3D-Printed Car that will drive across USA

[Hum]

About two years from now, Cody and Tyler Kor, now 20 and 22 years old, respectively, will drive coast-to-coast in the lozenge-shaped Urbee 2, a car made mostly by 3D printing. Like Jackson and Crocker, the young men will take a dog along for the ride?Cupid, their collie and blue heeler mix. Unlike Jackson and Crocker, they will spend just 10 gallons of fuel to complete the trip from New York to San Francisco. Then they will refuel, turn around, and follow the same west-to-east route taken by Jackson, Crocker, and Bud.

Cody and Tyler's father, Jim Kor, beams when he talks about the trip. "The Google time estimate is 44 hours, but it will take a bit longer, I'm sure," says Kor, president of Kor Ecologic and team leader of the Urbee 2 project. "You know, the dog has to pee and whatnot. And we could have a breakdown. But it will be a swift and efficient trip."

Jim Kor described this ambitious endeavor at the Manufacturing the Future Summit on Wednesday. Stratasys, a global additive-manufacturing company, hosted the event at its Eden Prairie, Minn., headquarters. PopMech joined a small group of journalists at the meeting, which featured presentations by many early adopters of 3D printing.

The terms additive manufacturing and 3D printing are synonymous. A computer-aided design (CAD) file is uploaded to a 3D printer, which reads the file and creates the object, using, for example, PolyJet or Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) systems. A PolyJet machine uses liquid resins to build an object one microscopic layer at a time, following the CAD file?s code, and then cures the material with UV lights. FDM is a similar process, but it uses molten polymers. Printers can be as small as a microwave oven (such as MakerBot's desktop models) or as large as a minivan. The biggest Stratasys model, the Fortus 900mc, is more than 9 feet long and 6 feet tall and weighs about 6600 pounds. It can print objects up to 36 by 24 inches.

Stratasys, which went into business in 1994, is growing fast. In August, it acquired MakerBot, the Brooklyn-based leader in desktop 3D printing, for a reported $604 million. It has 1600 employees worldwide, with offices in Israel, Asia, South America, and Europe. Its production arm, RedEye, has factories in Belgium, Turkey, and Australia, and at two other U.S. locations besides Eden Prairie. At Wednesday's press event, RedEye vice president Jim Bartel announced that the company would build production facilities in Shanghai in 2014.

Sratasys has clients who testified at the summit about using its technology to make prototyping and producing their wares faster and cheaper. But Jim Kor was the star of the show. He was fidgety when he started his presentation, "Sustainable Cars and the Future of Manufacturing," in front of about 25 people in a ground-floor conference room. "I'm an introvert," he said, nervously stroking his salt-and-pepper beard. "Actually, it's worse than that?I'm a hermit."

The aha moment came over lunch one day in 1996, at the Sunstone Cafe in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Kor lives and works. He and a team of seven other designers and engineers had just finished making and testing the Solos personal rapid transit vehicle (also known as a podcar), which ran on rails. It was an efficient design, propelled by a small electric motor and human power, but a rail system would have to be created to support its use. "We should take a version of that vehicle and put it on the road, because the roads are already there," one of Kor's colleagues said.

Kor was intrigued by the idea, and began sketching on a paper napkin. "It was a side view of a car that looked like a more aerodynamic Smart car, a two-seater," he says. Within days, conceptualization and design work began on a vehicle intended for urban use, powered by electric motors and a small, ethanol-fueled combustion engine. Those key words?urban, electric, ethanol?gave the Urbee its name, and Kor Ecologic spent more than a decade refining the design.

The primary challenge was aerodynamics. In his presentation at Stratasys, Kor mentioned how a sprinting cheetah flattens its ears onto the top of its head and a falcon speeds through the air with its feet held flush with its body. "Nature is my inspiration," he said.

By the fall of 2008, Kor and his team had a full computer model and a partial physical model of a hybrid that would get about 300 mpg. The process was smooth?Kor has worked with the same group of designers and engineers for decades?but not without some disagreement. "There were two of us that knew the aerodynamics really well, and two industrial designers," Kor recalls. "The industrial designers kept saying, 'It can't look like a jellybean.' But I was adamant that the design must be efficient first, and then we would design for the look. Most cars are done the other way around?they start with how they want the car to look, and then they try to find ways to make it efficient."

Kor's team modeled the Urbee's exterior in clay at 60 percent scale. The Urbee's aerodynamics were impressive, with a coefficient of drag (Cd) of about 0.149. (By comparison, a Prius has a Cd of about 0.25.) But while creating the CAD file of the exterior was a major step, it was still too early to celebrate. "We had everything in the computer but no way out," Kor says.

Regardless, he felt so confident that the car would be built that he decided to enter the Automotive X Prize (AXP), plunking down $10,000 and registering ahead of the February 2009 filing deadline. But building the working prototype proved more difficult than Kor and his team expected. Making the body from fiberglass molding, it turned out, would have required creating a full-scale model of the exterior, creating the molds, laying in the fiberglass, extracting the fiberglass, and then fitting the pieces together. The process would have taken up to 10 months, at least, and the parts would need a lot of tweaking to perfect the fit. Kor would end up dropping out of the X Prize competition.

But in mid-2010, Kor received an email from one of his industrial designers, Terry Halajko. The message contained a link to the Stratasys site. "Look at the size of the parts they can make!" Halajko wrote.

Kor contacted Stratasys, and talked with engineers at RedEye about the 3D printing process. It started with a 1/6th-scale model. Working via CAD, Kor's team sliced up the exterior?the body and glass panels?into 20 pieces, each of a size that the Stratasys printers could produce. The scale model was a success, so production on the full-size parts began.

"The body was printed from basic white ABS [acrylonitrile butadiene styrene]," Kor says. "We were cautious about the thickness?we didn't want the first body to be too weak?and made it thicker than we originally felt necessary. It was 1/4-inch thick all around. In certain places, we added a simple crisscross egg-crate structure to the inside to stiffen the panels further. So, the first body was just a skin with some basic internal bracing added."

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[LittleNeutrino Veteran]

First off, that would be really cool to see them do, secondly it is VERY ugly lol.

[tsupersonic]

Cool idea, terrible design. 

[Hum]

The design makes me think 'mobile trash dumpster'. :laugh:

[Torolol]

 

wait, is that a three wheeled car i see there?

[Hum]

^ er, one back wheel

[Arachno 1D]

So its a robin reliant that drives backwards :D

 

EDIT Them wheels aren't moulded plastic :P

[Dotdot]

So its made of plastic and they expect to be safe in it?

Sorry but plastic frame and plastic panels = unsafe car.

Not to mention that a 3 wheel car isnt very safe either.

GL to them tho.

[Arachno 1D]

Reminds me of this

[Astra.Xtreme]

They better hope they don't get hit by a semi or large SUV as they clearly don't have an airbag system.

 

Also, I wonder how fast is goes.  Seeing at many cross country interstates are 75-80mph, if it's slow and gets in people's way, it's going to be a huge safety hazard.

[+Mirumir Subscriber¹]

Great idea, good luck to them!

 

I wonder what their total cost will be and how much the vehicle will weight.

 

 

They better hope they don't get hit by a semi or large SUV as they clearly don't have an airbag system.

 

The airbags will be useless as a collision with an SUV or any car one tonne plus car will shatter it to pieces.

[Hum]

Now if it could only fly ... :/

[AnotherITguy]

This reminds me of a little communist car called the YUGO, nonetheless, good luck guys.

[Brian Miller]

Ugly.  

 

Print a bloody a Lamborghini already

[The Evil Overlord]

So its a robin reliant that drives backwards :D

 

EDIT Them wheels aren't moulded plastic :p

it'd be fairer to say a Morgan three wheeler with added fairing

[537]

So now you can download a car!  :laugh:

[The Evil Overlord]

So now you can download a car!  :laugh:

lol guess those anti video piracy ads were right all along :p

[winrez]

Looks like a wireless mouse

[537]

lol guess those anti video piracy ads were right all along :p

Exactly!  :woot:

[psionicinversion]

So its made of plastic and they expect to be safe in it?

Sorry but plastic frame and plastic panels = unsafe car.

Not to mention that a 3 wheel car isnt very safe either.

GL to them tho.

 

I dont think plastic is going to bother them to much, TVR's were made out of fibre glass least there isnt going to be much chance of losing control and hitting a lampost hahaha