxes made of the “chocolate-fiber” material bolted into the back seat, spilling forth various hoses and wires. I find no hidden batteries or combustion engine of any sort, and the relatively stripped condition of the car, with only the front half of its interior intact, makes my search for chicanery easy. A large, trunk-mounted tank holds the apricot slurry.

SCOTT G. TOEPFER, SIDD FINCH

We leave Carmichael at the curb, and Lünd and I travel down Piltdown Road, cruising through Atherton and Menlo Park, then over to Palo Alto and onto the campus of Stanford University. While the drivetrain is beyond high tech, Françoise goes old school in using mostly mechanical connections between the driver and the car. “Steering wheels work great,” Lünd tells me. “I like the feel of a direct connection between the steering and what’s going on with the tires. And since there are computer-controlled motors at every wheel, I can simulate almost any driving experience. I’ve got one program that has the car performing exactly like a 1977 Cadillac Sedan DeVille, for instance. My favorite program so far has perfectly re-created the sensations of driving a 1970 Porsche 911S.”

Except for the sound of the apricots sloshing around in the electro­lyte solution, the Mercedes driving experience is big and sort of numb. What’s most impressive is the sensation of tenacious traction, instantaneous thrust, and instinctive steering. Is it a real driving sensation or a clever computer simulation? At some point does it really matter? Lünd later explains that the car was mistakenly running the 1991 Dodge Stealth R/T program when we were piloting it. No wonder it felt so heavy.

There’s every reason to believe that Lünd’s dream may only be so much vapor in a world already filled with vapor. With Lünd sitting next to me in that old Benz, the California autumn sun shining in through the open sunroof, his vision is seductive: Water and the sun, not oil and batteries, are what power this vision of the future car. He offers no timeline for production, no marketing or pricing schemes. But those details probably don’t concern a guy who has a room in his house dedicated to nothing but contemplating the universe an hour every day. “Science is fine as far as it goes,” Lünd says. “But I’m not giving up hope for a sudden burst of inspiration. Whether that comes from God or a synaptic blowout, I don’t care. I’m trying to cover all the bases.”

As I get into my Tundra with that apricot in my hand, I can’t resist picking off the skin and taking a bite. Nygârd Lünd’s dream for the car may not become reality, but it sure is delicious.

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