Urbee Two, the 3D-Printed Car That Will Drive Across the Country
In early 1903, physician and car enthusiast Horatio Nelson Jackson accepted a $50 bet that he could not cross the United States by car. Just a few weeks later, on May 23, he and mechanic Sewall K. Crocker climbed into a 20-hp Winton in San Francisco and headed east. Accompanied by Bud, a pit bull they picked up along the way, the two dudes arrived in Fresh York sixty three days, twelve hours, and eight hundred gallons of fuel later, completing the nation’s very first cross-country drive.
About two years from now, Cody and Tyler Kor, now twenty and twenty two years old, respectively, will drive coast-to-coast in the lozenge-shaped Urbee Two, a car made mostly by 3D printing. Like Jackson and Crocker, the youthfull boys will take a dog along for the rail–Cupid, their collie and blue heeler mix. Unlike Jackson and Crocker, they will spend just ten gallons of fuel to finish the journey from Fresh York to San Francisco. Then they will refuel, turn around, and go after the same west-to-east route taken by Jackson, Crocker, and Bud.
Cody and Tyler’s father, Jim Kor, rafters when he talks about the journey. “The Google time estimate is forty four hours, but it will take a bit longer, I’m sure,” says Kor, president of Kor Ecologic and team leader of the Urbee two project. “You know, the dog has to piss and whatnot. And we could have a breakdown. But it will be a swift and efficient excursion.”
Jim Kor described this ambitious endeavor at the Manufacturing the Future Summit on Wednesday. Stratasys, a global additive-manufacturing company, hosted the event at its Eden Prairie, Minn., headquarters. PopMech joined a puny group of journalists at the meeting, which featured presentations by many early adopters of 3D printing.
The terms additive manufacturing and 3D printing are synonymous. A computer-aided design (CAD) file is uploaded to a 3D printer, which reads the file and creates the object, using, for example, PolyJet or Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) systems. A PolyJet machine uses liquid resins to build an object one microscopic layer at a time, following the CAD file’s code, and then cures the material with UV lights. FDM is a similar process, but it uses steaming polymers. Printers can be as petite as a microwave oven (such as MakerBot’s desktop models) or as large as a minivan. The largest Stratasys model, the Fortus 900mc, is more than nine feet long and six feet tall and weighs about six thousand six hundred pounds. It can print objects up to thirty six by twenty four inches.
Stratasys, which went into business in 1994, is growing swift. In August, it acquired MakerBot, the Brooklyn-based leader in desktop 3D printing, for a reported $604 million. It has one thousand six hundred employees worldwide, with offices in Israel, Asia, South America, and Europe. Its production arm, RedEye, has factories in Belgium, Turkey, and Australia, and at two other U.S. locations besides Eden Prairie. At Wednesday’s press event, RedEye vice president Jim Bartel announced that the company would build production facilities in Shanghai in 2014.
Sratasys has clients who testified at the summit about using its technology to make prototyping and producing their wares quicker and cheaper. But Jim Kor was the starlet of the display. He was fidgety when he embarked his presentation, “Sustainable Cars and the Future of Manufacturing,” in front of about twenty five people in a ground-floor conference room. “I’m an introvert,” he said, nervously tugging his salt-and-pepper beard. “Actually, it’s worse than that–I’m a hermit.”
Kor got over his dislike of public speaking, and during his talk and in subsequent interviews with PopMech, he described the years-long development of the very first Urbee car and the grand plan for Urbee Two’s cross-country odyssey.
The aha moment came over lunch one day in 1996, at the Sunstone Cafe in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Kor lives and works. He and a team of seven other designers and engineers had just finished making and testing the Solos private rapid transit vehicle (also known as a podcar), which ran on rails. It was an efficient design, propelled by a puny electrical motor and human power, but a rail system would have to be created to support its use. “We should take a version of that vehicle and put it on the road, because the roads are already there,” one of Kor’s colleagues said.
Kor was intrigued by the idea, and began sketching on a paper napkin. “It was a side view of a car that looked like a more aerodynamic Wise car, a two-seater,” he says. Within days, conceptualization and design work began on a vehicle intended for urban use, powered by electrical motors and a puny, ethanol-fueled combustion engine. Those key words–urban, electrified, ethanol–gave the Urbee its name, and Kor Ecologic spent more than a decade refining the design.
The primary challenge was aerodynamics. In his presentation at Stratasys, Kor mentioned how a sprinting cheetah flattens its ears onto the top of its head and a falcon speeds through the air with its feet held flush with its figure. “Nature is my inspiration,” he said.
By the fall of 2008, Kor and his team had a total computer model and a partial physical model of a hybrid that would get about three hundred mpg. The process was slick–Kor has worked with the same group of designers and engineers for decades–but not without some disagreement. “There were two of us that knew the aerodynamics indeed well, and two industrial designers,” Kor recalls. “The industrial designers kept telling, ‘It can’t look like a jellybean.’ But I was adamant that the design must be efficient very first, and then we would design for the look. Most cars are done the other way around–they commence with how they want the car to look, and then they attempt to find ways to make it efficient.”
Kor’s team modeled the Urbee’s exterior in clay at sixty percent scale. The Urbee’s aerodynamics were amazing, with a coefficient of haul (Cd) of about 0.149. (By comparison, a Prius has a Cd of about 0.25.) But while creating the CAD file of the exterior was a major step, it was still too early to feast. “We had everything in the computer but no way out,” Kor says.
Regardless, he felt so certain that the car would be built that he determined to come in the Automotive X Prize (AXP), plunking down $Ten,000 and registering ahead of the February two thousand nine filing deadline. But building the working prototype proved more difficult than Kor and his team expected. Making the figure from fiberglass molding, it turned out, would have required creating a full-scale model of the exterior, creating the molds, laying in the fiberglass, extracting the fiberglass, and then fitting the lumps together. The process would have taken up to ten months, at least, and the parts would need a lot of tweaking to ideal the fit. Kor would end up pulling down out of the X Prize competition.
But in mid-2010, Kor received an email from one of his industrial designers, Terry Halajko. The message contained a link to the Stratasys site. “Look at the size of the parts they can make!” Halajko wrote.
Kor contacted Stratasys, and talked with engineers at RedEye about the 3D printing process. It embarked with a 1/6th-scale model. Working via CAD, Kor’s team sliced up the exterior–the bod and glass panels–into twenty lumps, each of a size that the Stratasys printers could produce. The scale model was a success, so production on the full-size parts began.
“The figure was printed from basic white Six pack [acrylonitrile butadiene styrene],” Kor says. “We were cautious about the thickness–we didn’t want the very first figure to be too powerless–and made it thicker than we originally felt necessary. It was 1/4-inch thick all around. In certain places, we added a ordinary crisscross egg-crate structure to the inwards to stiffen the panels further. So, the very first figure was just a skin with some basic internal bracing added.”
Urbee Two, the 3D-Printed Car That Will Drive Across the Country
Urbee Two, the 3D-Printed Car That Will Drive Across the Country
In early 1903, physician and car enthusiast Horatio Nelson Jackson accepted a $50 bet that he could not cross the United States by car. Just a few weeks later, on May 23, he and mechanic Sewall K. Crocker climbed into a 20-hp Winton in San Francisco and headed east. Accompanied by Bud, a pit bull they picked up along the way, the two guys arrived in Fresh York sixty three days, twelve hours, and eight hundred gallons of fuel later, completing the nation’s very first cross-country drive.
About two years from now, Cody and Tyler Kor, now twenty and twenty two years old, respectively, will drive coast-to-coast in the lozenge-shaped Urbee Two, a car made mostly by 3D printing. Like Jackson and Crocker, the youthful studs will take a dog along for the rail–Cupid, their collie and blue heeler mix. Unlike Jackson and Crocker, they will spend just ten gallons of fuel to finish the tour from Fresh York to San Francisco. Then they will refuel, turn around, and go after the same west-to-east route taken by Jackson, Crocker, and Bud.
Cody and Tyler’s father, Jim Kor, rafters when he talks about the journey. “The Google time estimate is forty four hours, but it will take a bit longer, I’m sure,” says Kor, president of Kor Ecologic and team leader of the Urbee two project. “You know, the dog has to piss and whatnot. And we could have a breakdown. But it will be a swift and efficient journey.”
Jim Kor described this ambitious endeavor at the Manufacturing the Future Summit on Wednesday. Stratasys, a global additive-manufacturing company, hosted the event at its Eden Prairie, Minn., headquarters. PopMech joined a petite group of journalists at the meeting, which featured presentations by many early adopters of 3D printing.
The terms additive manufacturing and 3D printing are synonymous. A computer-aided design (CAD) file is uploaded to a 3D printer, which reads the file and creates the object, using, for example, PolyJet or Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) systems. A PolyJet machine uses liquid resins to build an object one microscopic layer at a time, following the CAD file’s code, and then cures the material with UV lights. FDM is a similar process, but it uses hot polymers. Printers can be as petite as a microwave oven (such as MakerBot’s desktop models) or as large as a minivan. The thickest Stratasys model, the Fortus 900mc, is more than nine feet long and six feet tall and weighs about six thousand six hundred pounds. It can print objects up to thirty six by twenty four inches.
Stratasys, which went into business in 1994, is growing prompt. In August, it acquired MakerBot, the Brooklyn-based leader in desktop 3D printing, for a reported $604 million. It has one thousand six hundred employees worldwide, with offices in Israel, Asia, South America, and Europe. Its production arm, RedEye, has factories in Belgium, Turkey, and Australia, and at two other U.S. locations besides Eden Prairie. At Wednesday’s press event, RedEye vice president Jim Bartel announced that the company would build production facilities in Shanghai in 2014.
Sratasys has clients who testified at the summit about using its technology to make prototyping and producing their wares quicker and cheaper. But Jim Kor was the starlet of the display. He was fidgety when he embarked his presentation, “Sustainable Cars and the Future of Manufacturing,” in front of about twenty five people in a ground-floor conference room. “I’m an introvert,” he said, nervously masturbating his salt-and-pepper beard. “Actually, it’s worse than that–I’m a hermit.”
Kor got over his dislike of public speaking, and during his talk and in subsequent interviews with PopMech, he described the years-long development of the very first Urbee car and the grand plan for Urbee Two’s cross-country odyssey.
The aha moment came over lunch one day in 1996, at the Sunstone Cafe in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Kor lives and works. He and a team of seven other designers and engineers had just finished making and testing the Solos private rapid transit vehicle (also known as a podcar), which ran on rails. It was an efficient design, propelled by a puny electrified motor and human power, but a rail system would have to be created to support its use. “We should take a version of that vehicle and put it on the road, because the roads are already there,” one of Kor’s colleagues said.
Kor was intrigued by the idea, and began sketching on a paper napkin. “It was a side view of a car that looked like a more aerodynamic Clever car, a two-seater,” he says. Within days, conceptualization and design work began on a vehicle intended for urban use, powered by electrical motors and a petite, ethanol-fueled combustion engine. Those key words–urban, electrical, ethanol–gave the Urbee its name, and Kor Ecologic spent more than a decade refining the design.
The primary challenge was aerodynamics. In his presentation at Stratasys, Kor mentioned how a sprinting cheetah flattens its ears onto the top of its head and a falcon speeds through the air with its feet held flush with its assets. “Nature is my inspiration,” he said.
By the fall of 2008, Kor and his team had a total computer model and a partial physical model of a hybrid that would get about three hundred mpg. The process was slick–Kor has worked with the same group of designers and engineers for decades–but not without some disagreement. “There were two of us that knew the aerodynamics indeed well, and two industrial designers,” Kor recalls. “The industrial designers kept telling, ‘It can’t look like a jellybean.’ But I was adamant that the design must be efficient very first, and then we would design for the look. Most cars are done the other way around–they commence with how they want the car to look, and then they attempt to find ways to make it efficient.”
Kor’s team modeled the Urbee’s exterior in clay at sixty percent scale. The Urbee’s aerodynamics were incredible, with a coefficient of haul (Cd) of about 0.149. (By comparison, a Prius has a Cd of about 0.25.) But while creating the CAD file of the exterior was a major step, it was still too early to feast. “We had everything in the computer but no way out,” Kor says.
Regardless, he felt so certain that the car would be built that he determined to come in the Automotive X Prize (AXP), plunking down $Ten,000 and registering ahead of the February two thousand nine filing deadline. But building the working prototype proved more difficult than Kor and his team expected. Making the figure from fiberglass molding, it turned out, would have required creating a full-scale model of the exterior, creating the molds, laying in the fiberglass, extracting the fiberglass, and then fitting the chunks together. The process would have taken up to ten months, at least, and the parts would need a lot of tweaking to flawless the fit. Kor would end up ripping off out of the X Prize competition.
But in mid-2010, Kor received an email from one of his industrial designers, Terry Halajko. The message contained a link to the Stratasys site. “Look at the size of the parts they can make!” Halajko wrote.
Kor contacted Stratasys, and talked with engineers at RedEye about the 3D printing process. It embarked with a 1/6th-scale model. Working via CAD, Kor’s team sliced up the exterior–the assets and glass panels–into twenty lumps, each of a size that the Stratasys printers could produce. The scale model was a success, so production on the full-size parts began.
“The bod was printed from basic white Six pack [acrylonitrile butadiene styrene],” Kor says. “We were cautious about the thickness–we didn’t want the very first bod to be too feeble–and made it thicker than we originally felt necessary. It was 1/4-inch thick all around. In certain places, we added a ordinary crisscross egg-crate structure to the inwards to stiffen the panels further. So, the very first figure was just a skin with some basic internal bracing added.”