A Private Office on the Highway

But when a Fortune 500 chief executive wanted an exercise bicycle installed in his Cadillac Escalade, Mr. Becker, whose company makes vans and cars into luxurious mobile offices, asked himself, “How do I do that? And how do I do that and make it safe?”

He cut a $2,000 recumbent bicycle in half, welded the flywheel with the pedals to the floor and transplanted the heart monitor to a side panel at eye level. Then he shortened one of the car’s seats to clear the path for rotating legs. “The key is that we were able to maintain the three-point seat belt,” said Mr. Becker, who noted that the bike-Escalade required no special inspection from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Clients also buy custom mobile offices for many other reasons. Occasionally, a medical condition restricts a client’s ability to drive. Some consider tricked-out Mercedes Sprinter vans and Cadillac Escalades — among the most popular models for mobile offices, customizers say — to be understated alternatives to stretch limousines.

Others just like to show off the plush interiors, which can include granite floors, overstuffed leather couches, walnut foldout desks with mother-of-pearl inlay and voice-activated wide-screen televisions. And many chief executives want to speed down the information superhighway even when their car is stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

In the last year and a half, advances in mobile broadband Internet have “driven business to us in droves,” said Mr. Becker, whose company, Becker Automotive Design in Oxnard, Calif., charges $150,000 to $500,000 for “ultimate mobile productivity machines.”

Faster broadband enables clients to hold back-seat video conferences or download large files. Three-watt signal boosters and roof-mounted cellular antennas improve cellular reception, reducing Internet dead zones.

“How can people go back to working on little screens on smartphones in the back of cars?” wondered Mr. Becker.

Many of his clients opt for a Slingbox, a relatively inexpensive device ($300) that allows viewers to watch every channel they receive on their home televisions in their offices on wheels. Recently, a man from Saudi Arabia rode through downtown Manhattan in his chauffeured modified Sprinter van but fretted about his inability to watch Arabic-language television.

“You can’t get satellite anything in the canyons of New York,” said Mr. Becker. “We sent a Slingbox to his palace in Riyadh. They hooked it up to his TV feed. Blink. He’s got 24/7 Middle East programming, in Arabic, in his van in New York.”

“Everything I can do in the office, I can do on the road,” said Joe Sachen, the owner of an office Escalade. Mr. Sachen, who lives in Aliso Viejo, Calif., says he now looks forward to his commute to Los Angeles, where he often meets clients of his merchandising company. The roughly 120-mile round-trip can last up to five hours in heavy traffic.

“A lot of people come into my office constantly, and when I’m in the car, it’s just me by myself, and I feel I get so much more done,” he said. He now has a larger computer screen (32 inches) in his Escalade than in his office, he said.

Business has long been conducted in cars. “Traveling salesmen were one of the target markets for the first automobiles,” said Matt Anderson, curator of transportation at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. Ford published a magazine advising salesmen how to convert the Model T to carry product samples.

But the rough roads of the early 20th century were not conducive to writing memos in motion. One of the first cars marketed as a mobile office, the Stout Scarab, cost about $5,000 when it was introduced in 1935 — “a small fortune in the day,” said Mr. Anderson.