Kevin Czinger examines the Blade sports car's interior. (Photo credit George Anders),
What can you create with a 3-D printer, 61 pounds of aluminum powder and some carbon-fiber tubing? If you're California entrepreneur Kevin Czinger, you've got enough to start making Blade: a revolutionary new sports car with a 3-D printed chassis. (See video footage here.)
Only one such car exists right now. But Czinger is hoping that his new-age approach to manufacturing will catch on in a huge way, with the eventual goal of radically reducing the weight, costs and environmental toll of making cars around the world.
Czinger's car makes its public debut today at the O'Reilly Solid conference in San Francisco. This particular machine is better suited to the race track than the morning commute: it's a bobsled-style two-seater (one front, one back), with huge gull-wing doors and a 700-horsepower engine. Thanks to a super-light chassis, the car weighs only about 1,400 pounds.
There's no reason, though, Czinger said in an interview, that the lightweight design methods of Blade's chassis can't be applied to more traditional car designs. Even pickup trucks or sports-utility vehicles could be built with 3-D printed chassis, he contented.
Czinger, a one-time Goldman Sachs executive, has been trying to shake up the car industry since 2009, when he founded Coda Automotive, a Los Angeles-based electric-car manufacturer. Coda raised more than $200 million but wasn't able to sell more than about 100 cars during its four-year operating lifespan. Czinger stepped down as Coda's chief executive in 2010; the company filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors in 2013.
This time, Czinger isn't committed to doing all the manufacturing himself. He says his new company, Divergent Microfactories, is more interested in licensing its 3-D-printing technology to a new generation of relatively small automakers around the world.
Current automobile factors can require $1 billion of capital investment in metal stamping and other "technologies that date back to the 1920s," Czinger contends. That makes it hard for anyone except global giants to get involved in mass-market car manufacturing.
With 3-D printing of key components, however, Czinger maintains, it should be possible to start an economically viable, small-scale car manufacturing plant for as little as $10 million. "That's comparable to the investment in a microbrewery," he points out.
Czinger isn't the first innovator with ambitions of a drivable car made largely via 3-D printing. At a Chicago trade show in February, Local Motors 3D introduced a plastic car that it printed in 42 hours. KOR Ecologic has demonstrated one prototype, the Urbee, and is trying to raise money to make a more advanced version. In China, Sanya Shihai won attention for the Gold Tyrant, a car whose body is printed with 3-D plastic filament.
Most of these other early versions, however, are rudimentary versions of cars, looking more like covered golf carts and making no claims of being able to go faster than 40 m.p.h. They use plastic as their main building material and rely on traditional manufacturing for key elements such as engines, seats and steering wheels.
Like the other pioneers, Czinger isn't trying to make an entire car via 3-D printing. (Blade's engine, body and seats are traditionally manufactured.) But when it comes to the chassis, Czinger's Divergent Microfactories is taking a much more audacious approach than simply fusing plastic resin. He and his engineers use laser-based 3-D printing with metal powders, by contrast, to produce tubular aluminum junctions, known as nodes. These nodes are connected via carbon-fiber tubes, providing a strong skeleton to the car's overall frame -- much like the mesh-like designs that are used for race cars or advanced commercial jetliners.
Brad Balzer, Divergent's project lead engineer, says that 3-D printing makes it easier to design intricate parts that would be hard to machine using traditional technologies. With software determining the pathways that 3-D printing equipment must travel to complete a job, "complexity is free," Balzer points out.
It's unclear how auto-safety regulators might regard the Blade car or other subsequent models. Balzer says Divergent has subjected its nodes, junctions and carbon-fiber tubes to intense stresses and has found that they hold up well. He says he believes that Divergent's technology could create whatever "crumple zones" regulators might want, so that drivers and passengers could survive crashes into barriers or much heavier objects.
Ultimately, Czinger says, collision-avoidance technology may become the most decisive safety factor for motor vehicles, rather than relying on buffering features that protect passengers in a crash. Another possibility: if Divergent licenses its technology to small, local car makers, those manufacturers may take on the challenge of meeting safety norms in various jurisdictions around the world.
Using 3-D printing technology to produce lighter cars isn't just a matter of reducing costs and improving fuel efficiency, Czinger says. He sees a huge environmental boon from switching to leaner manufacturing methods that will reduce the energy consumption and pollution associated with all the mining, steel-making and metal-stamping associated with traditional car production.
