BMW's polarizing designer Chris Bangle is at it again. He has pushed his team to re-examine the purpose of the body of a car, and has come to the conclusion that it need not be structural. Thinking far outside the box, the BMW design team has developed a fabric body, stretched tight over a frame that can be shifted and adjusted according to the conditions. The doors appear to bend open, the spoiler grows out of the rear deck, eyelids open to reveal headlights, and the hood parts in the middle for access to the engine while suggesting strongly what a Terminator autopsy might look like.
Autoblog has an extensive writeup of the car, but to really appreciate how radical the fabric body is, you need to see it in motion.
1 comment:
It's a pretty neat idea. Beyond the metaphysics I see several practical benefits. Compared to steel, fabric should be cheaper and greener to manufacture, lighter, more resilient to dings and scratches, and more recyclable. I bet that re-skinning a 15 year old car would be cheaper than repainting a metal body. There are far fewer seams to seal and potentially leak. Likewise panel gaps do not exist because there are no panels.
If a car's exterior lines have nothing to do with its structure, platform sharing can be taken a lot further.
My biggest worry would be that any joker with a steak knife could slash his way inside my car.
Post a Comment