It Was 20 Years Ago Today...

Two decades is a long time to be working at one company, but when the company has changed so significantly over that period it doesn't feel like standing still at all. Looking back at a 20 year career that developed in parallel with the success of Plasan

The 2nd of September 2001 was my first day at Plasan. I was 26 years old, just a few years out of Coventry University where I'd studied Transport Design, and a few years back in Israel where I had been trying to reconcile a childhood desire to be a car designer with living in a country that had no automotive industry. I had done a bit of freelance design work, working on concepts for mobility scooters and the like, but was essentially biding my time in a soul-sapping hi-tech job that paid the rent while pitching myself to local bus manufacturers and specialists like Tomcar with the rare skills that I was bringing to Israel from Britain. One of those companies had been Plasan, then a very small company on a Galilee hill that used composite materials to make armoured panels for military vehicles, primarily at the time the Jeeps and Humvees of the IDF.

I had been trying to reconcile a childhood desire to be a car designer with living in a country that had no automotive industry

I had visited Plasan on Kibbutz Sasa some time in 1999 and seen the small workshop which had four vehicles squeezed into a space barely adequate for two. One of them was something I absolutely had not expected to see on a remote northern kibbutz and I remember blurting out loud "is that a Hindustan Ambassador?!" to the surprise of the prototyping department manager, Kobi Ben-Ari who seemed equally amazed and disturbed that I knew what this Indian saloon based on the ancient Morris Oxford actually was. I showed my portfolio of work and that elicited a response of "very impressive - if and when we have the need for a vehicle designer we'll call you". I had interpreted this as "thanks, but no thanks" and returned to Tel Aviv where I was living. It was nearly two years later that I got an unexpected phone call from the COO, Ilan "Ingi" Shwartz. "Remember us? Remember how we said that if and when we need a vehicle designer we'll call? Well, we're calling".

I drove up in a borrowed Lancia Prisma to find that Plasan had not changed very much in the intervening 2 years, but that the Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon had left them seeking export markets and following some initial success with India they had a project to armour the Volvo S80 for a certain country's government. They understood that they needed to up their game when it came to interior trim and finish, and mostly wanted me to help them hide the armour inside by redesigning plastic parts and trim in the original Volvo style but subtly reshaped to accommodate the composite armour panels and thicker glass inside. And that was how I joined Plasan's prototyping department as their tenth team member and the company's first vehicle designer. Plasan in total was only around 80 employees at this point and was turning over maybe $3m in a good year. But this was the first week of September 2001 and everything was about to change.

But this was the first week of September 2001 and everything was about to change

In just my second week at Plasan I was in the workshop, hacking away at a Volvo door trim and thinking about vacuum forming an alternative to the deep pockets that we were going to fill with armour when the radio we were listening to started talking about a plane hitting the World Trade Center in New York. Without the accompanying images being broadcast on TV our assumption was that an inept Cessna pilot had made a mistake but when the second plane hit it became clear that something big and ominous was happening. It is not my intention here to write about that attack, the massive human tragedy, and the profound consequences that it had on the world, but it would be amiss to discuss how Plasan developed over the ensuing years without that context. My personal story of 20 years at Plasan coincides precisely with the evolution of Plasan in that suddenly disrupted post-9/11 world.

The Volvo S80 had been a slightly frustrating project to try and prove my worth with. The whole idea was to make my work invisible. If I was successful then people would open the doors on the car, see nothing out of the ordinary, and wonder what exactly I had done. Which is exactly what happened. My second project was a bit more of a vehicle design exercise, creating some new external body parts for a Volvo FL6 truck to surround the now flat armoured glass and try to blend it into the aperture previously occupied by a larger curved windscreen. As with the S80 parts, the work was all very manual, making moulds for vacuum-forming and fibre-glass with my own hands, and beginning to establish the infrastructure for undertaking more ambitious vehicle design projects at Plasan.

Then an opportunity to really show what I could do presented itself. We had been commissioned by ELVO, then the Greek partner of AM General, to design a new armoured Humvee for the Hellenic Army. I have told this story here before and won't retell it in detail now but please follow this link to read it because more than anything, this is the story of the birth of armoured vehicle design, certainly at Plasan. The short version is that Plasan took a massive gamble on a creative design which really put us on the world stage as a company who could design armoured vehicles and work with major OEMs, taking on the role not just as a supplier of armoured panels but as a partner to design and supply whole vehicle bodies as kits for local assembly. It was to become the recipe for Plasan's meteoric growth over the decade that followed.

Plasan took a massive gamble on a creative design which really put us on the world stage

After that M1114GR HMMWV we started to get involved with US projects, mostly through truck manufacturers Oshkosh and Navistar. The US military, together with the British and others, had gone into Afghanistan and Iraq with unprotected Humvees, trucks and troop carriers, thinking that after a few weeks of "Shock & Awe" air bombardment the Taliban and army of Saddam Hussein would drop their weapons leaving them to lead a relatively safe low-key peace-keeping operation. They were wrong. Tragically and painfully wrong. Yes, the Iraqi army dropped its weapons and abandoned their bases, but the allies had not adequately considered that a melee of insurgent groups would fill the vacuum and what they could do with the weapons and high explosives that the standing army had left behind. The improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and roadside bombs that rapidly peppered the landscape were threats that Plasan understood well, it was what the IDF had been facing from the similar Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon in the 1990s and what our own Humvees had been designed to defeat. So while the allied armies literally didn't know what was hitting them, Plasan had solutions, and our agile prototyping department was able to quickly develop retrofit armour kits for trucks such as the Oshkosh MTVR. These composite armour kits were saving lives within days of being fitted by the troops in the field. They were a very effective patch on the old trucks, but they were still a patch and it was obvious that what was really needed were brand new vehicles purpose designed for the situation in Iraq.

the allied armies literally didn't know what was hitting them

By now it was 2006 and we had already become a prolific designer and supplier of armoured vehicle kits, not only for the US, but also for the UK, Holland, and many others. This year we had shown our SandCat, initially as a concept demonstrator showing how we could take any chassis (in this case a Ford F-Series SuperDuty) and design an armoured hull for it to turn it into a comprehensively designed armoured vehicle. I myself was developing personally together with Plasan. In April I got married, using the prototype SandCat as my wedding car. We were working with Navistar on the MXT-MVA (later to be used by the British Army as the Husky TSV and by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in Fast & Furious 6) when the US military started talking earnestly about procuring MRAPs, Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles.

At the AUSA show in Washington in October 2006 MRAPs were everywhere. There were eight of them in fact from different companies all vying for a slice of what was to be a big pie. We weren't on any of them. What we had was a presentation on my laptop and a pile of drawings. We threw them down on the table of the Navistar meeting room on a mezzanine above their stand at the show. Our idea was bold and innovative. The competing MRAPs were all welded steel hulls over bespoke automotive components. They were labour-intensive to manufacture and not at all suitable for mass-production. The US DoD wanted thousands of them and were preparing to procure different vehicles from multiple vendors to build up the fleet as quickly as possible because soldiers were being killed out there at a rate that could not be tolerated. Plasan's plan was to build a bolted & bonded "Kitted Hull" like our SandCat body and like we were already doing on the MXT, and to assemble it on a commercial chassis already in production. We had sketches of a design for an MRAP intended for mass production down a conventional existing truck line. The Navistar management looked over the big hall of MRAP candidates in Washington and figured that they had nothing to lose by trying. They shipped us a 7000-series chassis and worked on militarizing it while we worked on the armoured hull for it.

in October 2006 MRAPs were everywhere... we had sketches of a design

By January 2007, just 3 months later we had a prototype and had already blast tested a few iterations of the hull. In February the first two pre-production kits arrived for assembly at the Mississippi production line. In April they were delivered to the Aberdeen Test Center in Maryland for blast testing and on/off road trials. In testing they exceeded all expectations and then we were asked the question, how long will it take us to ramp up to 200 vehicles per month? The other eight MRAP manufacturers had presented 12 month plans to ramp up production of their welded hulls from the one a day that they could get off a jig to a rate that was 10 times that. We promised 200/month within 3 months, "unless you want more than that". In June, Navistar got its first order for 1200 vehicles. By October 2007, just 12 months after throwing sketches onto the table at AUSA we had supplied 2000 of what was now known as the MaxxPro MRAP, and had back orders for another 2000 that were rolling off the line at a rate of 500/month. And most importantly it was saving lives. It became the rock star of MRAPs, designed as a great vehicle that happened to be very well protected rather than as a compromised moving fortress. And due to its easily manufactured and repairable Kitted Hull architecture it was there in volumes, swiftly deployed when it mattered. The Kitted Hull was also a modular concept that allowed for quick development of variants and upgrades. Could we make it a little shorter and lower to be more suitable for Afghanistan? Sure, just a few weeks design work, another few weeks production engineering, and within 6 weeks of the phone call they were assembling the smaller MaxxPro Dash model in Mississippi.

We all knew though that these big MRAPs were also a temporary fix. Ultimately militaries need that high level of protection in much smaller and more agile vehicles. We were working with Oshkosh on the major JLTV programme to replace 150,000 Humvees when the call went out to industry to provide an "M-ATV", an MRAP All-Terrain Vehicle. Like with MaxxPro for Navistar, it was our initiative to suggest to Oshkosh that we could take the design that we were working on for JLTV and adapt it to be mounted to their MTVR chassis to quickly create a production-ready M-ATV. The Oshkosh M-ATV won the tender as a single source and in next to no time we were making them at the astonishing rate of 1000 vehicles every month. The US Army literally couldn't plug in the radios as fast as Plasan and Oshkosh were turning out the vehicles (a situation that caused them to start piling up at the nearby Wittman airfield).

The US Army literally couldn't plug in the radios as fast as Plasan and Oshkosh were turning out the vehicles

By now (2010) Plasan was a totally different company from the small kibbutz business that I had joined. It had become an international force with facilities in France and the US and a collection of subsidiaries, working with all of the major vehicle OEMs and integrators for militaries around the world. We had a reputation for innovation, high quality design and attention to detail, being a reliable supplier, and most importantly for saving lives. Thousands of people were home with their families because they had been in a Plasan protected vehicle when it mattered. We were very aware at this point though that much of our commercial success was dependent on large but short production runs based on urgent requirements coming from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We won a major Australian programme with Hawkei and that was a longer term project, but still we were thinking a lot in the early 2010s about "the day after" and this brought us to diversify, including putting greater emphasis on the commercial automotive company, Plasan Carbon Composites (PCC), that we had established alongside the military focused Plasan North America.

I was no longer a lone designer in a team of 10 prototyping specialists, each of us had effectively expanded to become a department in our own right and I was at one point managing a design team of twelve within what was now an engineering department of around 150. Plasan globally was around 1500 employees and my role as Chief Designer grew to become Design Director with involvement also in our global subsidiaries, including PCC dealing with the regular automotive industry to which we were introducing mass-produced composites on cars such as the Corvette.

The last ten years have seen me helping Plasan through a process of diversification, expansion, and further innovation, both in the military and commercial fields. The SandCat, which was originally a concept demonstrator has become a popular product in its own right, broadening into a family of vehicles fielded in almost 20 countries on five continents. We've worked with OEMs around the world, some we can talk about, to some we will forever be a silent partner. I have had the privilege of designing some vehicles that became national icons. I have enjoyed creating some, like the Lockheed Martin AVA and the Yagu, that created big buzzes when first revealed due to their unconventional designs. I've had vehicles feature in movies like World War Z and The Dark Knight Rises. In what was an unexpected career highlight I've had two of my designs (the Navistar MXT-MVA and the Oshkosh M-ATV) made into models sold by Matchbox. These things, like being featured in the car magazines that I grew up reading, have never been something that I take for granted due to the unusual route that my career has taken and how unlikely they were to happen.

I came to Israel 23 years ago with a lot of ambition and a degree that was all but useless here

I came to Israel 23 years ago with a lot of ambition and a degree that was all but useless here. When I started at Plasan I figured that it was a step in the right direction but never imagined that I would still be here 20 years later. I thought that I'd spend a couple of years cutting my teeth in an industry that was adjacent to where I actually saw myself, while making the contacts I'd need to move on and do "actual car design". But this dynamic company always had something else interesting for me to do, fresh challenges and satisfying projects. We are still managing to innovate and are constantly pushing boundaries and moving our industry forward. To that end we have some really interesting new products and vehicles that we'll be revealing soon. When I first stood proudly next to the Greek M1114GR Humvee alongside our CEO, Dani Ziv, back in 2003 I rather arrogantly said to him "I bet you never thought we'd do something like this when you hired me". He cut me down with a "you're wrong, this is exactly what I expected, and we've only just got started". It turns out that he was right. So as I look back on the last 20 years and everything that we've achieved together those are the words that echo to me. We've only just got started.

Nir Kahn is the Director of Design for?Plasan?and has been responsible for vehicle design in the company for 20 years, including the design of the Navistar MaxxPro MRAP, Oshkosh M-ATV and JLTV, the?Plasan SandCat and Yagu, and many others