Crave - An Ecologic Sports Car, diploma project 2005 Rating Options

[Steppenwolf1980]

Now I finally managed to post my graduation (diploma) project... even though I finished my ID study at the FH Joanneum in Austria last year, I couldn't find the time to post it earlier.

Short description: Nowadays a fast sports car usually means to have a lot of power and unfortunately a lot of weight (we'll just skip cars like the Elise or the Speedster here, please). This also makes them a lot unneccesary, for my opinion. I don't need two tons around me to have a fun ride,but most people with for example a Bentley GT seem not to be able to live without seat heating and crappy stuff like that, always making the car heavy, increasing the fuel consumption. So, my project was to create a pure sports car without endangering the environment at all, which means that it just doesn't only consume litte fuel, but also is ecological in its production and the choice of materials.

Fictitious time was the year 2020 because then we'll probably have about 8% of hydrogen powered cars around, so there are at least some gas stations providing hydrogen. The car is called "Crave" to underline how much we need ecological intelligent vehicles in our world, without making them boring and slow. Crave was made for both track and road use, spartanic in its interior configuration, but focused on minimum weight, maximum performance and of course hyper eco-friendliness. It is supposed to have below 500 kilogramms of weight and an output of 88kW, achieved with four electrical hub motors, one in each wheel, powered by a hydro cell. Acceleration from 0 to 60 mphs / 100km/h about 4 seconds.

I researched about 2 months on materials and production techniques, the result is an almost completely recycleable or rotting vehicle. As you can see in the presentation plot, every part of the car has the right material, for example bio-plastic for the body (this plastic is made from lemon shell oil called Limonen, there's no fossile oil in it) or recycled (secondary) aluminium for the chassis. I won't numerate every aspect here, because this would be too much.

The design process was based on former racing cars, see the moodboard... old formula one and soapbox cars were the inspiring products for Crave, because they pass on useless stuff and keep the car much more compact and simple. The target group of customers are individualistic people, currently owning cars like the Elise, Speedster, MR2 (I did a market analysis on this).





moodboard  mood_formel1_Kopie.jpg ( 96.83K ) Number of downloads: 26


moodboard

Attached File(s)

 mood_formel1_Kopie.jpg ( 96.83K ) Number of downloads: 2

 

[Renzsu]

you're attachments aren't working, did you upload them correctly? Also the ImageShack image isn't working properly.
I recommend to use the 'preview post' button when making a new post/topic that has images in it, to test if everything is working correctly.

[Steppenwolf1980]

yeah, photoshop saved some files not properly. here we go...

moodboard




presentation plot (degree show 2005)... sorry for the bad quality, but the file would be too large...




final exterior sketch




final interior sketch




digital renderings





1:5 scale model with photoshop fake

[dr3amz]

very nice car and good research steppenwolf,

if people want to drive around fast just for fun its good to keep pollution
as low as possible. presentation and sketch looking good.
i think your renderings got to much light on the chrome-parts.
they look almost white. maybe reduce the main light and add some small colored spotlights
to bring out the chrome more. which software was used?
i really like your clean style and the classic racing car - spirit in the design.
good project, big up.

drmz.

[Steppenwolf1980]

hi drmz,

i know about the renderings... in fact they were darker, like on the plot. I just got them a bit more brightness before i posted them, because otherwise some details weren't visible.

Because I built a real model anyway, I didn't waste much time with the 3D-Modeling and Rendering... Modeling time was about 5 days in Studio Tools, these Renderings were made in SolidWorks 2005, each took about 5 minutes, so no big deal. I also had an animation made in Maya, so the Rendering quality here isn't the best, I know...

greetz Marcus

[render]

goood job!!

[Tim_meh]

Nice sketches and Modelling (both physical and 3D)! Did you have access to a lasercutter to make components for your model?
I like the design, reminds me of the days when we used to race boxcars (not that old..only early 20's) was an American thing when I lived there. This would have been a cool car to race.
Nice work, looking forward to your future works!

[nate]

hey Steppenwolf1980

nice concept car - can i ask why you went fron studiotools to solidworks??

also maybe droping that last pic into photoshop and playing with the colour balance, would fit it into the scence a bit better

nice work

keep posting

[Aargh]

Nice design and renders, I like the style of it.

A few points though, your evaluation of the current sports car segment is a bit skewed. Listing sports cars as weighing 2 000kg's is all well and good but the Bentley Continental GT is a GT car which is meant for fast crusing and the like. If you want to compare with stripped down, back to basics kind of cars look to vehicle brands such as Caterham, Lotus (340R, Exige, Elise less so) and Ariel (Atom). All of these cars are likely to have a higher power to weight ratio than your design (although the use of electric motors might give your design better acceleration). Also most of these cars are 2 seaters which is a bit more practical.

Also I think that in order to comply with various regulations, you would have to change certain aspects of the design. For example the position of the headlights (I seem to recall something about them having to be a certain height from the ground).

Overall though I really like the design and would consider buying one as a track car should it be on the market and/or I had enough money.

[Steppenwolf1980]

@tim

yes, the industrial design department of my university has some brilliant equipment like big cintiq screens, lots of workstations and a big modelshop with a cnc mill and tons of other tools. I only had to make the body out of town, because our deep drawing machine was slightly too small for the full lenght of the 1:5 scale body. Most of the parts have been CNC milled and then painted/assembled by hand, also the interior.

@nate

I prefer to build those freeform surface stuff in alias, it's a lot faster an easier, i think. that's why the complete modeling didn't even took a week, although i modeled the whole car including interior and small details like joints and graphic surfaces. But still I had to build the real model, so I had no time for configuring the render engine in Alias properly, which is a big piece of work. So I copied the model into SolidWorks and the new PhotoWorks2 Engine which is great... I rendered really good pics within 10 minutes and saved a lot of time there.

@Aargh

well, of course I know that somebody driving a Bentley GT never rides my car, it's just something complete different. But I wanted to describe the background of my project's intentions, I still believe in lightweight vehicles as the transportation device of the future. In my mind it's completely nonsense to carry more than 1.5 tons around with me even though I'm the only passenger. That's for example why I can't understand people buying cars like the Touareg or an M-Class, I usually see them driving alone in the city center, never going offroad and consuming 15 litres of gas on 100 kilometers. That's just the wrong way. I really like Lotus and some other firms who really seem to think about the core of driving a car. As I told, I did a market analysis and categorized all common small and lightweight roadsters in different rasters. The conclusion was that my target group in 2020 are people who drive nowadays an Elise, Speedster, MR2 or SuperSeven. They don't care about missing comfort but they focus on performance and the feeling of a sports car itself.