What Was the Question Again?

How often do designers truly return to an old brief to create something completely new from old requirements? It can be a valuable exercise in shaking off old paradigms and no longer relevant solutions to problems that don't even exist anymore.

There is an often repeated story about how the width of a Roman horse's backside dictated the NASA Shuttle's triple rocket arrangement. I am sure that you have heard it before but the abridged version is that the need to transport the booster rockets by rail mean that they must fit through tunnels and that you can trace the size of modern train tunnels back through rail gauges to the gaps in Roman paving and therefore the size of their horses. The details or precise truth of the story isn't important but the lesson is; legacy constraints matter. Even the most modern products can be affected by design decisions taken many generations ago to solve very different problems.

For this reason, every so often a product needs a reset. Occasionally an entire product category gets a reset and changes everything. The iPhone is the classic example of a product's rule book being thrown out and a clean sheet approach creating a completely new type of product. This doesn't happen very often though. Legacy constraints of manufacturing, infrastructure, and customer expectations that new means bigger and better usually prevent companies from starting product development from a clean sheet. And so we get steady evolution of products, form-factors, and solutions; and often gradually bloating products. Over time these can move so far from their original brief that we don't even notice that they no longer answer the basic need that they originally set out to meet. Sometimes it helps to revisit the original brief and re-evaluate how you would answer that today, with modern technologies and capabilities.

It can be an interesting exercise. And quite often it fails to produce a successful alternative to the evolved product. There have been numerous attempts to reinvent the computer keyboard, ignoring its ancient mechanical typewriter roots, but still we are stuck with the QWERTY layout, originally intended to prevent typewriter arms from clashing together by distancing common letters from each other and now needlessly forcing you to dart around the keyboard like a whack-a-mole arcade game.

Manufacturers prefer to recycle old names on superficially similar designs

There have been surprisingly few attempts in the car world to revisit original design briefs. Manufacturers prefer to recycle old names on at best superficially similar designs. Before BMW relaunched MINI in 2000, the Rover Group presented a pair of concept cars called Spiritual. Their explicit purpose was to investigate what the spiritual successor to the classic Issigonis designed Mini could be. They returned to the original brief and much like the Mini had in 1959, created a wholly new package and design for a very small urban car. It didn't look much like a Mini, they were explicitly not attempting to simply pastiche the old design as VW had the Beetle around the same time. But it was undeniably a Mini, answering that original 1950s brief with 1990s technology and styling in an innovative rear-engined package.

They didn't build it.

BMW bought the Rover Group and decided that Mini was all about the sporty Cooper models, that Mini wasn't a practical cheap small car at all, but a sports hatch brand. And in fairness to them, the new MINI brand was an overwhelming success in a way that the much more Smart-like Spiritual quite probably would not have been.

Because sometimes the baggage of the name doesn't allow you to truly revisit the original brief. We are left with commercially successful but pastiche cars like MINI and the Fiat 500 or Land Rover Defender, or superficially applied historical names like DS and Mustang, and it is left to other manufacturers to quietly revisit those old briefs and create innovative new cars from them. Daimler's Smart being a case-in-point. Arguably much more in the spirit of the original Mini or 500 than either of those relaunched cars was, it drew nothing from Mercedes-Benz history, and that gave them the freedom to create a new type of city car.

What would happen if you tried to answer a brief like that with a clean sheet and state-of-the-art technologies?

In my world of military vehicles there is one clear example of a brief that needs revisiting. Of a very real need that after many decades of evolution has moved so far from the original intent that it has left an unanswered requirement precisely where the original vehicle had been so brilliant. I am talking about the Jeep. In the civilian market there is still a car that is remarkably similar to that original Willy's Jeep of 1941, the Jeep Wrangler hasn't strayed all that far from its military origins. But the military Jeep has. The Jeep was to be a 4-seat, 4x4, with 1/4 ton of payload. Simple to operate and maintain, tough and durable. It stayed that way through slow and steady evolution until its replacement in 1983 by the much bigger HMMWV - the "Humvee". Still with 4 seats, the HMMWV was wider, longer, with independent suspension and more payload. And despite the extra girth it did the job admirably through the first Gulf War, and broad international deployment through the 90s. But in the 2000s it hit its limitations as it hadn't been designed to be protected and as armour kits were added to protect it in Iraq and Afghanistan the residual payload was used up and it became neither especially well protected nor particularly useful as a systems carrier. And so the effort began to replace it with what became the JLTV, a design that I am intimately familiar with because Plasan developed it together with Oshkosh Defense, the eventual winner of this major US programme. I spent a few years with the extensive JLTV requirements, looking for the best ways to comply with the complex set of often conflicting written desires of the US Army and Marines. The Oshkosh JLTV answered its brief perfectly, but this brief no longer really resembled that of the original Jeep, and the 8t JLTV dwarfs the HMMWV as much as the 5.5t HMMWV had the little Jeep. I have written before about "feature creep", and the path from Willy's Jeep to JLTV is paved with feature creep; just adding a bit of this and a bit of that until the product becomes unrecognisable from its original intent.

JLTV answered its brief perfectly, but this brief no longer really resembled that of the original Jeep

What would happen then if you went back to the original WW2-era brief for a compact 4-seat 4x4 with a 1/4t flatbed, but added only the protection and modern systems that are essential today? What would happen if you tried to answer a brief like that with a clean sheet and state-of-the-art technologies? This is a question which we've been asking ourselves at Plasan. How might you approach the packaging of such a vehicle today? Could it include useful protection and payload and yet maintain the small footprint of a Jeep? How could the weight be kept down low enough that it is drivable by any new recruit with a regular car license rather than needing the truck license of most armoured vehicles? How can we give it the maneuverability and mobility of the original Jeep despite the addition of an armoured body? To move military vehicles into the future, we have taken a trip to the past and created something entirely new. We look forward to revealing it soon.

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