In order to build a car, car manufacturing companies have to do a lot of planning and then have to assemble various parts. The whole process takes considerable amount of time. A few months back we wrote an article about mass-producing cars using 3D printer. (Read that article here). This doesn’t seem to be a distant dream if we get to know that a company names Local Motors has 3D printed an electric car!
The company has innovatively named the car- Starti which is in Italian means “layers”. The company revealed that it took them 45 hours to build this car having a range of 120 miles along with a maximum speed of 40mph. John Rogers, the CEO of Local Motors said. “We expect in the next couple of months [printing a complete car] to be below 24 hours and then eventually get it below 10 hours, [down from 45 hours currently]. This is in a matter of months. Today, the best Detroit or Germany can do is 10 hours on a [production] line, after hundreds of years of progress.”
The company chose to make this car an electric car because it was a simpler process as compared to a petrol or diesel version. The USP of this car is that it is made from thermoplastic. The printing was done using a Big Are Additive Manufacturing (BAAM) machine. The material is fully recyclable and can be easily chopped and reprocessed to make another car!
The price that was fixed by the company to own one of these car is anywhere in between $18, 000 to $30, 000. The company plans to start manufacturing the vehicle by 2015. Hopefully we can also see a few 3D printed cars in India as well!
