"I've got a secret car club," designer Joey Ruiter tells me. The club in question is defined, in both spirit and literal membership, by the gold and black t-shirt he's wearing that bares the shorthand exclamation, "MIDZWL" across the chest. The letters are shorthand for the phrase "Might as well..." and represent the attitude of the kind of person it takes to build the vehicle I'm here to see and drive: the Reboot Buggy.
"Might as well" is a phrase uttered and heard with some frequency amongst the circles of car guys and tinkerers the world over. "Well, I needed to replace the front discs anyway, so I figured I might as well get a bigger set of Brembos. Then I wasn't sure I had exactly the clearance I needed from the wheel, so I guessed I might as well get a set of eighteens while I was at it; and at that point, I might as well do the rear brakes, too..." You know this guy. Perhaps you are this guy.
Ruiter is most certainly "that guy," as evidenced by the imposing black, open-topped-box vehicle that I'm wide-eyed over in his Grand Rapids, MI garage. The Reboot Buggy started as "the notion of a city car" and an "exercise in curiosity," and ended up here, with a vehicle that can jump over sand dunes, pick up the kid from school, turn every head that it passes and enthrall car writers like me enough to make the trip to come see it. The "Reboot" part of the sobriquet was meant as a concise definition – what you get when you strip away all the conventions of car building, and make a pure, functional vehicle. An eye for interesting form, a love of machines and more than a handful of MIDZWLs later, and you end up with this beastie. Henry Ford never had it so good.
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