Man builds ultimate RV for his 4 year old daughter

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The Places Ferren actually intends to go with his daughter in the KiraVan don’t seem exactly like destinations you need a mobile citadel to explore: Ferren reckons they’ll start out in California, most likely the Mojave Desert, then possibly go to parts of Canada and Europe. (The KiraVan can be transported by plane, though that would be appallingly expensive.)

There are other locations Ferren might personally like to visit—African deserts, active volcanoes—but not with Kira. “I don’t plan on taking my baby to dangerous parts of the world,” he says. “So I’m willing to make the trade that, for the safety of my family, I will go to places that might have been a notch down from my first choice.”

Wherever the KiraVan goes, it will get there in style. On a mid-August afternoon last summer, while the rest of his family is relaxing in the Hamptons, Ferren is at Applied Minds’ headquarters in California working in the cavelike garage on the company’s parking lot that serves as home to the KiraVan project. Nearby are several of Applied Minds’ deceptively bland-looking industrial buildings, some of which house artifacts from Ferren’s past, including plant tentacles, a giant light-up sign from the original musical Cats, and several top-secret technologies he helped develop in recent years, like a full-scale [REDACTED] with the power to [REDACTED].

As a half-dozen or so Applied employees watch, Ferren steps off a ladder, slides into the truck’s cab, and begins fussing with a black leather chair that’s been mounted in the back of the truck’s cab for Kira to ride in. One of Ferren’s primary concerns when designing the backseat was making sure his daughter wouldn’t endure an unpleasantly bumpy ride. “When you’re picking your way off-road, it’s quite stressful and physically demanding,” he says. “And it’s not a lot of fun for your 4-year-old who’s trying to work with crayons. I thought, how do I make sure she can watch Sesame Street? And how do I make sure she’s comfortable?”

The solution is this computerized chair, the basis of which was created by Bose and employs a variant of the noise-reduction technology found in the company’s headphones but used in the vibration spectrum to reduce unwanted shudders and bumps. A few inches away from the chair are controls for the drones that can depart from the truck and report back on road conditions ahead. There are also monitors for the truck’s seven masts, which telescope as high as 60 feet and raise everything from cameras to lights to communications antennas.

I ask Ferren how he’ll keep a 4-year-old from playing with all of this stuff when she gets bored on the road. “We’ll deal with it the same way we do with everything else at the house,” Ferren says. “We’ll say, ‘Sweetheart, someday this will all be yours. Don’t break it.’”

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