Pioneers: Iliya & Nikita Bridan

The bond between identical twins is undeniable, and while you can see it and sense it, it’s hard to understand unless you share the same genes with someone else. Over the last six years, I’ve come to appreciate this deep, biological connection by spending time with 34-year-old Iliya and Nikita Bridan, twin brothers from Canada who both pursued careers as automotive designers. Even though their lives have run in parallel since birth, neither has tired of the other yet and now they collaborate on some of the coolest automotive builds, including the Dropped Alfa and the Half-11, working out of their shop, Oilstainlab, in Signal Hill, California. I sat down with the Bridan twins to know what they did to get where they are today and better understand how they hope to pioneer in a fast-changing automotive world.  

ILIYA: We don't come from a very artistic family. My mom's side was pretty much all military, engineers, and...

NIKITA: ... doctors. Yeah, artistic creativity is not a very good thing in our family. It's a waste of brainpower, according to them. But still, as kids were drawing dinosaurs and cars. Canada didn’t have much car culture; I remember this one time when we saw a BMW 7 series, and our minds exploded. Our fascination with cars really piqued after my dad wanted to buy a new car and he brought home a Consumer Report guide that had all the numbers and statistics for every car and everything, so Iliya and I memorized it, front to back. Then we’d quiz each other, like the wheelbase of a Dodge Grand Caravan versus the wheelbase of a Ford Expedition.

ILIYA: Then on family road trips, we would play a game in the backseat, looking from 400 yards at the car coming to overtake us and ask each other, "What is it?" Based on headlights or whatever.

NIKITA: Now the only cars that I recognize are cop cars.

ILIYA: We also got really into Gran Turismo 3 on PlayStation 2. We played that nonstop.

NIKITA: Oh, that’s right. We were never really traditional car geeks because we weren't allowed to work on things. Our parents thought that old cars are rusty and dangerous and that we’d end up working as mechanics, which would be even worse than working as artists.

NIKITA: I’m working freelance on industrial design projects. 

ILIYA: And I’m working as a designer at Canoo. 

ILIYA: I'll say this. It’s an evolution of maturing as a designer and understanding what you're really trying to create. When you're in ArtCenter, you’re naively thinking that you're going to reinvent form language, that you're come going to come in and redesign everything, and that you're God's gift to mankind. You're like, "This is so easy. Why don't they do it?" Then, your first few years you run up against some walls that are really hard and no matter how many times you run into them, they don't break and you slowly realize there's only so much you can do. That's why the results are on the street that you see.

It just basically came to the point for me where I couldn't work for an OEM anymore because their vision of what a car is so old-fashioned and irrelevant to the everyday people that you talk to. They're still trying to make emotionally appealing cars when most people no longer emotionally connect with a vehicle. It's really, really stupid in some ways. We need to design vehicles from a sustainability point of view, a manufacturing point of view, a cost point of view... it's more interesting to solve those problems than to make dynamic linework or a more sculpted body side. It's picking up on the new challenges of today's marketplace. That's what I get excited about nowadays more so than cars. I could really care less about the newest hypercars or whatever. I'm just like, "Who cares? If it goes fast, who cares?" Does it help make the world a better place?

NIKITA: I agree, more or less. I think when you're a student you get excited by something that just looks new or you haven't seen that before, or maybe you don't know enough to know that's been done before or something. You have to learn how hard it is to make something real. I think for us, it's only real when it's physical when you can interact with it, use it, whatever. We have so many projects that are just renderings. It's dangerous because it cheapens it if it's not real in a way. It's interesting because of how much more effort it takes to make something real and function versus just making some renderings.

NIKITA: Yeah, and I just hoped everything's tight. I spent the previous two days going over every nut and bolt, making sure everything's good because we're going to go 160 miles an hour, but the car was great. I was almost too tired to be super euphoric after the whole prepping, emotionally and mentally, I was just spent. It was a relief that nothing happened and now, looking back at it, it's the best feeling you could have. The car isn't going to kill us. It's actually really comfortable, it drives really nice, and it handles amazingly. It's like, "Oh, shit. We could actually drive this car every day on the street like we talked about.”