Keeping Things Moving : Powers Design On a Roll With Transit

As a student at Pasadena’s famed Art Center College of Design in 1970, Ronald H. Powers designed a complete mass transportation system for Los Angeles that won the senior rave reviews from seasoned industry professionals.

Los Angeles did not, however, adopt Powers’ idea for a system using buses, high-speed trains and small commuter vans. So when the then-24-year-old transportation designer was graduated, he went to work for Irvine-based Kawasaki Motors Corp. U.S.A.

Powers is now president of Powers Design International, a Newport Beach company he founded in 1974. He has gone on to win a measure of fame as a major designer for the automotive and truck-building industry.

Clients include Ford, General Motors (he designed the 1989 Cadillac El Dorado), many Japanese car and motorcycle makers and big truck builders including Volvo-White Inc., Freightliner Corp. and Kenworth Trucks Inc.

Powers Design “is a very creative organization, with broad-based capabilities,” said Scott Stauber, general sales manager at Aero Detroit Inc., an $80-million-a-year transportation design and engineering company in Detroit that has worked with Powers and his company on numerous projects.

And while Aero Detroit especially values Powers Design for what Stauber calls “its West Coast style input,” the Newport Beach company doesn’t limit itself to the West, or even to the United States.

A recently completed project involved redesigning the two cars produced by the state-run automobile industry in India.

For that task, Powers Design created new bodywork for a compact sedan that uses a 1955 Fiat frame and engine and developed a new interior and restyled some of the bodywork for a mid-sized sedan based on a 1973 Fiat design.

Because Powers’ designers were limited by budget and by the need to work with the running gear, engines and much of the body paneling that the Indian government acquired from Fiat, the finished products don’t share the curve and verve of modern autos. But Powers said his team found the project challenging because of the limitations.

Projects like that, involving individual transport, have paid the bills for more than two decades, but Powers said that his heart still belongs to the world of mass transit. So much so, that over the past two years his company has invested more than $2 million to design and build a streamlined transit car that can be used on numerous elevated rail systems.

Powers recently agreed to become exclusive vehicle supplier to a small Florida company, Intermass Inc. of West Palm Beach, that owns the U.S. rights to a novel, non-polluting, pneumatic-powered elevated rail system. The system, based upon an idea tried in England in 1840, was designed by a Brazilian inventor who dubbed it Aeromovel, or Portuguese for “moved by air.”

Powers Design also was asked in April to join one of four teams selected by the federal government in 1991 to design prototypes of high-speed rail systems that would connect the nation’s major population centers.

Powers said he is not abandoning cars and trucks and other products--he has just signed a major design deal with one of the Big Three U.S. auto makers, but a confidentiality agreement prohibits him from identifying the client. The company also is about to spin off a product design subsidiary to work on non-automotive projects, including computers, hot tubs, medical equipment and commercial lighting systems.

In the past three months, in fact, business has gotten so good that Powers has boosted his staff from 15 to 53 employees.

“Employment swells with contracts, and because we are one of the only design houses that does everything from concept design to engineering and actual production, we need a lot of people. With all the ongoing contracts we have now,” he said, “it looks like we’ll be staying at 35 to 40 people instead of dropping back to 15.”

Powers said companies like his--there are 23 auto design studios and scores of product design businesses in Southern California--typically get busy as a recession begins winding down.

“The clients all get nervous that their competitors might have something new to put on the market as soon as the economy gets a little better, so they hire us as soon as they see signs of improvement so we can design them something.”

Powers Design specialized in automotive design from the beginning “because it is just a lot more satisfying than general product design,” he said. “It’s more fun to do and your (car) designs elicit a lot more enthusiastic response. You don’t hear people saying ‘Wow! What a sexy refrigerator.’ ”

Along with the 1989 Cadillac El Dorado, Powers’ “sexy” designs include many of the large, more aerodynamic cabs that American and European truck makers are producing; several large power boats for Pacifica Yachts and MacGregor Yachts; and various body styles for Mitsubishi Motors, Nissan, Subaru and Chrysler--car companies that Powers says prohibit him from being more specific about his contributions.

Powers Design has also worked with McDonnell Douglas West in Huntington Beach to design crew quarters for the proposed U.S. orbiting space station and has done jet ski and motorcycle design for Powers’ first employer, Kawasaki, as well as motorcycle designs for Suzuki Motor Corp. and Yamaha Motor Corp.

But his automotive and vehicle design specialty, Powers says, stems from his fascination with public transportation--not vice versa.

“The auto gave us this incredible lifestyle, with freedom and mobility that was unheard of, but then we messed it up with gridlock. The attraction of mass-transit planning is to come up with alternative transportation methods that allow us the mobility and personal convenience we want without the gridlock. That’s what I want to be part of.”

Powers, in fact, majored in transportation design as a student at Art Center College.

“I am a transportation designer, not a car designer, but I would have starved to death if I’d have relied on mass transit for the past 22 years to earn a living,” said Powers, gesturing to the scores of conceptual car and truck drawings adorning his office walls.

That situation may be changing.

As part of the General Motors-led team that recently prepared a design concept report for a national high-speed transit system, Powers and his crew have helped transit specialists from GM, Bechtel Research & Development, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology design a vehicle that could be used as part of the so-called U.S. Maglev System, if such a system is ever built.

The federal project envisions a raised platform on which aerodynamic trains would race across the country at speeds of up to 300 m.p.h. The vehicle Powers created doesn’t have wheels but is “levitated” over an electromagnetic guide rail, suspended by the force generated by powerful electromagnets in the car aligned with the rail so the same poles face. That same magnetic principal--that like poles repulse--would be used to propel the train along its frictionless guideway.

To reduce air resistance, Powers designed a clean, curved cab with flush-mounted glass and virtually no protuberances on the body. The 120-foot vehicle seats up to 100 passengers and incorporates a double bank of powerful electromagnets beneath the passenger compartment to provide lift and propulsion.

The four teams’ reports were presented to the Federal Railroad Administration in October, said Joseph Perkowski, manager of advanced civil systems for Bechtel Research and Development in San Francisco. Now specialists with the railroad administration and the Army Corps of Engineers, working together as the National Maglev Initiative, are reviewing the reports and are scheduled to issue their own report to Congress in March, Perkowski said.

After that, Congress will either shelve the whole thing or fund a six-year demonstration project that entails a competition among five engineering and design teams to prepare detailed working plans for a national magnetic levitation transit system, he said.

Powers started working on a mass-transit vehicle long before the federal project came about, however.

His own transit vehicle--a 40-foot, 40-seater that can be used with conventional propulsion systems as well as in the air-powered system, is not made to travel at such high speeds as the Maglev System design, so it is a bit more bus-like, with broader expanses of glass and a taller profile that gives passengers more headroom.

“And the beauty of it, for transportation agencies, is that it is already designed, tested and built,” Powers said. “That is my selling point. If you are looking for a transit vehicle, I can save you the $2 million I’ve already spent in design, engineering and tooling.”

Powers maintains that he is not just interested in selling his company’s transit car. “Any transportation system has got to be one that people will use,” he said, “and that means it has to be designed to get the people to and from their their homes and offices and shopping areas, not just to get from transit station A to transit station B.”

To that end, he said, a properly designed system must include not only fixed-route vehicles like the one his company has designed, but mini-buses and vans or even moving sidewalks to take people from the transit stations to their ultimate destinations.

And doing the planning for that type of integrated system is the new goal Powers is pushing his company toward.