It isn't easy for me to have contact with the industry, because it is so outdated. Look at General Motors, look at -Mercedes, look at Chrysler, look at Porsche, look at BMW . . . They are all building cars from yesterday! Nobody has an idea how the car of tomorrow should look. I've built them already. I have the prototypes in my exhibition, but they won't do it.

Everybody was inspired by the drawings and the wind tunnels and the race cars - but no one wanted to work with me because I had a reputation for being an aerodynamic dictator!

I learned to ask myself questions like: Why is something made the way it is? Why does a motorcar look like it does? Is it right or wrong? What is an airplane? Why is it shaped like that? Then, later, I became a diver and studied subaquatic life and the streamlining of sharks and manta rays. Any fish is superior to the shapes we humans have invented - and unchanged for 250 million years, imagine!

Look at nature - look at birds, look at fish. Things that look good, work good. People don't get the message of ergonomics.

1973 was the first gasoline crisis in the world. That year, I designed the first aerodynamic truck, eating 40 percent less fuel. I put it on exhibit everywhere. It was 30 years ahead of its time. Nobody is building it today, and everybody still has problems with their boxy cars and trucks eating up fuel.

I was 3 years old, and we had a very rich neighbor in Berlin who drove a Mercedes sports car. I remember standing behind this car, admiring the trunk, how nicely shaped it was, for an hour. That shape has never left me - I could design it today!

An architect has to build the building from the inside out, not the outside in!