There’s no easy way to explain this story other than to go into the details… even though the details themselves make almost no sense. This is the story of a car that’s had an insane amount of work put into it and then was crushed, along with a fake skeleton, because, well, what else could be done with it?
AiDesign, the wild and semi-secretive design shop out of Tuckahoe, New York, is known for quietly doing outrageous things. So it’s no surprise that a client came to them around 2005 with the desire to build a futuristic gadget car. It is a bit peculiar, though, that the car this client chose was a Subaru Tribeca.
The project was called “Q-Car” as both a nod to a super-stealthy vehicle and to James Bond’s provider of cool tech. Subaru was pretty much dead-on to build a three-row SUV, but their execution was questionable and the thing looked too strange for the kind of consumers who buy three-row SUVs.
According to AiDesign’s founder Matt Figliola in the above video, the client wanted to imagine what a car would be like in the future and so asked the shop to install screens everywhere, computers, AppleTV, and put video cameras on all corners of the car. This was back in 2005-2006 when it was a big deal if a car had Bluetooth.
In a way they sort of nailed it. This is basically a Mercedes EQS about two decades too early.
The work required to do all of this at the time was intense and some of the photos of the wiring are ridiculous:
So what happened to this car? According to AiDesign, it went to exactly one Geek Fest in New Jersey and then was sent back two more times to improve the concept and update the technology.
At some point during the third iteration, the Tesla Model S was revealed and basically made the Q-car project obsolete, so Matt and company stopped working on the car.
I can’t remember, exactly, the first time I saw the Tribeca hiding under a tarp at AiDesign’s shop in Tuckahoe but it’s always just been there. This strange Subaru that no one talked much about sitting next to Ferraris and Cannonball cars and all sorts of other exotics.
It’s clear to me that this is the most expensive Subaru Tribeca ever built, though AiDesign is a black hole and they absolutely refused to tell me what was spent on it. Just adding up the work that seems to have been done (three times!) and the actual equipment in the car brings me to a dizzying, six-figure amount.
For a Tribeca.
Ultimately, this car lived up to its name by being the ultimate Q-Ship. It’s so secretive and stealthy that almost no one outside of a small number of people who went to Geek Fest or saw it in the shop even knew it existed!
As Figliola says in the video, the car was never registered or licensed so it can’t be sold or driven or really have anything done to it. The technology in it, though state-of-the-art at the time, is mostly valueless.
So what did AiDesign do? They Stuffed a skeleton in it, sent it to a crusher, then put it in their Carhenge-like graveyard of dead cars behind their shop.
I have seen firsthand the brilliant work they do, so I guess the cost of brilliance is also a little madness.
