When he was eleven years old, A3Design Group president Nathan Armstrong attended the Birmingham Motor Show in the UK. He remembers the day as typically English – cold and drizzly – and the air around the displays redolent with gas fumes and rubber. And then there was the car: a 1985 Lamborghini Countach 5000S – gleaming red, oozing with boyhood possibilities. Very much the epitome of the 80’s vehicle, the car presented such an overstated, aggressive visual aesthetic that to fight the urge not to be instantly infatuated was an effort in futility. Brash, excessive, and full of testosterone, this Italian icon of the day would stick in Armstrong’s cranial closet as the significant turning point shaping his design career.
Time shifting 22 years ahead, away from the Birmingham drizzle, finds the now locally situated design engineer sitting in elemente’s boardroom in downtown Calgary reflecting on his life-altering encounter with the Lamborghini.
“That was the first time I woke up out of a dreamy, child-like mind state and saw something real,” he says. “I have a strong suspicion that we spend the majority of our adult lives trying to re-create the best moments of our childhood.”
As a boy, he watched his father, a luthier, turn pieces of old wood into guitars of remarkable beauty. Growing up, Armstrong sought to fulfil a similar vocation, though in a very different realm. The moment with the Countach made sure that it would be all about cars. His first foray into the automotive world occurred while studying drafting at Golden West College in California. Working as a Jaguar and Lotus mechanic in Costa Mesa, he learned first hand a ‘hands-on’ approach on how to build automobiles. “That was the real education,” he says. “Working on cars physically.”
After college, Armstrong worked briefly for Arrowhead Products on Delta IV rockets and joint strike fighters, before being hired by legendary concept builders Metalcrafters to work on show cars like the PT Cruiser, the GM Precept and the Cadillac XLR.
Armstrong’s participation on the now famous Foose Hemisfear concept project involved body and chassis engineering. Chip Foose brought in and white-light scanned a 1/4 scale model of the open wheeled 500 HP concept. Armstrong then worked closely with a friend to develop the exterior body surface in GeoMagics, which then received his signature engineering evaluation and refinements. (See images for the finished product.)
After Metalcrafters, Armstrong joined Aria Group as Lead Project Engineer, where he built concept cars and preproduction prototypes. Finally, in 2004, after helping to pioneer and perfect low-cost, low-volume manufacturing techniques, Armstrong established A3Design Group to design, engineer and assemble custom vehicles and vehicle parts.
Armstrong’s design-engineering goal is to turn a designer’s vision into a working vehicle. Inspired by the work of designer-engineers like Ferdinand Porsche and British contemporary Gordon Murray, A3Design Group has engineered projects such as the T3 Motion Standup Vehicle, the Hemisfear, two Detroit showcars, production car parts and a couple of surprises to be revealed this coming showcar season. Many prototype projects remain on the level of concept, destined to tour the show circuit before finding ‘rest’ in transportation museums.
However, a number of Armstrong’s vehicles have gone into low-volume production. Most recently, he was the primary body and interior engineer on the Aptera (see sidebar), a high-tech, environmentally friendly vehicle designed to run either on electricity or as a gasoline hybrid.
The crisis ::
By the time Armstrong’s childhood dream came true with the creation of A3Design Group, his passion had carried him far beyond the aesthetic pleasures of making visually responsive designs to the brink of a cultural revolution in automobile design – construction and ownership.
For the past ten years, global concerns over greenhouse gas emissions and the limit to fossil fuel supplies have led to calls for a complete overhaul of the automobile industry. Yet, for Armstrong at least, change has come with excruciating slowness, if it has come at all. Some of the problem, he believes, lies in outdated business models. Large car companies (i.e. the Big-3) would rather maintain their current approach to production than face the spectre of massive layoffs. But how do you layoff a significant portion of the automotive workforce and still keep friends? Perhaps a retooling of the existing Mesozoic business model, and CEOs with an environmentally friendly bear trap in the governmental feeding trough would fix the Big-3’s prehistoric mentalities? Yeah, perhaps. . .
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