Joey Ruiter’s latest creation, a car, is true. But is it a vehicle?
“What happens if what you expect isn’t there?”
This is the kind of question that drives Joey Ruiter’s design aesthetic, in general, and the driving force behind his latest motoring piece, “Consumer.”
Ruiter was the first person I met a few years back, when I had the opportunity to drive his Reboot Buggy. This futurist, elemental off-roader is one result of Consumer’s original question: “What do you want the car to be?”
The answer was almost agricultural. The Reboot Buggy was designed to replace the farmer’s go anywhere horse and buggy with a vehicle that could fulfill the old Model T requirements. Consumer now focuses on urban driving and defies all expectations about what it means “car”.
Name is a subtle play on culture. However, it also speaks to the most important element of the vehicle’s design, the expressive grille. The nose has a huge two-way mirror, surrounded by an air intake wraparound. It conceals large LED lights. Hidden lights can produce 54,000 lumens. They are angled down to not blind drivers ahead. Three white beams direct the light forward. Ruiter states that the overall design gesture “consumes all” light, dark, air, space, and time.
The vehicle’s edgy and geometric silhouette is a great example of how far you can push almost every automotive design convention. Ruiter says that “Every car designer begins with the wheels” and has eliminated rolling stock from Consumer. You can see a tiny bit of black rubber under the angular bodyside. However, it is so subtle that the car seems to hover from a distance.
The details of Consumer are more complex than what a quick glance at its slab-sided form will show. The bodysides have a variety of surfaces. The front is made from subtly faceted metal and folds forward to reveal the engine. While the back is covered in Xorel, a high-tech indoor-outdoor fabric that is plant-based and highly-tech. In this context, utterly functional elements such as side-steps (there is no door) and the matte gas caps become almost ornamental.
There is actually a functional vehicle underneath that concept car exterior. It has the appropriate dimensions to be used in urban environments. Consumer’s footprint is much smaller than a Mini Cooper Hardtop. It has a wheelbase of around 90 inches and an overall length 135 inches. The curb weight of the Consumer is just 1,250 pounds. Its front-mounted powertrain makes it an economy car, but that doesn’t make it any less fun to drive. Drivers can feel involved in the forward progress with the open top and 33-inch height.
Ruiter claims that driving Consumer is about the same as riding a motorcycle. This is something I would love to experience. The designer is located in Grand Rapids, Michigan or you can take a short trip across the state to the motor1 headquarters. Yours truly appears to have a firsthand experience.
Every auto show season, we all see prototype cars and design experiments. Ruiter’s work excites me because it works. Although the design of Ruiter’s consumer product may not conform to our standard expectations of what a vehicle object should look like it does make it easy for car enthusiasts to desire to drive it.