The mamoth car industry supports millions of workers, but few have found a stranger way to make a buck than Priddy and a small band of other automotive paparazzi. Perched on hills by test tracks or cruising through California desert or Canadian tundra, they sneak past security guards and fight off the boredom of the stakeout to snap pics of cars years before the public is supposed to see them. Every week the trade papers and buff books reveal a few more secrets. The automakers have a love-hate relationship with these self-described “spy photographers.” They don’t mind publicity-but only on their timetable. A leak too early, and a competitor might steal an idea-like the second sliding door on Chrysler’s new minivan that Chrysler feared Ford might copy. Worse yet, a customer who has glimpsed the future may put off that purchase.
To see the spies in action, NEWSWEEK spent two days roaming the desert with Priddy, the rising star of the auto paparazzi, and a morning in Detroit with veteran Jim Dunne. There’s no obvious cloak-and-dagger aura to Priddy. She and her driver, 30year-old grocery-store manager Michael Rice, cruise out of Las Vegas in a rented minivan, munching on carrots, listening to Kenny G. and scrupulously obeying speed limits to avoid tickets. Nor was Priddy born to espionage. She was raising two kids and shooting weddings to supplement her husband’s engineering salary when she spotted a prototype of the 1994 Mustang outside a restaurant near her Phoenix home four years ago. She snapped a few pictures and sent them to Automobile magazine, which put one on the cover, and sent her a couple of thousand dollars. Since then, she’s juggled motherhood with spy missions. Suddenly she stops, eying an approaching string of sport utilities. They’re redesigned Isuzu Rodeos and Amigos, due out in 1998 Ho-hum: Priddy shot them last week Phoenix. But the first sighting of the trip gets her motor running. Sometimes “the are so many prototypes out here we can’t decide which ones to chase,” she says.
That won’t be a problem on this trip. For the next two days we cruise through 115-degree heat, looking for car trailers, Michigan plates or any other tip-off that a test team might be near. At one point, we pass a cara van of Ford pickups that look like they might have new grilles. We do a quick’ turn and give chase. But on closer look, turns out there’s nothing new; they’re probably ably testing engine components, says Pr dy. Still, the trip isn’t a total bust: at a n down motel frequented by test drive Priddy asks casually about sununer vacancies. “Oh, BMW has the whole place booked [that] week,” says the clerk, pointing to a calendar, “and then Mercedes comes in [that] week.” Outside Priddy immediately scrawls in her calendar and checks the dates with her driver. “That just paid for this trip!”
Loose-lipped motel clerks are a help because the test teams’ road trips to the desert are the best place to shoot. Priddy takes eight or nine trips to Cahfornia a year. Despite the security risks, says Ford product launch manager Tom Rhoades, road testing is essential. “We can’t do everything on a test track.” Extreme temperatures, long, empty roads and varied terrain are hard to duplicate in Phoenix or Detroit. So the carmakers spend hours on camouflage: adorning cars with leather “bras,” designing fake panels and headlights, painting cars in checkerboard colors to confuse the camera, training drivers to jump out of cars and whip on a cover in 3Oseconds.
The companies go to even greater lengths to foil the photogs at test tracks, where Priddy and the two other top sharpshooters spend most of their time. Priddy works mainly in Arizona, where nearly every automaker owns a track; Dunne lurks outside the Big Three “proving grounds” in suburban Detroit, and German photographer Hans Lehman frequents the roads around Hamburg, looking for Mercedeses and Volkswagens. To cut down on photo ops, Chrysler spent $1 million last vear fencing in its Arizona facility; GM recently planted 60 tall pine trees (now dubbed “Dunne’s Grove”) to obscure its Michigan track.
Heightened defenses, travel expenses and costly equipment make spying a tough way to earn a living. Priddy says she couldn’t get by on her wages, and Dunne holds a day job at Popular Mechanics, although Lehman does well enough shooting cars to own two homes, a Porsche and a Mercedes. (European magazines are a big market.) But it’s clearly the thrill of the chase, not the money, that counts. Priddy uses fake names when registering at motels (“Bond” is a favorite), and she speaks in code on her cell phone. Occasionally, the thrills can get a bit chilling. Although all the carparazzi swear they don’t trespass on company property, Lehman is facing criminal prosecution for allegedly trespassing to get a shot of a Porsche. (He denies the charges.) Angry test drivers sometimes offer more concrete disincentives. Hiding in the brush at a curve in the road, Priddy has sometimes had a driver swerve threateningly at her. Lehman says he’s been run into a snowbank by VW engineers in Finland and attacked with a snow shovel in Norway.
Jim Dunne is long past worrying. After three decades of spying, his picture is posted in guard shacks at test tracks around the country. But he was inconspicuous one rainy day last month when he spotted some juicy quarry outside Ford’s Dearborn test grounds: the front end of a 1998 Lincoln Town Car, attached to a decoy Mercury Marquis. Dunne switched lanes and chased it to a red hght, jumped out and started firing. Not bad for a morning’s work. But it’s that 1998 Corvette that haunts him. There are reportedly three prototypes being tested in Arizona. It would be so nice… Unless Priddy gets there first.
