The email had one subject line: “Steve Jobs.”

A few hours later, Bryan Thompson was on a plane to San Francisco to meet up with the rest of his small team who’d been working on a small, lightweight and ultra-modern prototype car called the V-Vehicle. Jobs, the team was told, was an informal advisor to the investors, and curious about the project.

It was May 2010, and Thompson, an experienced industrial designer, had spent two years working on the secretive car project. Their mission was to up-end the car industry by creating a lightweight, petroleum-powered car that used cheaper materials and could sell for just $14,000. And backed by Silicon Valley investors including Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Jobs wanted to see it.

If you’d told me I'd have one-on-one interactions with Steve Jobs, I'd have laid down and had a design pleasure seizure Bryan Thompson, V-Vehicle car designer

At 5pm the small team pulled into the driveway of a modest, tudor-style house in a quiet Palo Alto suburb. A thin figure came out of the doorway, big smile and faded blue jeans. During the handshakes, Jobs’ son Reed came out to complain an iPhone prototype wasn’t working. “Get back in the house,” Jobs told him, and then took a long, deep look at the car. Finally, Jobs got in the driver side and Thompson on the passenger side. Two others got in the back but Jobs ordered them to get out. “I don’t want anybody else in here,” he said.



In the next fifteen minutes, Thompson said he learned more about plastics than in his years in design school and auto industry combined as Jobs talked through his ideas on materials, perception and design intuition.

Working with designers Tom Matano and Anke Bodack, Thompson had developed a car body made of polypropylene and glass fibre that was 40% lighter than a conventional steel vehicle and would cost 70% less to produce. The creamy white hatchback had unpainted, upgradable body panels and a “space frame” body, a design technique usually reserved for high-end cars like the Ferrari 360 or Audi’s line of cars.

The interior of the V-Vehicle used fibre-wood throughout, which was left exposed and gave the car an organic appearance. According to designers, it also made the car smell like fresh wood. “The fresh-car smell you’re used to is actually just plastic. The wood smell is way more pleasant.” Photograph: Bryan Thompson

Jobs told Thompson to think about emphasizing the plastic rather than disguising it. “Let the material be honest,” he said, noting the dashboard, which was made of fibre-wood, a composite of synthetic resin and wood pulp. He suggested it would look better designed as one piece that “evoked a sense of high precision” – an idea Jobs often returned to with Apple’s chief design officer Jonathan Ive.

Jobs also encouraged the young designer to add surface tension to the interior, just as he’d done to the exterior with its simple, muscular lines. “A taut surface has a sense that it’s full of energy, like an animal ready to pounce. It’s a subconscious thing that gives the product an impression of high quality and confidence,” Thompson says. “He didn’t spell out the solutions; that’s what I do. But the sensibilities and feeling resonated with me deeply and I took that moment of high energy buzz to get that sensibility into the interior.”

Jobs also said he was impressed that a small team without the corporate resources of a major car firm had executed such a good, simple design. It cost one-tenth of the expected investment. Plus, “it has soulfulness”, Jobs raved. On the flight home, Thompson feverishly drew out ideas. “If you’d have told me I would have one-on-one interactions with Steve Jobs, I would’ve laid down on the floor and had a momentary design pleasure seizure,” he said.

On the flight back from his meeting with Steve Jobs, designer Bryan Thompson redesigned the interior of the V-Vehicle to match Jobs’ suggestions. Note how Thompson looked to reduce the number of lines on the dashboard. Photograph: Bryan Thompson

Unfortunately for the V-Vehicle, the business still failed. Tighter state budgets meant plans for subsidized manufacturing plants fell through, and venture funding dried up.

V-Vehicle was later renamed Next Autoworks, and Thompson’s designs and $89m of research and development assets bought by LCV Capital Management in 2015. The Pennsylvanian firm, which plans to build the car in Italy, is backed by V-Vehicle’s original investors including KPCB, and is run by Tony Bonidy, a former director at Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer.

Project Titan: AKA the Apple car

Six years on from Thompson’s meeting with Jobs, many of the ideas in the V-Vehicle are being embraced by the more progressive car designers: BMW’s i3 was the first car to expose fibre-wood in its interior, while Tesla’s recent Model 3 announcement pointedly mentioned super-lightweight interiors to counteract the use of heavy batteries.

But Thompson’s project also points to ideas that Apple is likely to explore in Project Titan, Apple’s much-rumored electric car. Evidence that Apple is building a car has become unavoidable, from secretive testing and research sites to the purchase of car-related domain names and, crucially, a string of appointments of specialist car engineers. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the project was an “open secret”, and described Apple as a “graveyard” for Tesla staff. “If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple,” he told German newspaper Handelsblatt in October 2015.

Both KPCB and Apple declined to comment for this article.

Steve Jobs had a long-term interest in the cars. Former Apple designer Tony Fadell said Jobs had speculated what an Apple car would look like. Jobs had admired Ive’s collection of classic cars, while Ive told the New Yorker in February 2015 that he and Apple Watch designer Marc Newson shared a frustration over the poor status quo of mainstream car design.

It won’t come in many colors. Its exterior might have a single unified color with impactful color accent body panels. Former Apple designer Marc van der Loo

Bryan Thompson created this photoshop from a 1980’s Toyota Camry ad to illustrate how the car of the future will look like from the inside, with a wider cabin facilitating headspace throughout. Photograph: Bryan Thompson

Apple will take big design risks with its vehicle, and its approach is likely to encourage more innovation from traditional car firms as they try to defend their market share. Thompson has already started work on designs for the cabins of self-driving cars. He thinks that when people no longer have to watch the road they will face each other, picnic table-style. The shift in design, he says, is towards openness, meaning more “architectural shapes, exposed cabins, low belt lines and lots of glass”. (Curiously, Thompson recently bought a many-windowed 1984 Toyota Camry for inspiration, and photoshopping an old advert to show what the cabin of an autonomous car might feel like.)

Peter Phillips, an associate designer at the British Design Council, started his career with Jony Ive in late 1980s south London. He points to common design themes in Apple’s other products; a traditional style that echoes the timeless modernism of Germany’s early 20th century Bauhaus movement, which balanced minimalism with desirability. This, he says, has remained Apple’s core design principle. “The design process starts by thinking about the ‘why’ of a problem,” he says. “Why make a car? Because the American car industry has not changed dramatically since World War II. Cars can be more beautifully engineered and desirable than they are.”

Former Apple designer Marc van de Loo expects a practical electric car indicated by the “profiled” look of Newsom’s 1999 Ford 021C prototype design. That candy-colored car’s front and back were treated as a geometric, symmetrically-balanced whole. “It will not be an off-road or sport car,” says van de Loo. “It won’t come in many colors. Its exterior cosmetic might have a single unified color with impactful color accent body panels. It will feature streamlined exterior details borrowed from jet fighters, a flush vent or handle or intake grill.”

British industrial designer Marc Newson designed this prototype in the late 1990s in conjunction with the Ford Motor Corporation to explore potential future designs. The celebrated designer officially joined Apple’s design team in 2015 and may be working on an Apple car. Photograph: Marc Newson/The Ford Motor Company

Van de Loo says Ive won’t stray from his beloved aluminum. The Indonesia-based designer says Apple will extensively use the non-corrosive metal structurally and cosmetically. Van de Loo says it could use a solar rooftop panel to contribute energy, and points to Welsh designer Ross Lovegrove’s solar car prototype with a roof texture detail as an example.

Lovegrove’s solar car prototype. Photograph: Ross Lovegrove Design

Former Ford designer Natalia Amijo expects augmented reality (AR) will eventually play a role. “Aside from infotainment, AR will change the way we perceive our surroundings by overlaying digital information over the real world. This tech will enable us to see around corners as we approach, prevent collisions and plan our destinations instantaneously,” she said in an email. Apple has bought three related companies in the last three years: 3D scanning specialists PrimeSense, and augmented reality firms Metaio and Flyby Media. It has not detailed how their technologies will be incorporated.

Andrew Hargadon, an engineering professor at UC Davis, says that Apple likes to move into other industries when it can create a hardware product at the centre of a software service it can fully control – just as it did with the iPod and digital music in 2001-3, and then the iPhone and apps in 2007-8. “In 2001, the PC had achieved a quality point that could only be improved in small increments and the best innovations were happening outside it, like digital music, videos and the web,” said Hargadon, a former Apple designer.

The ‘bubble’ car, officially called COAS (Car on a Stick) has high visibility and seats four adults. If the design looks curiously familiar, it might be because Lovegrove is part of Apple’s design history. He worked out of Frog Design, the firm that made several Apple product in the 1980s. Photograph: Ross Lovegrove

Yet even with Apple’s track record as a consumer electronics company, making the transition into a 100-year-plus old market will be hard. A car typically has 1,000-2,000lbs of parts wearing out at top speed for up to 10-15 years, says Hargadon. “A car is more complicated than an iPhone. It only has a few circuit boards, some layers of plastic and shielding that get thrown away after two years of not-super-hard use.”

For Thompson, self-driving, electric cars can’t be designed in isolation from their environment. “Visualize the driver eliminated,” he says, picturing a ride in a car of the future. “Turn around the two front seats and have a face-to-face conversation. The windows in your mobile lounge are intelligent. Some of the houses you pass are overlaid with a pink or red hue, indicating owners have begun the search for realtors. A message hovers above it that reads “Hi! Would you like to send the owners a greeting and allow them to see your contact info?”

“You reply ‘Yes, tell them hello for me,’ and the car connects you.”