3-D Printed Urbee Car – Future of Automotive?

The buzz lately in the tech world is about 3-D printing. And now, an automotive engineer has developed an automobile using this printing technology. From car parts to entire cars, is the future of automotive in a printer?

If you haven’t heard this story yet, Jim Kor has engineered what he calls the Urbee. It is essentially 3-D printed car with a hybrid engine. The process is a bit involved as you might imagine. By using the equipment at RedEye, an on-demand 3-D printing shop, the printers use ABS plastic that sprays molten polymer to build the chassic layer in microscopic increments to build the car. Essentially, Kor uploads a design, presses a button and the automated machine does its thing. When he comes back to it, hundred hours later or so, he has a bumper. The entire 3-wheeled two-passenger car takes about 2,500 hours to build according to Wired.com.

While the car isn’t by any means a race car, it does have several advantages including a curb weight of just 1,200 pounds. This combined with a 36-volt electric motor and a diesel engine, the prototype produces a maximum of 10 horsepower. While slow, it doesn’t use much gas though and the plan is to drive from San Francisco to New York on 10 gallons of pure ethanol.

One of the big questions is safety. The printer helps with that a bit since it can be set to add thickness and rigidity to specific sections like say the bumper. Essentially, the bumper could be as resilient as say the Prius while being much lighter. Plus, Kor is focused on what he calls “race car safety. We want the car to pass the tech inspection required at Le Mans.”

This is largely accomplished through design which includes a tubular cage around the driver (think Nascar). To overcome Gov’t regulations on safety, the Urbee will be registered as a motorcycle, which is really is.

Kor says they already have orders for 14 and they estimate the cost to be around $50,000.

Much like most protypes of things, we don’t see this as being really that useful. However, it is definitely a precursor of what could be. Someday, we might live in a world, where if you need to replace your water pump for example, you print out a new one. Incredible.

For more information on the future of 3-D printable car parts, check out 3DCarParts.org.