Freeman Thomas (1957- ) is the kid who spent every study hall in high school drawing cars in the margins of his notebooks. He is simply a natural, someone who has the gift of car design.
It started with the sketch of a fire engine that won Thomas a prize when he was in the first grade, and then came long summer afternoons in Huntington Beach, Calif., cruising the streets on a bicycle with his friend Jeff Zwart (now a well-known cinematographer of action-theme, automotive television commercials) and looking for cool cars. The son of an air-traffic controller in the U.S. Air Force, Thomas spent half his young life in Europe (he also speaks German, like his mother). He joined the Air Force himself once he graduated from high school and became part of a fire crew attached to a squadron of F-111 fighter-bombers.
Eventually Thomas developed a portfolio of drawings that won him a Ford-sponsored scholarship to Art Center College of Design once he left the military, and a job at Porsche was waiting when he graduated in 1983. There he and Grant Larson (designer of the Porsche Boxster) were part of a subversive group of young designers who were interested in using retro design themes.
In 1991 Thomas moved to Volkswagen-Audi's new advanced design studio in Los Angeles and met J Mays, who was also interested in retro themes. They came to describe their outlook as "progressive emotional optimism," an embrace of both history and technology to tell a story about a car.
The Mays-designed Audi Avus show car of 1991 was the catalyst that created enormous enthusiasm in the design community for retro-theme vehicles, and Mays came up with the notion in 1993 to recreate the Volkswagen Beetle. He invited Thomas to collaborate, and the two developed alternate versions of a modern Beetle that were synthesized in the 1994 Volkswagen Concept 1.
While on assignment in Germany to develop a cabriolet version of the Concept 1 for the 1994 Geneva show, Thomas made a sketch on a cocktail napkin of a design for an Audi convertible. Soon Thomas had been asked to develop a complete presentation, and he drew a single sketch of the car with a unique roofline. VW-Audi executive Ferdinand Piech preferred the coupe, not the convertible, and so the Audi TT came to be the hit of the 1995 Frankfurt auto show.
In the Concept 1 and Audi TT you can see Freeman Thomas's preference for simplified geometric forms, something young designers have emulated. Yet Thomas also has a rare gift of whimsy, and it helps his designs tell a story about heritage without becoming abstract and self-important. A vice president of advanced design for DaimlerChrysler since 1999, Thomas is trying to pass his enthusiasm along to a new generation of designers as the director of Chrysler's Pacifica studio in California.