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Tilted Cat Head
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Location: Manhattan, NY
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The next excitement to Concept Cars...Camoflauged Cars
Quote:
View: The Man Who Hides Cars
Source: Car and Driver
posted with the TFP thread generator
The Man Who Hides Cars
The Man Who Hides Cars - Feature
Disguising preproduction prototypes requires an artistic touch and a lot of black fabric. But who makes these camo kits? And how?
BY JOHN PHILLIPS, PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRENDA PRIDDY & CO., STEVE SILER, HANS G. LEHMANN/HIDDEN IMAGE, CARPIX, CHRIS DOANE, KGP PHOTOGRAPHY, CORIE AMSDEN, AND WADE RATZLAFF
June 2008
For three months, all I knew was his cell-phone number and his first name: Dan. To me, he was “Dan the Camo Man.” Dan told me he was “on the fence” about talking to me. “It’s a sensitive business,” he explained. “The whole idea is to avoid publicity.”
Dan owns Autocanvas, one of only two independent U.S. companies that create camouflage to thwart the public—and rival automakers—from eyeing preproduction cars.
When Dan reluctantly agreed to talk, he imposed a few rules. “I can’t name the manufacturers who buy body wraps from me,” he cautioned. And he refused to meet at his office. “It’s always locked,” he explained. “Only my employees go in or out. Not even my clients meet me there.” He told me that if I brought along some out-of-date spy photos he’d look at them but warned he could neither confirm nor deny whether he’d created the disguises. During the 18 years he’s been in the car-cloaking business, he’s never taken a photo of even one of his camouflage kits. “It’d be too damning to have something like that around,” he said, adding that he didn’t care to talk about the precise address of his factory, only that “it’s in the Detroit metro area.” And he warned that many of my questions would evoke an off-the-record response or no response at all.
We met at a restaurant that neither of us had ever set foot in. I told Dan I’d be wearing a tie and would have a copy of Car and Driver on the table in front of me. When he arrived, he slipped quietly into our booth, then scanned the restaurant, apparently searching for any of his clients’ faces.
“Hello,” he said in a whisper.
“This is like ‘Spy vs. Spy,’ ” I said.
Dan, it turns out, is 40-year-old Dan Hossack, and his personality doesn’t match the average dark and taciturn CIA agent’s, but it’s close. He is so soft-spoken that my tape recorder barely registered his voice, and he isn’t a guy who volunteers information eagerly. But otherwise he proved inquisitive, bright, and able to recite chronologically every step in the creation of an automobile.
“On the most basic level, I’m paid to thwart industrial espionage,” he began. “My clients demand privacy. They even do extensive background checks to ensure I’m who I say I am and haven’t ever leaked any corporate secrets. When strangers ask about my job, I’ll often say, ‘I make car covers.’ They understand that. But when my relatives talk about me to their friends, they say, ‘Well, Dan hides cars,’ and most people are mystified. They’re like, ‘What, stolen cars?’ Even the few people who actually understand what I do, they’ll often ask, ‘Seen any cool prototypes lately?’ And I have to say, ‘Nope, not a one.’ ”
Dan’s roots are in wraps. When he was 17, he began making canvas tops for speedboats and yachts. “I’d build them from scratch,” he said, “the metal supporting brackets, the whole works. After a few years, I guess my reputation got around, and one of the Big Three’s truck divisions called. They were building a truck too big to transport in an enclosed van, so they asked if I wanted to take a shot at camouflaging it. I talked to the engineers, then studied some disguised vehicles in their yard. I ended up doing that truck essentially for free, because it really interested me. I’ve been wrapping cars ever since.”
At first, Dan assumed automakers hid their prototypes merely to stump would-be copycats. Turned out there were other reasons. “Sometimes a company just doesn’t want a potential customer seeing an upcoming model and saying, ‘Hey, the new such-and-such is on the way, guess I’ll postpone buying for a year.’ That annoys the dealers. Or sometimes it’s just to hide a technical breakthrough—radical new headlights or something. And sometimes they’re only trying to hide how beat up the mules are. They’re often scratched, with no paint or mismatched paint, bad cut-lines. Some parts are taped on, and there are holes where test instruments have been attached. You don’t want a customer seeing that and saying, ‘Jeez, this company’s cars look like junk.’ ”
Camo kits, Dan explained, are no longer made of canvas, and few are made of vinyl. “Vinyl stretches in hot-weather tests in Death Valley,” he told me, “and then it contracts in the cold tests up north. So now we’re using a material created specifically for the purpose, called Polystrong. It’s like a pair of polyester pants but with a fuzzy backing. Our old vinyl used to break with 100 pounds of stretching, but the polyester can withstand 475 pounds. Plus, it breathes really well, and it’s one-half the weight of vinyl.”
In a typical new-car program, Dan arrives on the scene early. Way early. “I’ll often fly to the design studio, and they’ll show me the full-size clay,” he said. “I’ll overlay that in a see-through plastic material, then take a Sharpie and draw in all the surfaces: hills, valleys, compound curves, and where the material will lie dead flat. Then I draw the outlines for all the openings, like the headlights, taillights, side-marker lights, door handles, exhaust tips, and especially the grille. The engineers work closely with me whenever I get near the grille, because my camo absolutely cannot affect underhood temperatures.”
With his marked-up plastic pattern in hand, Dan returns to his factory, where he digitizes all the car’s surface measurements. After that, his 10 employees begin cutting and sewing the individual polyester pieces that will make up each wrap, a process that can easily take seven hours. The workers don’t know the name of the model they’ve been asked to disguise. To them, it’s just another black camouflage.
A typical full-body wrap for a sedan comprises eight pieces: a “sock” for the hood; a nose bra that extends rearward to cover the front quarter-panels; separate socks for each door; a trunk cover; and a “diaper” that not only hides the tail but also extends forward to disguise the rear quarter-panels.
The engineers who drive the prototypes insist that a camouflage be installable in 45 or fewer minutes, “which means I have to be able to do it in 30,” Dan explained. It must also be sturdy. “They’ll run it through automatic carwashes, for instance, and it’ll have to endure salt-spray tests.” Nor can the camouflage fly off. “There’s Velcro everywhere, because I know each car will be tested in excess of 100 mph, and the sports cars will be driven on racetracks.” The
disguise must remain intact as long as the car is officially a prototype—and that can be as long as 18 months to two years.
“For the engineers, unfortunately, the camo is just a big pain in the ass,” Dan observed. “The fabric can introduce noise. The pieces have to be installed in the correct sequence, with no leading edges facing into the wind. Done wrong, a disguise can add to a cockpit’s solar load. It can degrade aerodynamics. And a full vinyl kit on a pickup truck or large SUV can weigh 95 pounds—150 pounds if it’s wet. Even done in polyester it will weigh 45 pounds. So that definitely can affect fuel economy.”
Of course, not all prototypes are covered nose to tail. A model undergoing minor running changes might require merely a bra to hide the grille, plus a mask to disguise the taillights—the two items most likely to tip off a manufacturer’s identity. Sometimes, an artful application of tape or decals is sufficient. “With decals, I can insinuate all sorts of shapes,” he said. “I like animal prints best—zebra stripes, leopard spots. You can apply tape that makes straight edges look wavy or curvy. You can turn ovals into squares and make concave surfaces look convex. Some of it actually hurts to look at, it’s so jarring. Which is the point—to distract your eye. I can use decals that suggest shading from white to gray to black, creating shadows where none exists. Tape is also good on C-pillars, where, for instance, you can make a hatchback look like a coupe.”
At the other end of the continuum are “the full Batmans,” the really complicated disguises worn by high-profile cars whose shapes must absolutely, positively remain under wraps. “On those,” he continued, “what we do is insert carved chunks of Styrofoam or molded ABS or bubble wrap into fabric pockets of the cover itself, creating bulges and ridges.” Sometimes such lumps are clumsy blocks that are obvious fakes. But sometimes they’re artful slivers that suggest an aggressively flared fender where none exists, or a “Bangle butt” trunklid, or a hood scoop, or a rear overhang that really hangs. Dan can make polyester wraps in almost any color, but the manufacturers always specify black, which makes it trickier for a camera’s lens to read shadows.
If a full-on disguise is ordered, Dan has more than the exterior to worry about. “When the engineers stop for lunch,” he said, “people will sometimes peer inside the car, so I might make a custom flap that folds down to cover the IP and center stack.” Of course, even as Dan sweats such details, a manufacturer might not. He has seen fully camouflaged prototypes whose steering hubs boldly pronounced the brand. Ditto the wheels’ center caps. But he’s also had clients so paranoid that they wanted him to attach a rival company’s actual logo to a grille, as recently happened in Europe, where a Mercedes-Benz was spied sporting a chrome Hyundai flying H.
“I won’t do that,” Dan asserted. “That’s a copyrighted logo, and it’s not mine to use as I please. You know, if I were Hyundai, I’d be annoyed by that. Anyway, there are much easier ways to trick people.”
One way, it turns out, is to photograph a rival car’s headlights and then transform that image into replica decals, similar to those on the snouts of NASCAR stock cars. The fake lights can be tucked into the front mask, or they can be pasted directly atop the prototype’s headlight lenses. Either way, they’re easily removed under the cover of darkness. “That’s when the engineers do a lot of airflow testing anyway,” he said, “because at night they can remove the whole front mask.”
Dan thinks the future of high-end disguises may be custom-made pieces of injection-molded plastic attached directly to the car, creating bulges where the sheetmetal is flat and flat surfaces where the sheetmetal is bowed. “I’m really interested in hard-plastic camo,” he explained. “For one thing, it has the capability of being quieter than fabric. It won’t flap and is less likely to blow off. Done right, plastic also won’t make the car look so obviously camouflaged, meaning it won’t draw so much attention.”
Dan won’t say how many camouflage kits he produces annually, but it has to be in the hundreds. “On a specialty car that’s basically hand-built,” he said, “I may do only 20 kits. Then, as the car nears production, maybe 60 more. But if it’s a really big mainstream model, the manufacturer might order 200 to 275 kits right out of the box.” Neither will he specify how much each disguise costs, although the range reportedly extends from hundreds of dollars for a tape-and-decal job to $2000 to $3000 for a stem-to-stern body wrap. Fortunately for Autocanvas, car manufacturers destroy their camo kits once a car goes into production. “They’re pretty worn out by then,” Dan advised, “and, anyway, they don’t fit anything else.”
I asked Dan if he’s ever disguised any megabuck supercars—Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maybachs. He paused, then said, “You know, I have the best job in the world.” Then he smiled. I asked if he created the original camo for his daily driver, a C6 Corvette. “I can neither confirm nor deny that,” he replied, smiling again.
After our meeting, Dan and I stood in front of the restaurant and exchanged business cards. I told him I’d be in touch. He remained immobile, staring at me. Finally, I turned left to walk away. Dan turned right.
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2009 Nissan Qashqai
2010 Ford Mustang
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Nothing is as cool as a concept car, that is until you start seeing preproduction cars on the road wearing masquarades. I remember as a kid in on a family vacation, the first generation Mercedes C and E class were "touring" with us as we drove around the hot Arizona desert. It was an amazing thing seeing something before it hit mainstream. It had no camo, but it also had no MB designations on it whatsoever. Only a person who knew MB styling could see the heritage.
I have been lucky seeing many cars that I shouldn't have seen, well mainly because in LA they hid in plain sight. The most exciting car I ever saw was the Toyota Sera near Ventura Blvd.
enjoy the article...
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06-30-2008, 07:12 PM
