Even if you don’t know his name, you’ve likely had your eye arrested by one of his creations: Consumer, which resembles a flash drive on wheels; Reboot, a radical re-interpreting of off-road iconography; Moto Undone, a motorcycle which takes the form of a polished slate. Then there’s his recent sedan, Another, which got a bit of Instagram-worthy buzz typical for his work: a clip of the car curbside, and a caption referring to the driver arriving “in a rough draft.”
Meet Joey Ruiter, the man behind these rolling question marks. Based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Ruiter’s home serves as Ground Zero for a litany of vehicles which beg onlookers to ask “is it coming or going?” or even something as baseline-establishing as “is that a car?”
I spoke to Seyth Miersma – a friend of Ruiter’s and author of a Road & Track feature on him – before I visited Grand Rapids. Miersma and I talked about our affinity for these designs, which break the mold while, somehow, maintaining them. At one point during our video chat, I pulled out a 1:43 model I have of a 1974 Dodge Monaco. “[Joey and I] are of a generation that would see that kind of vehicle as the ‘default,’” Miersma told me. I grabbed the Monaco because, if Ruiter’s philosophy has to be associated with an everyday car feature, perhaps those monochrome steel wheels might be the most apt. Their bleak look, immune to era, fits the Ruiter philosophy like a glove.
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Just like many of us, Ruiter’s dad played a part in introducing him to the automobile. The senior Ruiter worked for a subsidiary of General Motors, and rebuilt humdrum sedans as a hobby. “Sleeper cars…just abandoned from grandmas and aunts. [He put] big motors in them,” Ruiter remembers. He and his several siblings shared a garage packed with tools. “We could kind of do whatever we wanted,” Ruiter says now. While in community college, Ruiter pursued welding and industrial design. While he admits that his hands-on upbringing perhaps engrained his knack for re-imagining vehicles into his psyche, “I didn’t know you could be a car designer growing up.”
Ruiter is from Grand Rapids, a city on the west side of Michigan known for its furniture industry, with brands like Herman Miller and Steelcase in the area. Ruiter’s “day job” often involves furniture design through his firm, J.Ruiter. After getting out of my rental car, I walked into a meeting taking place at the end of his driveway. After tricking out a Mercedes Sprinter for a company called Grand Rapids Chair, he’s been working on a trailer for them to haul their wares. The plan is to travel to furniture dealers across the country, promoting the brand.
As the meeting waned, I walked around Ruiter’s property. He lives in a modernist abode, painted a Spinal Tap-tastic “none more black.” (At one point, I ask him if the paint job traps too much heat in the summer. “It definitely gets warm, but it’s not weird,” Ruiter tells me.) Despite the monolithic appearance, Ruiter’s property didn’t seem as outrageous as I might have imagined. He and his wife remodeled the house, which “makes it feel smaller, and not so obnoxious,” in his words.
We’ll start in Ruiter’s office, which features a substantial series of shelves. It’s a resting place for esoterica, model cars, and books. This shelf unit was the skeleton key, I thought to myself.
Ruiter talked me through some Hot Wheels; a few he modified himself, with different wheels and added weight, in order to have the edge on driveway races he held during the pandemic with friends and family. The upshot? Ruiter got banned from his own competition, after installing a motor in one of the runners.
“It’s tough to be humble and impressed with yourself. You have to have that yin and yang.” Ruiter says this to me as we discuss the fickle nature of creativity; it’s clear that he is aware of his place in today’s world of trendy minimalism. When I brought up the ubiquitous, geometric controversy of the Cybertruck, Ruiter levels with me and says “I’m a bit jealous that I wasn’t part of the program.” Then again, given that several of his works beat the Cybertruck project to the blunt-futurist punch, “I’m also flattered that I feel like maybe, somehow, I inspired some of that stuff.”
I also asked him his two cents on the Slate, the new back-to-basics electric pickup with a very “generic” look. “You check all those boxes…reconfigurable, low cost, electric, truck…they don’t all add up to desirability,” he says. Make no mistake: Ruiter’s into single-focus vehicles.
One of the toys you’ll spot is a collaboration with Candylab, the 1962 Lincoln Continental that “totally kicked my ass,” according to Ruiter. Nicknamed “White Beast,” Ruiter’s (now-sold) Continental was something of a starting point for his vehicle re-dos, blossoming into the image he’s cultivated today. Employing a motto of “might as well!,” he souped it up and managed to coax a 13.9-second time in the quarter mile.
After a quick bite of lunch, we go back outside to the garage, where the magic happens. No, this isn’t the sterile, underground lair Bruce Wayne might retire to; these alien forms come to life in a garage. That’s it. Said garage is far from mysterious, expansive, or intimidating. There’s even a splash of color nearby: an NSU Quickly T moped, pulled from a barn.
Yes, Ruiter’s workshop is no bigger, and no more extreme, than what you’d find on a visit to a typical midwestern home.
Once you step inside, however, your eyes will jump to, say, a few of his creations in one corner. These include the two motorcycles he’s known for, Moto Undone and Nomoto, and Snoped, an angular snowmobile which complements the bikes.
Outside of the Reboot Buggy obnoxiously taking up space, the work area is surprisingly restrained. You may even fool yourself into thinking this is the garage of just another hobbyist; then again, the anti-sedan is right between the two buildings.
The other four-wheeled item in the work area has yet to be given a name. (Ruiter later tells me he’s playing around with the moniker “Five,” as it’s his fifth design.) There’s angular anger radiating off the thing; to paraphrase a comparison Ruiter made, you could call it an evil Meyers Manx.
Based on a Can-Am off-roader, you might think of this machine as a Reboot Lite. The 2016 coffee table book par excellence The Drive: Custom Cars and Their Builders, David Lancaster highlights Ruiter’s Reboot, the first vehicle he ever created as a whole, right after his transformation of the aforementioned Lincoln. With a beefy V8 and near-endless suspension travel, Reboot seems like an inverse of Steve McQueen’s Baja Boot.
Reboot’s entry reads, in part, “[Ruiter] is keen to position it as an economy car — not in performance, clearly, but in a deeper sense of lack of gadgetry, throwing expectations back on the driver, rather than relieving him or her of them.”
I thought of this when I sat in Reboot, which I was allowed to fire up. Boy, did it sound mean. The big-block Chevy engine, demanding a constant feed of 1.5-2k revs, firing through the Supertrapp exhaust pipes: perfection. The startup, too, was tactical as hell — killswitch disengage, flip the toggle, et cetera. I’m reminded of something Joey told me in his office: “Horses aren’t designed for us, but we ride them anyway.” Same with Reboot. I’m an outsider, even inside the vehicle.
Meanwhile, Another is more of an art piece, geared for golf cart speeds. The white, featureless sedan is attention-commanding by taking “standard” as far as it goes. At one point, Ruiter tells me, he was just going to dub it “Car.” How did he arrive at the final name? “Every time a new car [came] out, I would say ‘Dodge Who Cares,’ ‘Ford Whatever…’”
At one point, we just stood there running through name ideas for the bastardized Can-Am. Discarded names Ruiter considered include the “Can’t-Am” and “Tars Rover,” after the Interstellar robot. I suggest “Untilted,” since I was playing pinball the night before, and off-roaders may be prone to tipping. On my drive home, I thought of another idea: “Can-Ampersand.” This portion of our conversation stuck out to me as a very human struggle: coming up with the perfect name in a time when everything is taken.
Strip everything away from Ruiter’s image – the internet clicks, the museum exhibits, the articles like this one – and the man just loves cars like you and I. While the designer admits that “it’s difficult, and vulnerable, to put yourself out there,” he maintains that his talent lies within “Everybody, in my mind, is creative. It’s just a matter of if they take that further.”
“If the shop is clean, I can come out there, and I’m like ‘the sky’s the limit,’” Ruiter says. Simple.
Adding weight to a hot wheels will not make it go faster. Maybe hold it to the track better, but not faster
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