Car Produced With a 3D Printer 257
Lanxon writes "A prototype for an electric vehicle — code named Urbee — is the first to have its entire body built with a 3D printer, reports Wired. Stratasys and Winnipeg engineering group Kor Ecologic have partnered to create the electric/liquid fuel hybrid, which can deliver more than 200 miles per gallon on the motorway and 100 miles per gallon in the city."
why does the picture in the article look like (Score:5, Insightful)
why does the picture in the article look like a still from a low rez video of a photograph of a badly-photoshopped computer rendering?
Misdirected efforts (Score:1, Insightful)
With all this green technology promised to us, I wonder if there is consumer demand. Look at the 1980s: after the government regulations that gave us crappy front wheel drive cars, consumers switched to large gas-guzzling SUVs (I wonder if fuel efficiency would have stayed better if we still had the large RWD sedan layout, with our current engine improvements).
The truth is, no-one wants a slow, cramped and wimpy go-kart (except for some hippies). People want a practical and fun car. If you force these shopping carts on us, we will just start buying more light trucks (eww).
Safe? (Score:3, Insightful)
The two-passenger hybrid aims to be fuel efficient, easy to repair, safe to drive and inexpensive to own.
Nothing about that picture, from the low driver orientation to the tin-can size, exudes safety.
Even the picture from their homepage [urbee.net] looks horrible.
Is the government going to ban these printers? (Score:3, Insightful)
As a threat to interstate commerce? Kinda like telling the farmers they can't grow their own animal feed? If you think that self publishing artists are a threat to the industry, wait until you have everybody self replicating everything they need.
Re:3D, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. For that you would need a 4D printer.
Re:So it's just a body? (Score:3, Insightful)
They could actually confirm the Golf dimple (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, some enterprising person could build a car body from scratch and truly verify if Adam and Jaime got it right.
Re:3D Printers (Score:2, Insightful)
You only do this stuff for prototype, not production due to cost.
Umm, yeah, that's exactly what the article said they did. Built the prototype. Summary of the summary: "Prototype built using only prototyping machine." Other than the sanding and painting, of course.
Nothing is said in the article about the actual production car if and when it ever gets past the prototype stage.
I'm 100% certain they aren't going to be stupid enough to go to production using a prototyping machine. You're absolutely correct, though cost is not the only factor (speed would be one, and durability of materials would be another).
Re:3D, eh? (Score:1, Insightful)
Where to get the plastic & on being a hobby (Score:3, Insightful)
Two links for videos of fixing something at home with a 3D printer:
"YouTube - Better Living With MakerBot - Episode 1: Kitchen Lamp"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBzyZSVK_Gs [youtube.com]
"Better Living with MakerBot - Episode 2: The Wall Socket "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9tnqHS2vFo [youtube.com]
You could recycle plastic you already have with better home technology, in theory. Just like you can build a machine shop from "scrap":
http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/index.html [lindsaybks.com]
What does it mean to say it is "cheaper" to mass produce things than print them on demand if you need to incur costs when you store them, ship them around, wait for them, secure them, deal with sending back wrong orders, keep track of stuff, and still need to repair and replace stuff on demand anyway? If that made sense, why do people have 2D printers at home when it is probably "cheaper" in some sense to print everything at a large central facility and have it mailed to you in boxes once a month?
If your 3D printer breaks, you ask your friend to print you a replacement part. Or you use another 3D printer you have at home. What do you do when you misconfigure a Debian system and it won't boot? You use another computer to surf the web looking for a solution and to create a boot CD-ROM or boot USB Flash drive.
Anyway, maybe it is good that it is "just a hobby" (even as that is not quite true), because 3D printers are part of ushering in "the end of work (as we know it)".
Related group I'm involved with:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing [google.com]
Re:They could actually confirm the Golf dimple (Score:1, Insightful)
They almost certainly have followed it up already. There are any number of things that could be done that would significantly increase fuel economy of virtually any car (just changing various settings in the computer is the easiest). The problem is, no one would buy such a car - you can have increased fuel economy by fiddling with the computer, but it's generally at the cost of reduced acceleration. In this case, better fuel economy, but ugly car = nobody will buy it. There's almost certainly other issues you would run into after spending a while working on it, off the top of my head - the dimples on horizontal surfaces would tend to accumulate dirt deposited by rain if the car was sitting outside when it rained. Probably harder to clean. Probably makes some kind of streaking. Likely some issues with the paint over time. The car would have to be bigger (e.g. if the dimples are 1/2" deep, your car just got 1" bigger in all directions, with no corresponding increase in interior room). But, the look is probably still the main thing. Most likely they did a marketing study and found very few people would want to buy it.
Re:3D, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Those aren't real klein bottles, they are just the closest approximation that we can make. A real klein bottle doesn't pass through itself, it passes around its own exterior though a fourth dimension.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Misdirected efforts (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Safe? (Score:3, Insightful)
Strangely, some people judge safety on actual collision tests instead of the size of a car. e.g. The Smart ForTwo is one of the smallest cars available, yet is also one of the safest.
What? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm reminded of the Slashdot article about the robot made out of Legos which solves a Rubik's Cube in 12 seconds. Of course, one of the components to this robot is a computer and the computer is not built out of Legos. This is no more a car produced with a 3D printer than that was a robot made out of Legos.
But the the headline "Parts of Car which it is Possible for 3D Printers to Produce, Produced With a 3D Printer" doesn't have that same ring to it.
Re:So it's just a body? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't go thinking that you'll be able to just print replacement parts. 3D printing/reprapping is going to be as encumbered by copyright issues as video and audio is.
It's already completely legal to create knockoff replacement parts and to sell them with information stating their application so long as you do not misrepresent yourself as the company which made the originals, for example by improper use of their logos. This is already done for body parts, sensor/sender units which basically consist of a potentiometer wrapped up in some custom plastic, trim pieces, window seals, glass pieces, and basically every other piece (including interior trim) where there is sufficient demand to create a lookalike.
Or in other words, this problem has already been addressed where it applies to automotive parts, and it is not the issue you claim it to be.
I wonder how that applies if the design [wikipedia.org] of the car in question is covered by a patent [google.com]
Re:You wouldn't steal a car... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it would work pretty much like with normal printers. You can print books on your inkjet/laser but it's slow, expensive, and you get loose leaf out of it.
So same for a 3D printer. It'll be slow, require materials to print with and have an inferior in quality. It will be really cool, even though it won't obsolete mass manufacturing.
Re:So it's just a body? (Score:3, Insightful)
Naw, we can just torrent the part specs from Car-PirateBay.com and get em for free. Additionally the torrented parts have stripped out the DRM that requires the printer to use substandard plastics and intentionally place flaws and weak spots in the printing pattern to ensure a frequent replacement rate.
And they'll call it, grand piracy auto.
The lawyers will make a mess of themselves just thinking about it.
Re:So it's just a body? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So it's just a body? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So it's just a body? (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case, function (Aerodynamics) dictates form.
My question is:
200 motorway, 100 city? This is FAR worse than the typical performance hit you see for conventional vehicles, and is abysmal for a hybrid. (Regenerative braking means you should pay very little penalty in city fuel economy, and if air resistance dominates your energy expenditures, city might even be more efficient due to the lower speeds involved.)
Also:
Is that on a pure hybrid cycle, or is that with the "electric cheat" of saying a plug-in hybrid gets (insane number) miles to the gallon (however, the number is highly dependent on driving patterns and what portion of the energy is from plugin charge vs. from liquid fuel)
Last but not least:
Does this vehicle meet all United States crash safety standards? Most of these "super high mileage" hybrids don't, so we'll never see mileage numbers like that in a real road-legal vehicle.