Drive A New 3-D Printed Car
With new automotive technology rampaging on it seems that we’ll be able to buy our own 3D-printed cars. The world’s first 3D printed car is called “Strati” and is made by Local Motors, and is reportedly going on sale during 2016.
Did you know that most vehicles that we drive around in today are made up using around 2000 parts? Local Motors indicate that the Strati is made up from just 40 parts. Mechanical parts like the suspension, motors and battery are sourced from a Renault Twizy – which is a battery-powered two-seater electric city car designed and marketed by Renault. Everything else on the Strati is made up of integrated single material pieces. These pieces include the exterior shell, frame and some of the interior features, which have been printed using ABS plastic that has been reinforced with carbon fibre.
Strati
Local Motors has developed the car so that it’s available with all the digital 3D-print files and build manuals available to the public for downloading and modifying by individual users. Local Motors aims to open around 100 micro-factories near major cities around the globe over the next ten years. The Strati boasts a sporty, little 2-seater design that, at present, takes 44 hours to print. Local Motors are working to speed this process up so that it only takes 24 hours to create. The Strati’s body is laid down layer-by-layer or slice-by-slice, and the Strati has approximately 212 layers laid down in its body. So, similar to a home desktop 3D printer, the Strati uses BAAM (big-area additive manufacturing) technology which relies on a digital 3D model part becoming sliced into layers. These modelled layers are then used to generate real layers of ABS plastic that are generated by the 3D printer.
Amazingly, this sort of 3D technology could have you download the necessary files from Local Motors, choose your options, create your own individual Strati on your computer and Local Motors could have the car made up inside two days. Design engineers from Strati suggest that you could even come up with your own design idea, have it looked at by Local Motors and then once settled, could be printed into your very own unique car design. That sounds fun; you could design and build your very own car.
The Strati vehicle is currently powered by a 6.1 kW battery which can be recharged in only 3.5 hours. It alsohas a top speed of 80 km/h – a perfect city car with zero emissions, and costing not much in power to charge.
Manufacturer, Divergent Micro-factories, is also in the business of creating their own 3D-printed cars with a difference, using the latest green technology. Take a look at their exciting supercar model called the Blade which has a 520 kW biofuel engine that is capable of flinging the car from 0-100 km/h in less than three seconds!
The Blade
3D-printing has been used in all sorts of engineering and modelling projects. Progressively, 3D-printing has been used in the building industry with all sorts of ingredients used for layering down in its design. You can even use 3D-printing and it’s layering machines to layer down a concrete building in any style or shape. This sort of technology allows you to get back to the lego block days when you really could create anything from your childhood imagination.
So what about layering down the dimensions and shape of a 1961 Jaguar E-Type?
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