If you know of anyone that owns or works at a custom shop, this becomes almost laughable. So many folks want an amazing ride but don't want to pay for the time it takes to make such a vehicle happen. They are more than happy to try to haggle prices and then look at parts catalog to compare rates of individual pieces of the equation, when they are forgetting the most valuable aspect of this whole operation, is the craftman's knowledge.
We applaud anyone that can figure out a way to do their craft and earn a living at it. As our nation trudges forward, we are continually losing more and more trade craftsmen who are told at a younger age, that college is the only path to a great career. We beg to differ. College is just one option of many, but what ultimately makes the difference is the aptitude to work hard and break new ground in whatever career path you choose. Choices will always have to be made, but we hope more folks get back to working with their hands and gain an intimate knowledge of machinery.
The article below from Wired Magazine's blog called Autopia caught our eye as we dug seeing a different style of vehicle being rebuilt. Yeah, maybe these rides are a bit overpriced, but what we laugh about are the comments at the bottom. Folks are so damn mad about the rides being sold to millionaires. Quit crying about price if you want a cool ride and go build it to prove what you can do with your own two hands.
"When
a work lifts your spirits and inspires bold and noble thoughts in you,
do not look for any other standard to judge by: the work is good, the
product of a master craftsman."
Jean de la Bruyere
Jean de la Bruyere
Link to original post on Wired Autopia
Check out more rides from Icon
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| Icon’s re-imagining of a 1965 D200 pickup truck, built atop a new Dodge 3500 chassis. Photo: Courtesy Icon |
Even stripped bare, his meticulous six-figure homages to classic off-road vehicles feature a cascade of tantalizing details. Mandrel-bent steel frames feature tolerances befitting a fine watch. Aerospace-grade stainless steel fasteners are liberally utilized, as are top-shelf items like hose clamps from Switzerland and gleaming CNC-milled aluminum components.
Ward moves to another wing of his shop, where a nearly completed Icon FJ45 – a stunning reinterpretation of a classic Toyota Land Cruiser – is undergoing final assembly. Ward points out polarized visors made by the same company that supplies Learjet, instruments inspired by Bell & Ross timepieces, and a convertible top worthy of a Mercedes-Benz. The snaps securing that top, by the way, are the very same you’ll find on a Bentley or Aston Martin.
“It’s asinine,” the 42-year-old Ward admits. “They’re like $9 apiece, versus 30 cents apiece. But their aesthetic and longevity is so much better.”
Icon occupies a rarefied corner of the auto industry, a place where buyers like Apple design guru Jonathan Ive happily wait a year or more for a hand-built truck more expensive than a Porsche 911 Turbo. This is the intersection of aesthetics and functionality, a place long inhabited by high-end hot rod builders and vintage car restorers. Icon isn’t building showpieces, either, but machines quite capable of carrying their well-heeled occupants to the farthest corners of the earth.
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| Jonathan Ward cuts hot rolled steel to make structural components for his Icon cars. Each car is handcrafted in his studio in Chatsworth, CA. Photo: Mae Ryan/Wired |
Ward’s unwavering emphasis on quality and his dedication to design recalls the golden era of bespoke coachbuilding, a time when craftsmen like Figoni & Falaschi spared no expense crafting exquisite automobiles. Yet even as he looks back, Ward has one foot in the future. For all the grief it has suffered of late, Ward believes the auto industry is on the cusp of a new era, one that could see upstarts wrest control from the old guard. Companies that stress innovation and creativity have the potential to create small but seismic shifts in how the industry addresses design, engineering, and even marketing.
“He’s a freak,” Icon client Mark Dowley says of Ward. “He is just so damn gifted. Why some major automotive manufacturer hasn’t bought his company, I will never understand, because the guys who are creative craftsmen and can take the through-line from design all the way to manufacturing are a rarity. Jonathan is one of those guys.”
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| Jonathan Ward, founder of Icon, fine-tunes the body of one of his creations. Each car is handcrafted in Chatsworth, CA. |
“The more remote and harsh the terrain, the more people were adamant followers and believers in their Land Cruisers,” he says.
Land Cruiser owners are fanatics about their rides and go to great lengths to keep them running. But most restoration shops won’t give classic utility vehicles a second glance. Ward saw an opportunity to provide the off-road crowd with the same craftsmanship and reverence typically afforded big-ticket restorations.
Few thought he’d make it. Land Cruisers are essentially Japanese Jeeps, the automotive equivalent of a pack mule. Who’d spend the money to restore one? Ward, sitting behind a 1950s-era Steelcase desk cluttered with sketches, models and a clock pulled from a MiG, chuckles as he recalls the early days of TLC. He didn’t consult an accountant, he didn’t consider how it might play with focus groups. He just did it. He pursued “the purity of the original version, for better or worse.” And when he tabulated the cost of his first job, he came to a sad but inevitable conclusion.
“Ah, shit,” he recalls thinking. “This is not a viable business.”
Thwarted by the paradox of creating a successful venture around building 50-year-old trucks with six-figure prices, Ward approached client and friend Millard Drexler, chairman and CEO of the J. Crew Group. “What do I do?” he asked.
“I told him to stick to what he did well and not to compromise,” Drexler recalls. “There’s always a good potential market for beautifully designed cars that are made with a great amount of care, affection, and integrity.”
In other words, if you build it, they will come. Sure enough, they came. TLC’s momentum picked up. Toyota caught wind of Ward’s cult following about a dozen years ago — inevitable, given that Ward’s customers included some high-ranking Toyota execs — and company CEO Akio Toyoda stopped by.
“That, to us, was like god visiting the church,” Ward says.
Toyota, lacking the heritage of a brand like Land Rover, wanted to tap the nostalgia craze sparked by the rebirth of cars like the Mini Cooper and the Volkswagen Beetle. Toyoda asked if Ward might reimagine the iconic FJ-series Land Cruiser.
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| Ward quality-controls the engine of an Icon truck before it goes through assembly. The 1965 D200 crew cab in the background was once used on the Union Pacific railways and is now reborn with a new chassis and a massively powerful diesel engine. |
Well into the build, Toyoda called with a favor. He wanted Ward to build two more vehicles. Ward scrambled, and eight months later loaded three trucks onto an 18-wheeler headed for the 2011 SEMA show. And then something curious happened: Toyota pulled the trucks from the show. Even now, it isn’t exactly clear why. Maybe they were too whimsical, too wild for public consumption. More likely, they simply did not appear modern enough for Toyota’s sensibilities.
“What he delivered was a very retro body,” says Bruce Hunt, a product planning manager for Toyota’s truck division. “It was difficult to engage our senior managers or our parent company to look backward and build the vehicle.”
Ward agrees.
“In Japanese corporate ethic, especially Toyota’s, looking back on design of the past is considered a big business no-no. It’s always about moving forward,” he says.
Move forward it did. Roughly five years after pulling the plug on Ward’s project, Toyota rolled out its own reinterpretation, the FJ Cruiser. It bears as much resemblance to the original as BMW’s modern Mini does with the classic Austin Mini of yore.
“In my humble opinion,” Ward shrugs, “they lost the utilitarian roots of the truck entirely.”
Ward is not alone in this perspective. And he considers the zeitgeist of retro design, littered with reduxes like the Fiat 500, VW Beetle and Chrysler’s frequent trips down memory lane, as an “anime pit where they turn it into a cartoon version of vintage, like a Gen Y meets PlayStation kind of thing.”
Still, Ward knew he was on to something. He realized people relish the look of the original Land Cruiser, but not necessarily the experience. A vintage FJ rides like, well, a truck. It’s rough. It’s noisy. It’s slow. So he launched Icon in 2007 to execute the concepts he explored with Toyota, without corporate constraints on his vision. He’d build the truck he wanted, not the one Toyota did.
They look old, but they’re thoroughly modern, thanks to a legal loophole that allows Icons to be registered as new vehicles just as long as Ward starts with an old one. That loophole, plus the fact Ward owns the trademarks to names like FJ and CJ, lets him sidestep IP and copyright issues.
Icon currently builds six vehicles: four FJ homages, a Jeep CJ tribute and a re-imagined Ford Bronco that is headed to customers’ driveways soon. At this week’s SEMA show, Ward will show off two new creations: a topless version of the Bronco, and the Reformer, his D200 pickup truck remake — an official collaboration between Icon and Dodge.
A bare-bones Icon CJ3B starts at $77,000, while a loaded Bronco comes in at $215,000. Few customers have a problem with that and are only too happy to request expensive options like, say, race-ready brakes. “By the time [customers] wrap their heads around my stupendous pricing,” Ward says, “they start clicking all the boxes.”
Icon has delivered over 100 trucks so far, the majority of them Icon FJs. The list of people who’ve put one in their driveway includes designer Marc Newson.
“Icon fits well in the context of design, bridging (and blurring) gaps between old and new,” Newson says. “It also acknowledges that classics should be revered. It’s kind of like luxury recycling.”
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| Ward takes time to inspect every aspect of his creations, including body-panel fitment. |
“They sound like a PT boat coming off idle,” says Texas rancher Dave Blevins, who owns an Icon FJ and has a second on the way. “Watching the Land Rover crowd snap their necks as I blow by them on the freeway is damn near worth the price of admission.”
Blevins also insists his Icon rides “many times better” than the original. Indeed, a test drive reveals a curious combination of an on-road hot rod sensibility combined with a voracious ability to surmount virtually any off-road trail. Inside, the Bronco’s optional Chilewich woven vinyl textile completes a brutally functional yet surprisingly comfortable interior.
“I like them because they’re works of art that work and you can use,” Drexler says.
Having thoroughly reworked the classic off-roader, Ward is turning his attention to the rat rod aesthetic currently popular with the hot rod set. His Derelict line is more playful, but just as meticulous in design and execution. Icon takes any decrepit classic from 1930 through 1960, then retrofits it with a contemporary drivetrain, interior and… That’s it. The exterior, with rusted panels, peeling paint and often mismatched parts, is left as-is.
“It takes a fairly evolved automotive taste to grasp what we’re up to,” Ward acknowledges, “Particularly with the Derelict.”
Ward’s daily driver is a 1952 Chrysler Town & Country wagon with a DeSoto front end. On the outside, it looks so ramshackle you expect to find a homeless guy sleeping inside. But the mechanicals beneath its oxidized exterior are 21st century, and its interior has been refreshed with a carefully modulated patina. It drives as smoothly and comfortably as anything on the streets today, with taut handling and satisfying acceleration despite barge-like proportions. Derelicts are just as expensive as his trucks, running $120,000 to $220,000. It’s a staggering price for a car meant to look like it’s been baking in the sun for decades, but Ward’s built five so far and has three more in the works.
If the ratty look isn’t your thing, Icon’s Reformer line offers museum-quality, built-to-order restorations of vintage cars updated with discreetly disguised modern powertrains. Their cost of entry starts at around $190,000, and can reach up to $1 million for the most ambitious project. Reformer models so far include an Aston Martin Vanquish inspired by a 1960s-era DB4 Zagato GT.
Icon’s expansion has been slow and steady, but Ward has taken steps to increase production, including moving to a sprawling new 40,000 square-foot warehouse in Chatsworth, California, and expanding the scope of the vehicles he tackles. Now that his reputation is cemented, if only among a small but sufficiently affluent segment of classic car cognoscenti, Ward muses about his next project.
“I want to build a modern Volkswagen Thing so bad,” he pines, referring to the remarkably banal four-door utility vehicle the German automaker introduced in the late 1960s. This being the 21st century, however, Icon’s version could feature a diesel-electric drivetrain wrapped in environmentally friendly vinyl polymer bodywork.
“I could be dreaming,” Ward says with a chuckle. “But it hasn’t stopped me so far.”
All photos: Mae Ryan/Wired"
