JAY
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Meet the chief designer of the Jeep Gladiator, Taylor Langhals. If you didn't already feel warm about the Gladiator, this will also make you feel fuzzy.
Taylor is not only a true born and raised Toledoan (aka person from Toledo), but he's also a 4th generation Jeep man! His father, grandfather and great-grandfather all spent their entire careers working at various FCA Toledo plants.
More on Taylor from the Toledo Blade: https://www.toledoblade.com/busines...-native-draws-inspiration/stories/20190114169
Taylor is not only a true born and raised Toledoan (aka person from Toledo), but he's also a 4th generation Jeep man! His father, grandfather and great-grandfather all spent their entire careers working at various FCA Toledo plants.
More on Taylor from the Toledo Blade: https://www.toledoblade.com/busines...-native-draws-inspiration/stories/20190114169
DETROIT — It wouldn’t be a stretch to call Taylor Langhals a true Jeep baby.
Mr. Langhals is a born-and-raised Toledoan, a St. John’s Jesuit High School graduate, and a man whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all spent their careers building Jeep vehicles at the various Toledo plants.
But at the tender age of 29, Mr. Langhals has earned a special place in Jeep folklore.
Rather than building Jeeps, he was a chief designer of the new Jeep Wrangler pickup truck — the Gladiator — which currently is in prototype production at Fiat Chrysler Automobile’s Toledo Assembly Complex and is expected to hit dealers showrooms sometime by April.
“My dad worked at Jeep for 30 years on the line, as a supervisor, building Jeeps, road-testing them. He did everything,” Mr. Langhals, lead exterior designer for the Gladiator, said Monday at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
Mr. Langhals found his way to the Gladiator, the first Jeep-branded pickup truck since the Jeep Comanche ended production in 1993, via a love of drawing and a love of Jeeps.
“I always loved to draw. Obviously, I grew up around Jeep. Ever since I was a little kid we’d go to the father-son car shows at the plant. When my mom was on maternity leave with my sister she’d take me every day to the plant. I’d go sit inside and wait for my dad to come out almost every single day,” Mr. Langhals said.
Somewhere along the way, he said, ... “someone told me, ‘hey, if you really love to draw you can make a career out of it.’”
After high school he went to the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and studied auto design. He interned at Jeep and afterward went to work for FCA North America.
Mr. Langhals has been with FCA for six years, the last four spent designing the Gladiator’s exterior — a plum assignment.
“Everybody’s been wanting this thing since the Comanche quit running in ’92. Everyone’s been begging for a Jeep truck,” he said.
Designing the Gladiator wasn’t a matter of taking the existing Wrangler and sticking a truck bed on it.
“For me, I like to take my inspiration from the lifestyle that we're designing for,” Mr. Langhals said.
“I'm a big dirt bike guy. I needed something to support my lifestyle and I think a lot of people's lifestyles. So we wanted to create a lifestyle vehicle and I think this is it.”
The Gladiator is for transporting dirt bikes to the trails, towing a boat, towing a camper, or heading to the ski slopes, the designer said.
Mr. Langhals drew inspiration from a variety of sources.
“We studied hinges on ski boots and that helped us design the hinges you see on the hood,” Mr. Langhals said. “We have a whole collection of ski boots in the studio and I would just kind of sketch around those things.”
Dirt bikes gave him the idea to put imprints in the front wall of the truck bed to indicate where bike wheels should go.
As for the whole vehicle's profile: “It was creating an unmistakable and iconic silhouette that's instantly identifiable not only as a Jeep, but also a truck so at a glance, when people see it driving by, they're going to recognize it right away,” Mr. Langhals said.
“That’s the big thing we wanted to accomplish here and I think we did. There’s no other truck in this building that looks like this,” he added.
Like the Wrangler, the Gladiator’s top and doors are removable, and the windshield fold down.
But it also is different in that, as a truck it has a best in class payload of 1,600 pounds and best in class towing of 7,650 pounds.
“It’s not only just a rugged Jeep, it’s fully functional. It’ll tow your house down,” Mr. Langhals said.
And it also has something else, a unique Toledo signature that Mr. Langhals was inspired to incorporate into the truck bed — a small imprint that has a heart followed by the numbers “419” for the Toledo area code.
“It's on every single bed. That's a tribute to Toledo and to each of the employees who worked there over the years, like my father,” Mr. Langhals said.
“This is an honor, it’s humbling. It’s an emotional experience,” the former Toledoan said of his chance to help design a Jeep.
“It’s been hard to put into words honestly. I think what makes it special is I grew up in Toledo, I grew up around this brand my whole life. It’s kind of inbred in me from the beginning. I learned everything I know from living in Toledo,” he added.
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