Bran Ferren has spent 4 years and millions of dollars constructing the most audacious exploration vehicle ever built. It’s mission: Take his 4-year-old daughter camping. Bran Ferren
CABIN The KiraVan's chassis has been stretched and reinforced so the cab, adapted from a Mercedes-Benz Unimog, can accommodate an advanced cockpit and secondary control room.
KITCHEN Fully stocked, the kitchen could provide for a family of three for two to three weeks; if some onboard gear were to be replaced with extra food, they could last as long as six weeks. Packed with a convection oven, microwave oven, induction and infrared cooktops, a fridge, and a freezer, the kitchen has all the basic necessities for a five-star meal.
DINING ROOM The KiraVan houses an ecofriendly bathroom, an upscale kitchen, and a luxe dining area. The only thing missing is a built-in coffee machine. A countertop one will have to do.
OFFICE The super vehicle could also someday help researchers, photographers, and anyone else who needs to travel to the most unreachable places on earth for long stretches of time.
SIMILAR GALLERIES
For all the risky adventures Bran Ferren has chased in the past six decadesâ€"a list that includes a variety of hazardous undertakings, from traveling through Afghan war zones to working in Hollywoodâ€"there was one highly perilous pursuit he never dared take on: parenthood. “Having a family,†Ferren says, “wasn’t a priority.â€
It’s a late-summer afternoon, and Ferrenâ€"celebrated inventor, technologist, former head of research and development for Disney’s Imagineering departmentâ€"is sitting inside a guesthouse-slash-storage facility on his ample East Hampton, New York, spread, drinking his third or fourth Diet Coke of the day. He’s 61 years old and towering, with a wily-looking red-gray beard and dressed in his everyday uniform of khaki pants, sneakers, and a billowy polo shirt. Ferren is the cofounder and chief creative officer of Applied Minds, a world-renowned tech and design firm whose on-the-record customer list includes General Motors, Intel, and the US Air Force; before that he worked on everything from Broadway shows to theme park rides.
But today Ferren is focused on his most important client: his 4-year-old daughter, Kira, who is just a few yards away, traipsing across the garden with a pal. Several years ago, when Ferren was still in his midfiftiesâ€"a time when many men are easing into their grandfather phaseâ€"his partner of more than 25 years, Robyn Low, told him that if he ever wanted to have a kid, the time was now. Finally having a child became a priority, and in 2009 Kira was born.
It took Ferren a while to adjust to fatherhood. He had to scale back on the hazardous work trips, and he had to curtail some of his more treacherous leisure activities, like racing motorcycles and flying helicopters. “I thought, what will it be like for my daughter if I end up becoming a cripple or dropping dead, doing something like that when she’s 4 years old? It changes your perspective.†The sacrifices, though, are worth it. “Everyone says, ‘Well, you’ve never felt love like this before,’†Ferren says. “It turns out to all be absolutely correct.â€
Bran Ferren 
Art Streiber
We leave the guesthouse and take a stroll around the grounds, where everywhere you turn there’s a project Ferren has initiated on his daughter’s behalf. On one side there’s a wood-shingled pod with a DeLorean-style door, which will serve as Kira’s playroom-slash-study area. (“The idea is that it’ll be a place for her to play until she’s old enough to date,†he says. “At which point we’ll fill it with concrete and roll it into the pond.â€) Nearby is a studio where he’s recording a series of interviews with some of his artist and designer friends in hopes that Kira will learn from them years from now. “One of the things about having a kid when you’re older is that you’re not going to see her through a lot of her life,†he says. “So what are the ideas and conversations that I might not get to have with her but that I’d like for her to think about?â€
Given Ferren’s ageâ€"he’ll be in his midseventies by the time Kira’s ready for collegeâ€"it makes sense that he’d want to leave some sort of words of wisdom for her. But he also wants to start teaching her about the world now, while they are both still young enough to explore it. “I’ve loved watching my daughter learn about life,†he says. “There’s a big world out there, and I’ve seen only a portion of it.â€
All parents obsess over the kind of life they want for their children, but Ferren is actually trying to design one. He’s inspired in part by his own parents, who encouraged him to examine the world around him. They took him to the Pantheon when he was only 7, they let him take apart machines to see how they worked, and they raised him in an environment with paintings and books and records at every turn. “I remember as a kid being shocked when I visited a friend’s house and it wasn’t filled with art,†he says.
Kira Ferren Art Streiber
Ferren is trying to create the same environment for Kiraâ€"one of constant, boundless learning. But he is not the type to simply buy her a globe and a few reference books. Ferren is a man who builds thingsâ€"huge, intricate, brazenly theatrical things. Fittingly, he has embarked on a childhood-enrichment project so lavish, ornate, and over-the-top it makes even the most aggressive tiger mom seem tame.
In the ’80s and ’90s, Ferren scouted locations for Hollywood features and documentaries in places like Death Valley and Alaska. Around the same time, he was also helping ABC develop some of its location trucks. As a result, he became enamored with off-road expedition vehicles. They were well suited for his many hobbies, including archaeology, mapping, and fine-art nature photography. He built one himself, which he called the MaxiMog, completing it in 2001. Adapted from a Mercedes-Benz all-terrain truck called the Unimog, the vehicle was equipped with videoconferencing equipment and a 40-foot mast with a camera that allowed passengers to see the terrain ahead. (An attachable trailer, meanwhile, featured a collapsible sleeping loft and an espresso machine.) A combination of rugged pragmatism and sleek design, the MaxiMog was eventually displayed at the New York Museum of Modern Art.
Around the time Kira was born, Ferren had an idea. What if he built an all-new, bigger and better expedition vehicle? No, more than that, what if he made the ultimate adventure truck, the very platonic ideal of such a thingâ€"which he could outfit for a family of three? He started to envision a vehicle that could take Kira nearly anywhere on earth without limitationâ€"a mix of high-powered machinery, bomb-shelter self-sufficiency, and luxe-life accoutrements. It would be a mobile, malleable five-star fortress. It could form the centerpiece of his and Kira’s exploration of the world and be her ride into the future. Before he drew up the first blueprints, he’d given it a name: the KiraVan.
Ferren then set out to build the thing, which required dealing with all manner of complicated questions. For example: What materials could he use that would endure both extreme cold and extreme heat? “You’d think it’d be harder to design a jet than an off-road car,†he says. “You’d be wrong. It actually gives you an appreciation for why there are so many shitty cars and why there are so few great anythings. Because, it turns out, to do a great thing is hard.â€
To answer the hundreds of questions nagging at him in his quest to build a supertruck, Ferren traveled all over the globe to seek the advice of experts. He spoke with mining consultants to learn how their equipment survives harsh conditions. He picked the brains of oil explorers to find out how their machinery functions over difficult terrain.
Now, nearly four years later, it is almost, sorta, kinda finished, and while Ferren won’t divulge the exact budget of the truck, he grants that its total cost is in the millions. If Ferren’s claims are to be believed, when it finally hits the road sometime this year it will be the most elaborate all-terrain vehicle ever builtâ€"a six-wheeled terrestrial spaceship capable of traversing nearly any terrain, from mud-swamped roads to rock-covered pathways to small bodies of water. It will be able to travel up to 2,000 miles without resupply and navigate slopes as steep as 45 degreesâ€"an incline that is difficult to walk up.
Then there are the extras, which include Kevlar-reinforced tires, more than a dozen interlocking communication systems, and a diesel-powered motorcycle “dinghy.†Add to that the KiraVan’s massive trailer, which is 31 feet long and more than 10 feet high and houses an ecofriendly bathroom, a custom-designed upscale kitchen, and Kira’s own “penthouse†loft (which she herself helped design). The only thing missing is a built-in espresso machine. A countertop one will have to do.
Because of his considerable intellectual and financial resources, Ferren can pursue his vision without regard to the usual constraints of time, money, or manpower. And he has. “Bran can go overboard,†says a good friend, former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. “Actually, for him, overboard is normal.†In fact, Ferren’s truck is a lot like Ferren himself: unapologetically audacious, highly adaptable, and more than a little extreme.
Ferren, it should be noted, is not especially particular about cars. When we first meet, he picks me up at an East Hampton train station in his 1986 Mercedes 300E, which is strewn with Kira’s Cheerios and takes a bit of coaxing to start up. “I’m of the old ‘buy it and run it into the ground’ school,†he says. “I’m as appreciative as the next person when I see a remarkable Bugatti. And I certainly admire what various designers and engineers have been able to accomplish. But that doesn’t make me a car guy.â€
Ferren spent his early childhood in Manhattan before his family relocated to its East Hampton property, parts of which were originally owned by Jackson Pollock. He grew up surrounded by engineersâ€"one of his uncles worked as a flight-test director for North American Rockwellâ€"and artists. His mother, Rae Ferren, who still lives on the property, is a renowned impressionist painter, while his father, famed abstract expressionist John Ferren, was a contemporary and friend of Pollock and Pablo Picasso; some of John’s work is now part of the Guggenheim permanent collection. “My father had several very distinctly different periods of painting,†Ferren says. “Some were geometric, some much more free-form. Watching him gave me at least a set of examples on which to base my own behaviors.â€
Growing up, Ferren would take apart surplus electronic equipment and furniture, trying to learn how they were built before eventually working on his own creations. One early invention was a robot he constructed for a high school talent show, which promptly (and intentionally) exploded when it came onto the stage. Ferren left before graduating, though he still wound up getting accepted into MITâ€"from which he promptly dropped out after a year.
In the ’70s, following a stint in summer-stock theaterâ€"he performed onstage and worked on lighting designâ€"Ferren was recruited to create shows for rock groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer. That led to Broadway shows like 1978′s Crucifer of Blood, a Sherlock Holmes tale for which Ferren used rumbling ultralow-frequency speakers and lightninglike strobe effects to give the audience the impression that a storm was actually brewing outside. “That was one thing I learned in theater,†Ferren says. “How you use theatricality and timing to do something that people think they understand but really don’t.â€
Soon Ferren had his own firm, cheekily named Associates & Ferren, and was getting big gigs in Hollywood, creating hyper-sensory visuals for the trippy 1980 sci-fi drama Altered States and whimsical special effects for the 1986 remake of Little Shop of Horrors (the latter earned Ferren an Oscar nomination). But he could never settle on just one thing, and between movie gigs he found time to work on projects ranging from specially filtered sunglasses to robot-controlled TV cameras to visual effects for a Paul McCartney tour. “He’s so knowledgeable about so many things that, at some point after meeting him, most people think, is this guy a bullshitter?†Myhrvold says. “But he really is that smart.†As Ferren and I cruise through the reliably psychotic Hamptons midday traffic, he adds, “There are people who are craftsmen, who really like doing the same thing over and over again. I’m not like that at all. To me, it’s ‘come up with a new idea nobody’s seen before, get it going enough to prove the point, and then get on with the next.’â€
In the late ’80s, a friend of Ferren’s introduced him to Robyn Low, a professional chef. Ferren hired her to consult on a kitchen he was building. “He asked me out, and I said, ‘No, I don’t date clients,’†Low remembers. “And he said, ‘Fine, you’re fired.’ And then we were off.†The two never married but have been together since.
By the early ’90s, Associates & Ferren’s client list was dominated increasingly by one name: Disney. In fact, Ferren would work on so many projects for the company that in 1993 it bought out his firm for an undisclosed sum and relocated Ferren to the West Coast, eventually making him president of research and development in the company’s Imagineering department. “His job,†then-CEO Michael Eisner says, “was to attack individual problems, like finding out how to make an elevator free-fall faster than gravity.â€
For that assignment, used in the Tower of Terror ride, Ferren and his team developed their own elevator system that could move at different drop speeds. Other big-scope assignments followed, like ABC’s Times Square television studioâ€"which required then-complex LED screens and blastproof glassâ€"and the high-speed General Motors Test Track ride at Epcot Center. “He was the instrument of change and creativity and craziness,†Eisner says. “What the Imagineers did was really an extension of what Walt Disney did, which was find a way to take technology and layer it with entertainment. And Bran was brilliant at that.â€
During his tenure at the company, Ferren created the Disney Fellows program, which brought in technologists, engineers, and even astronauts to work as in-house advisers. One of his first hires was Danny Hillis, a pioneer in the field of parallel supercomputing; the two hit it off, and in 2000 they left Disney to start Applied Minds.
The company quickly acquired a reputation as a sort of military-industrial toy shop. Visit its five-building Glendale, California, compound and it’s easy to see why. To enter you must step into a cherry-red English phone booth and pick up the receiver; suddenly a door opens and you’re inside an office that leads to a flotilla of workstations and machine shops. In one room, there’s a full-scale military command center mock-up, in another an immersive, real-time digital-imagery dome that uses 50 projectors to create a crisp, zoomable image of anything from satellite images to 3-D renderings. It’s the kind of place where you trip over a robot on the way to the bathroom.
Applied Minds proved to be the ideal playground for Ferren’s various creative compulsionsâ€"design, engineering, even old-fashioned showbiz razzle-dazzle. And it gave him the resources to dream bigger and crazier than ever beforeâ€"not that he’d really ever reined himself in.
Click to Enlarge. 
Bryan Christie Design
The Places Ferren actually intends to go with his daughter in the KiraVan don’t seem exactly like destinations you need a mobile citadel to explore: Ferren reckons they’ll start out in California, most likely the Mojave Desert, then possibly go to parts of Canada and Europe. (The KiraVan can be transported by plane, though that would be appallingly expensive.)
There are other locations Ferren might personally like to visitâ€"African deserts, active volcanoesâ€"but not with Kira. “I don’t plan on taking my baby to dangerous parts of the world,†he says. “So I’m willing to make the trade that, for the safety of my family, I will go to places that might have been a notch down from my first choice.â€
Wherever the KiraVan goes, it will get there in style. On a mid-August afternoon last summer, while the rest of his family is relaxing in the Hamptons, Ferren is at Applied Minds’ headquarters in California working in the cavelike garage on the company’s parking lot that serves as home to the KiraVan project. Nearby are several of Applied Minds’ deceptively bland-looking industrial buildings, some of which house artifacts from Ferren’s past, including plant tentacles, a giant light-up sign from the original musical Cats, and several top-secret technologies he helped develop in recent years, like a full-scale [REDACTED] with the power to [REDACTED].
As a half-dozen or so Applied employees watch, Ferren steps off a ladder, slides into the truck’s cab, and begins fussing with a black leather chair that’s been mounted in the back of the truck’s cab for Kira to ride in. One of Ferren’s primary concerns when designing the backseat was making sure his daughter wouldn’t endure an unpleasantly bumpy ride. “When you’re picking your way off-road, it’s quite stressful and physically demanding,†he says. “And it’s not a lot of fun for your 4-year-old who’s trying to work with crayons. I thought, how do I make sure she can watch Sesame Street? And how do I make sure she’s comfortable?â€
The solution is this computerized chair, the basis of which was created by Bose and employs a variant of the noise-reduction technology found in the company’s headphones but used in the vibration spectrum to reduce unwanted shudders and bumps. A few inches away from the chair are controls for the drones that can depart from the truck and report back on road conditions ahead. There are also monitors for the truck’s seven masts, which telescope as high as 60 feet and raise everything from cameras to lights to communications antennas.
I ask Ferren how he’ll keep a 4-year-old from playing with all of this stuff when she gets bored on the road. “We’ll deal with it the same way we do with everything else at the house,†Ferren says. “We’ll say, ‘Sweetheart, someday this will all be yours. Don’t break it.’â€
Ferren is working on a computerized chair for Kira that cancels out the bumps in the road. “I thought, how do I make sure she can watch Sesame Street How do I make sure she’s comfortable?†Art Streiber
Ferren leaves the chair for now and gives me a tour of the vehicle, starting with the front cab. Like his MaxiMog, the KiraVan is adapted from a Mercedes-Benz Unimog. Ferren and his team have gutted most of the original equipment, leaving only the steering wheel and a few smaller components. Among their numerous additions are a series of custom-made, overhead- and dash-mounted touchscreen cockpit displays, which monitor the vehicle’s health and navigational progress; a joystick-operated situational-awareness system, which allows passengers to see the view from any one of the vehicles’ 22 cameras and provides infrared thermal imagery of the road’s temperature; and an emergency-beacon locator-transmitter, which goes off automatically in case of an accidentâ€"if, say, the vehicle flips over. (With his radio direction-finder subsystem, Ferren can also track nearby vehicles that might be in trouble.)
There’s more: A joystick for the truck’s hydro-drive system, for switching from four-wheel drive to six-wheel drive. Passenger-side display units that allow riders to monitor everything from tire air pressure to battery problems. And a communications system that turns the vehicle into a mobile command base and allows Ferren to communicate and coordinate with nearby aircraft. “It’s basically as if we’re an airplane, just stuck to the ground,†he says. Every form of communication imaginable is on the truckâ€"from walkie-talkies to UHF radios to high-powered GPS systems. “I always want to know where I am,†Ferren says. The KiraVan can send emails from under a triple-canopy rain forest.
We step out of the cab and examine the chassis. He’d originally wanted to import a newer, extra-strength chassis from Europe, but when that proved to be a bureaucratic nightmare he decided to modify the existing model, which he lengthened and doubled for more reinforcementâ€"a process that took months. Affixed to the chassis are two fuel tanksâ€"from the front seat, Ferren can transfer fuel back and forth between them, in case one is damaged or to address balance issuesâ€"as well as the truck’s suspension system. (Ferren removed the original coilspring-and-shock-absorber setup and replaced it with a nitrogen-hydraulic system in hopes that it will provide a more stable ride.)
We move on to the trailer, which at the moment sits toward the back of the garage. Walking through a swing-out door, I find myself in a bathroom with a sink, shower area, and retractable toilet (there’s no sewage system; instead, waste is incineratedâ€"â€reduced to an inert ash,†Ferren saysâ€"that can be disposed during stops).
Much of the trailer is still under construction, but there’s already a wall of kitchen equipment, including a convection oven, a microwave, and an induction-cooktop stove. Fully stocked, Ferren says, the kitchen will be able to sustain a family of three for two to three weeks; if some of the onboard gear were to be removed and replaced with extra food, it could go as long as six weeks.
We exit and walk to the back of the trailer, where Ferren plans to mount a diesel-powered motorcycle. He searched forever for the right bikeâ€"at one point, he tested a model used by the Marinesâ€"eventually tracking down a Dutch motorcycle he could import. The KiraBike might seem like a luxury add-on, but in fact it’s proof of just how much preemptive worrying Ferren has done when it comes to safety. “I think of it as a dinghy,†he says. “If I want to run into town, I don’t want to take 51,700 pounds of expedition vehicle to get milk and eggs.†And in case of emergency it could also be used to transport a passenger to medical care. “I have a little girl,†Ferren explains. “I would like her to see the wonders of this world. But I’d like her to survive the experience.â€
Inside the Applied Minds office, the company’s various works in progress are listed on one of several large status boards, with different cartoon facesâ€"some smiling, some grimacingâ€"used to indicate how they’re coming along. The one next to Ferren’s truck has fire coming out of its head and a terrorized expression on its face. Numerous deadlines for the truck have come and gone over the years, and as of now, the earliest Ferren thinks he’ll finish the KiraVan is late this summerâ€"but even that’s just a loose estimate. “The reality is, we’re always behind,†Ferren says.
Still, he seems utterly unfazed by the delaysâ€"especially when he’s out in the garage, working on the truck. Today Ferren is trying to figure out where to place an especially crucial piece of equipment: the cup holder. Inside the cab he’ll be surrounded by a gridlocked cosmos of switches, gauges, and knobs that would look more at home in a TIE fighter than a truck. With all the electronics on board, he’s worried about the damage that could be done by a single spilled drink (not an irrational fear, given Ferren’s sizable Diet Coke habit). So for several minutes, with a handful of employees looking on, Ferren attempts to mime what it will be like to drink and steer simultaneously, moving his arms about the cab, testing various angles and arcs. It looks like someone executing a slow-moving and especially somber version of the Robot.
Finally he decides to put the holder in the door. When a member of his team points out that this now allows for liquid to spill outside, Ferrenâ€"who often shuts down ideas he doesn’t like with melodious sarcasmâ€"says, “Generally speaking, when you’re driving, the door is closed.â€
In truth, though, even Ferren is not sure if he’s made the right choice. He’ll have to wait to see what the cup holder looks like when it’s finally installed, at which point he’ll probably change it again. Ferren likes to work iteratively, tinkering and making last-minute adjustments based on intuition and pure whim and embracing surprises. He’s the first to point out that one of the main reasons the truck’s taken so long is that he keeps making changes. “There may be designers who are capable of doing this all in their head,†he says. “I’ve never been one of them.†And since this is for Kira, he wants it to be as close to perfect as possible.
Ferren can afford to take his time, in part because of the level of control he exercises over the project. All of the KiraVan’s expenses come out of his own pocket: Under his agreement with Applied Minds, he pays the company for its work. (Though Ferren says he sweats the costs “every time I have to sign a big check for something,†he has the reserves to cover it: Even before he sold Associates & Ferren to Disney, Ferren says, the company was billing nearly $25 million a year.) And because Ferren is his own client, the only deadlines he’s blowing are his own.
Still, at a certain point one can’t help but wonder: Is all of this necessary? Why not just rent an RV for the weekend, head out to a nice unthreatening patch of California desert, and not have to worry about balancing fuel tanks or making sure the hydraulics systems are operational?
To Ferren, such questions are beside the point. His goal is to build an expedition vehicle in its most ideal and fully realized form. In that sense, he says, KiraVan is not “a purely Kira-truistic project.†The super vehicle, he believes, could also someday help researchers, photographers, and anyone else who needs to travel to the most unreachable places on earth for long stretches of time. While the actual KiraVan will eventually belong to Kira, Ferren plans to license and share what he’s learned with othersâ€"while undoubtedly incorporating some of the truck’s more rarified systems into other Applied Minds projects.
Still, the whole point of the vehicleâ€"and the focus of years of workâ€"is to bequeath to Kira a way to safely see the world. Ferren might say that he’ll be OK if the KiraVan ends up as just another Applied Minds R&D project. He even jokes about the possibility of Kira’s selling it on eBay, but it’s hard to believe him. It’s almost as though Ferren has built a Disney ride for her life: a seamlessly designed, totally controlled, and completely singular environment that will allow her to experience some of the planet’s more thrilling localesâ€"without ever actually being at risk. Along the way he has also created a vehicle to literally transport her, protect her, and educate her after he no longer can.
The effort comes with trade-offs. While visiting Applied Minds, I ask him if it bothers him that he has spent so much time the past few years traveling and working to build something for Kiraâ€"time when he could have actually been with her. “I almost always would rather be home with the kid,†he says. “At the same time, you think, gee, I hope she likes trucks.â€
A little while later, Ferren is sitting in his office at Applied Minds, Skyping with his family back in East Hampton. It’s been a long day working on the truck, and he’s relaxing while watching Kira do somersaults before she heads to bed.
“So are you gonna drive the big truck?†Ferren asks her.
“No, ’cause I’m a little kid,†Kira says.
“OK, then I guess we’ll wait for you to be a big kid.â€
Kira shrugs and goes back to her somersaults.
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