Who's he texting though? That is creepy look at that that is...
bizarro. It's like you're looking through him. My name is Matthew Figliola and i'm
the owner and founder of Ai Design. Ai Design is an automotive customization
studio in the New York metro area. I'm more comfortable with more complexity
than with less. I prefer the work to be complex. I don't like it when it's simple.
Our craft is tailoring a vehicle to its owner and we do it like no one else.
This is MK 71 this is a really big, really interesting project that is being
completed in in three different phases. We're in the last phase. It's very
interesting. The client is a lot of fun and he has affinities for military, law
enforcement, hunting... All these things. He basically is
modeling this as his own sort of a salute to those folks.
So it's a Cadillac Escalade ESV the long wheelbase one, and there really isn't any
aspect of the core vehicle that he hasn't had us change, modify, add
performance to, or or even add completely new systems to. It's got this striking
finish on it which is this bumpy urethane coating that you would put on a
pickup truck bedliner. Really challenging to put it on a Cadillac Escalade
mostly because of all the finely fitted parts, because you're adding quite a bit
of thickness and there's all sorts of problems with seals and so forth.
But we got it. In this area here behind the grill is an infrared floodlight. There's
a surveillance camera system, a DVR system. This is the front camera for that.
We've got white and yellow strobe lamps. Let's get under the hood. There's some
big changes here too. The big change is the Callaway supercharger. In fact it's
the entire Callaway system in here. There's the pretty large air compressor
for the train horns that are inside. There's a set of train horns; the
trumpets are actually all the way in the back of the vehicle.
The wheels are HRE. We have a custom exhaust fitted with a
a valve controlled muffler bypass, which is all custom made. The most notable
feature of this whole project is what's on top of the roof. What we did here is
we deleted the sunroof in order to fit this this is a FLIR Talon
thermal imaging camera tracking device. It's a very feature-rich, capability-rich,
wide-ranging sensor system that law enforcement military and folks like that
use to track a moving object. It has a laser range-finding
system. That entire thing is referred to as a turret or a gimbal. So the
turret just moves in 360 degrees on both planes. Beside it is a
military-grade searchlight, which has an LED light on one side and an infrared
searchlight on the other side, so it can turn around on itself. And then this is
just a really cool LED light bar.
This is actually the controller for the FLIR town and it's pretty impressive to
see it up close. There's 30 buttons on it and I mean they're all over. They're on
this side, they're on this side, they're over here, they're on top, they're over
here in front. Everywhere. And we made it so that depending upon how you're
hunched in your chair you had some movement to sort of be comfortable
ergonomically, and we developed like a really cool what we call a friction hinge
that gives you this nice feel, but firm. There's no wiggle room here now.
It just has this nice action to it.
All right, walk around. Look, it's superimposed. And we located the
cup holder. This is the joystick for the searchlight on the roof. And this is
one of the audio components in the car. This is the DAC. He's got his Whelan
emergency lighting controller. We made this hang-up cup for it.
The FLIR has its own monitor and we made it so it comes right out of the dash.
And this is again as a milspec monitor that's really tuned perfectly
for the output of the FLIR camera. There's a very sophisticated radar laser
detector system in here with a laser jammer. It's made by a company called
Stinger. They're the only product that had a means of calibrating out the
driver assist sensors that would set off your radar detector. So in this car,
because the driver-assist sensors are of a particular microwave frequency, and that
frequency is the same as some police radar guns, this system allows you to
cherry-pick a precise frequency and have it not detect it. It also has a very large
display. I mean usually we use other products like from Escort that have much
smaller displays and they can be integrated much easier. So we've
definitely shortened the rearview mirror a little bit, and then we grafted this in.
In CAD, and then just printed a whole new part here to house the mirror, the GM
electronics and the display for the radar system, and I think it works.
Spreadsheets and notes are very typical to have on a big project like this but
also just handwritten notes. It's common for us to just write them on the glass
with a paint pen. Here this is just a punch list because we're really in the
final stages of this work and we just want to we want everybody to see what's
left, so we have to test the OM RSC features the the network for this DVR
and the modem really all of these electronic systems need to be checked.
There's a vibration that we needed to check when driving all sorts of things.
Just things we don't want to forget. Well it's a lot of work to put all this stuff
in, but you'd be surprised how malleable a car is. I mean you can really you can
shift quite a bit around. Yes it's a lot of work. Yes it takes some talent
to pull it off, but to say that it's hard. I don't know if we would call it hard I
think we all like the challenge of doing exactly this. There's like... there's a fun
aspect to it.
What do I want to do next? Well to be completely honest I'm always on the
verge of not wanting to do this anymore at all. You know, because this is
really tough to do. I think for me it would be if I had a wish I would like to
be doing more of the larger projects like the Camaro, like MK 71 the Cadillac
there or 45, this Cadillac. I do enjoy the larger work and I think
as I get older you know those are those are just more interesting. I mean I've
been so like underground and introverted my entire life that I didn't even notice
that we were noticed so I don't get out much I don't pay attention to my
competition not because I dislike them I just don't pay attention to them I have
an indifference to just about everything that's going on in the car world there's
great clarity and and not looking at what everybody else is doing. How do
people find me and how do they hear about me? Word of mouth is all I have
to say for that. I mean I don't know what the word is that's being sent
out there about this place. I really don't. I don't have a good handle on that.
I just I just make my stuff you know and I think people like it.