Robert Downey Jr. Q&A: Talking Cars, Career, and Making a Difference

When Robert Downey Jr. walked away from playing Iron Man following 2019'sAvengers Endgame, the actor made some lifestyle changes and began a new mission: to champion "green" technologies.

Downey along with his wife, Susan, founded the FootPrint Coalition, a venture capital group that invests in startups and other firms that specialize in eco-friendly products, tech, and solutions. But he still possessed a car collection and decided he should do something productive with it. Enter his new show,Downey's Dream Cars, a reality program wherein each episode showcases a vehicle from his collection being "eco-modded" by a rotating team of specialists to make it more environmentally friendly. Once all his cars are modified, he plans to give them away. Seriously.

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To learn more about the show, his new mission, and his take on the automotive industry's inevitable electric future, we chatted with him at FootPrint Coalition headquarters and at his private hangar where some of his freshly eco-modified vehicles reside.

Generally speaking, when someone has a car collection, it's because they've had a long-lasting relationship with car culture. When did it start for you?

Robert Downey Jr.:My first car was a BMW L6, which is hard to describe. It's basically a 635. This one was black with a lotus-white interior. My relationship with car culture was being an East Coast guy. Kind of like kids nowadays, there was no reason for me to learn how to drive. The first time I really drove was when I came out here [to Los Angeles] to doWeird Scienceand they gave [co-star] Robert Rusler and me an IROC and I forget what [else]. It was a circa 1984 muscle car.

How old were you at the time?

RDJ:Seventeen or 18.

That sounds like a terrible idea. How did it go?

RDJ:Rusler had grown up in L.A. driving since long before he was 16, and he would just be like, "Dude, follow me, don't do anything stupid and just pretend that you and I are one car." He would rip around up over Laurel Canyon because we were going from the Universal Studios backlot into Hollywood. SoI learned how to drive essentially in an IROC just gunning it. I mean, [we] were like doing brodies in the producer's parking lot at Universal, [and security] being like, "If we see you guys doing anything but the speed limit on our studio lot one more time, we're calling the police." So, it never got any more wild than that. But I could tell how—and particularly in L.A.—how much of the identity and culture of the city was tied to cars. Whether it's the cars that I liked, which maybe weren't the "cool cars" or the "rich guy" cars. So, it really started then. But my first brand new car was that BMW L6.

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That's a pretty good start, and you've had your fair share of cars from that L6 all the way to now. Which one is your favorite?

RDJ:Right!My missus got me a 993 Porsche Turbo, which is the last year of the air-cooled 911s. I literally was driving up to a symposium and I saw the odometer go from 9,999 miles to 10,000. I was like "Dang! It had under 10,000 miles!" I'll tell you when I drove back it was literally the break of dawn. I had just finished being at this weekend mini conference and it was midnight. I said to myself, "Go back to your room, don't do anything stupid, just lay there until 4:45 am." I couldn't sleep because I was jet lagged from shooting this thing calledThe Sympathizerin Southeast Asia. So I got up, got in that 993, and drove it home.

The sun's not up yet and you're in this beautiful car, so you're not driving it so people can see you in your cool—it's officially a classic car now, right?

Right.

RDJ:You're just doing it because of that rear-engine vibe, the sound. Coming down PCH, getting out, you know. You know, there's still so much to be said for the end of that era. Like, who's still making stick-shift cars?

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Not many. That must have been a glorious drive. Though, as it goes with most car enthusiasts, for every great drive there are usually at least one or two horror stories. Care to share any of yours?

RDJ:Well, again I'm gonna go back to the '80s. I rented a Maserati Quattroporte which wasn't easy to do but they had one. I quickly realized—and they didn't care to mention—that the accelerator cable on this particular rental car was subject to, um, "unfastening."

Oh God. Where did it happen?

RDJ:Sunset Boulevard, on the winding part, on the "against all odds" kind of area.

Holy …

RDJ:It happened multiple times! Dude, there were times when I literally had my hand on the steering wheel, my right foot on the brake in case I had to stop, and I was literally pulling on the accelerator cable to get it to go and trying to get to places. Rather than just going back and saying, "Hey, nobody should be driving this car," I was just like, "They're busy. I'm busy. How do we make this work?"

I'll try to refrain from mentioningIron Manas much as possible, but I have to bring it up for this next one.

RDJ:Good luck! Let's just pause for a second. I don't think either of us are failingMotorTrendyet, are we?

I think we're good so far.

RDJ:There's time.

So, let's go back in time a bit.Iron Manis a certified hit, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a huge success because of it. Then, one day toward the tail end of your time with the franchise, you make some big life changes. You form the FootPrint Coalition with your wife and announce your mission to invest in technologies that will help the planet withDowney's Dream Carsbeing a part of it all. What were the deciding factors that ultimately led to this path?

RDJ:Let's pretend it was just one thing. I just woke up one morning wondering how can I reconcile the fact that I'm committing to developing and scaling sustainable technologies; and I have this, you know, not massive, but a pretty sizable collection of cars that just are doing the environment no favors. Then I was thinking the way to be literally self-sustaining for the coalition is, "What's the end game for all these cars?" The end game can't be for me to have Max [HBO's streaming service] pay to make them cooler, do a show, and pay me to do the cool show. This has to be about these cars winding up somewhere else.

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None of these cars are for me to keep. They all have to be given. Everyone needs a chance to spend five or 20 or 50 bucks [for a chance or chances to win them]. Not some Barrett-Jackson or Mecum thing—which I love and where I've gotten a fair amount of my cars in the past, but that's a pro game. That's like high-stakes poker. I want anybody to get a chance to own one of these cars.

What's your take on those who may look at what you're doing on the show and say that by removing the V-8 from a classic car and making it electric, you're taking away its soul?

RDJ:Well first, before I agree with them in a vacuum, I'm gonna say, where does the soul of the car reside? To me, it's in a couple areas. It's definitely the engine and the way it feels, the drivetrain, the smell, the steering wheel, the ergonomics of the interior, just everything. But it depends. For episode two [ofDowney's Dream Cars], the soul of that car is in the right front seat, which is where my mom sat.

But to play devil's advocate for them, absolutely right. Also just practically speaking, you're in a drawdown environmentally. Yes, it is probably true that the best thing you can do with a classic car is nothing, because as soon as you start making changes, you're burning energy to do that. So, in a way we had a real bar graph of how much carbon consumption is it going to take to make this thing this much more efficient? Is it worth it? So, there were cases where we said a new LS3 engine or a salvaged engine from a more modern car, you can't do any better than an internal combustion retrofit for something newer.

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I don't hate on internal combustion engines. I think that in a lot of ways, emissions, and gas guzzling aside, there's something about it. I think I say it in the second episode, even talking about my mom. That whole period of time got us where we are. I think there's still room for internal combustion. Maybe it'll be different fuel sources. I'd say this again with an EV conversion, we still don't know the long-term ramifications of riding on top of a bunch of batteries. I mean, all of this is an experiment. Which is why to me—again going back to Mama Elsie—it's why that biodiesel conversion to me was a no-brainer [for the Mercedes].

Not everyone has a collection of classic cars they can eco-mod and give away. In your opinion, what do you think the average person can do to support lessening our dependence on fossil fuels?

RDJ: That's probably the most important question for the reader because when I became a fan ofMotorTrend, I couldn't afford any car that was ever on the cover, let alone half the ones that were being advertised inside. But you know, I've never come across a family or an individual who didn't have some history or connection to some old beater that just needed a refurb in the family somewhere.

There are so many DIY things you can do to make it more energy efficient regardless of the year. I mean, pre-1930s it starts getting pretty messy, you know. Another is whatever car you're driving, try to eat a little less animal protein while you're doing it because you know, that has huge ramifications.

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I was really pleased with the [Buick] Riviera [project] because it's the one we really did the least to. It's the car that I owned for the shortest amount of time. We put that Aclima sensor on top, which would measure the air quality wherever you go, and we drove it around New York City. Having been raised in the city, I think you can find a way to have these things have meaning to you and look out for some of these technologies that would benefit from being on any mobile vehicle. So that Aclima sensor on top of that Riviera made me really happy because it was trying to signal a time when we can democratize [data] collection about what's really going on in our city, rather than just having an assembly person or some mayor tell you, "Hey, we checked everything and it's looking pretty good." Because in New York, I mean, South Street Seaport was ghastly.

You know, going back to favorite cars, I had a very long, decade-plus relationship with Audi and—not unlike Iron Man—they were at the time a second-tier luxury automobile company. Something about that era, about our franchise obviously suited each other really well and both kind of went up at the same time. Hilariously enough, I almost never got any of its cars in a functional state; because it was always a year, 16 months, or sometimes longer ahead of when the release date was.

So I've kind of been informally, kind of like one of its longest suffering co-conspirators. When I drove the E-Tron, I think it was to theEndgamepremiere. It was me and my missus, and literally a guy was like down in the wheel well because he had to start the car by putting in some combination.

I appreciate that, because take a company as big and formidable as Audi and it's still doing what we're all doing. We're kind of putting things together with toothpicks and band-aids just trying to demonstrate what an end-product might look like. They tend to get there, but that's always been fun.

What's the message you want the audience to take away fromDowney's Dream Carsonce people finish the final episode of the first season?

RDJ: Don't try this at home or do try this at home. It's completely up to you. Know it's not as easy as I made it look on TV, but it's definitely worth it because then you're owning it, you know? I think if you do a deep dive, I think the main messaging on this show is that a habitable planet for future generations ultimately is not in the hands of some government agency or some tech unicorn. It's each and every one of us. Because we're all so individual and specific, we have to trust that our own contributions from our own intuitions of what to do are really what's important. That was what the show came out of. It was literally almost like a dream of how to demonstrate a start, you know?

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A while back during a red-carpet event forFast X, Vin Diesel said publicly that he wants you to play the villain in the next film. Has Diesel spoken to you about joining the nextFastfilm? Would you be interested in doing so?

RDJ:Well, funnily enough, and here's another full-circle thing, Vin and I only really started hanging out last year. Love his family. He's great. We both are from the exact same neighborhood in New York, literally within blocks of each other.

We have all the same cultural references. We know most of the same people. I know half the people who grew up in his building. It's really weird that we've kind of like, without knowing it, been like six degrees to separation for 50-plus years. Yeah. Uh, the future's uncertain. You never know. I mean, that's probably the most likely way to get a second cover ofMotorTrendmagazine.

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