3-D Printed Car Nears Production 93
An anonymous reader writes "An article at Wired shows just how close we are to a 3-D printed car. Jim Kor's 'Urbee 2' design is a lightweight teardrop shape with three wheels. The engine, chassis, and wheels aren't printed, of course, but much of the car is formed layer-by-layer out of ABS plastic. It takes about 2,500 hours of printer time to create the whole thing. Assembly is easier, though, since many different parts can be consolidated into just a few. 'To negotiate the inevitable obstacles presented by a potentially incredulous NHSTA and DOT, the answer is easy. "In many states and many countries, Urbee will be technically registered as a motorcycle," Kor says. It makes sense. With three wheels and a curb weight of less than 1,200 pounds, it's more motorcycle than passenger car. No matter what, the bumpers will be just as strong as their sheet-metal equivalents. "We're planning on making a matrix that will be stronger than FDM," says Kor. He admits that yes, "There is a danger in breaking one piece and have to recreate the whole thing." The safety decisions that'll determine the car's construction lie ahead. Kor and his team have been tweaking the safety by using crash simulation software, but the full spectrum of testing will have to wait for an influx of investment cash.'"
Re:2,500 hours to print car? (Score:5, Interesting)
While I am skeptical about a lot of things in this project, this likely isn't as bad as one might think. This is the full serial time to build all of the components, which could be parallelized, meaning that in production they would only have to worry about the single component with the longest generation time. This is probably still quite a long time using this technique.
Re:know how I know it's a pipe dream? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm bemused the assumption is the engineer is an idiot, not the reporter or marketdroid that wrote it.