The automobile is what’s called a “mature technology.” A 131-year-old invention perfected over decades and peddled to the masses by a handful of multinationals. Every facet, from the composition of a bumper to the process of dispensing fasteners on an assembly line, has been proven and refined.
Yet there are still those who look on from the outside and say, “It can be better.” Call them overly ambitious, unrealistic. But don’t discount their vision or underestimate their courage. Because one good idea is all it takes.
Retooling The System | Kevin Czinger | CEO and Founder, Divergent 3D
The future of the automobile won’t roll off an assembly line.
To understand Kevin Czinger’s dream, you need to know about plate glass.
During the Fifties, a company called Pilkington realized that making glass by floating the melted raw materials over molten tin, instead of using the grinding and polishing method for plate-glass manufacturing, was more efficient and made further processing unnecessary. The firm nearly went broke building a reference plant. But it worked. Within a decade, Pilkington had licensed the process to major glassmakers. “It totally changed the manufacturing approach,” Czinger says.
Czinger, 58, talks a lot about reinvention. He grew up working class in Ohio, building hot rods with his brothers. He entered the Ivy League on a football scholarship, graduated from Yale Law, joined the Marines, and landed at Goldman Sachs. He cashed out, started a record label, then co-founded Coda Automotive, in 2008. There, Czinger oversaw ground-up development of an all-electric sedan. Within a year, he had a new prismatic battery-cell design, a joint venture with China’s largest state-owned battery producer, and an operational megafactory. Coda ramped up to produce 10,000 cars annually, but it sold fewer than 150 before folding in 2013.
The failure opened Czinger’s eyes to an auto-industry truism.
“Battery-powered vehicles, autonomous vehicles, ride-sharing . . . you can have these new technologies lined up, ready to disrupt. But if you don’t do away with massive up-front cost inherent in today’s factories and tooling, and long product cycles . . . you’re not going to innovate at a truly fast rate,” he says.
In other words, Czinger thinks the manufacturing process for every mainstream car, from the Model T through the Tesla Model S, needs to die. “This system is fundamentally broken.”
Hence his latest venture, Divergent 3D, founded three years ago in Torrance, California. The company, which counts former senior executives from Apple, Boeing, Google, Koenigsegg, and SpaceX among its ranks, has created a new process for chassis design and construction.
The Divergent manufacturing platform begins with a computer-generated structure. Basic parameters, like body style, drivetrain, and preexisting components go into the program. Proprietary algorithms consider the weight, strength, and cost of various materials, including aluminum and composites. The software applies complex physics data, such as safety-certification requirements, and selects the optimal material and shapes to make the modular structure work. Then, 3-D metal printers create the “connective tissue” to join the sections together. These tissue pieces, called nodes, are made using direct sintering, a process wherein lasers fuse powdered metal into solid form.
This eliminates 20th-century body-shop technologies, like traditional metal stamping and welding, which are difficult and expensive to change, from the manufacturing process. The Divergent system also removes the roadblock of fitting bulky metal chassis sections together; pulverized alloy can be manipulated into whatever shape best suits the need.
“In a car company, they’re in all of their silos. They’re not trying to work with people outside [the auto industry] or develop new commercial equipment. They’re looking at what technologies fit into and improve their existing production capability,” says Czinger. “We’re looking to combine computing power, science, and additive manufacturing into one system.”
The hardware/software relationship is cyclical: Nodes enable the computers to propose a more efficient design, and 3-D printing allows the geometric freedom to bring that design to fruition. The result, says Czinger, is the leanest, smartest, safest version of any modular vehicle structure.
“From there, you can put practically any nonstructural body on top. And if you want to change something in the structure itself, you’re simply sending different data to the same [3-D printing] machine. And that machine doesn’t care whether it’s doing a superbike trellis or an SUV chassis. One day it might be mining trucks, the next, cube satellites. It’s non-design-specific manufacturing.”
Divergent’s proof of concept, the mid-engine Blade supercar, uses “commodity” carbon-fiber tubing connected to a matrix of high-strength aluminum nodes. Those nodes were made inside a four-laser 3-D metal printing chamber, which Divergent developed with SLM Solutions, a company that specializes in additive manufacturing.
Engineers claim the Blade’s structure weighs about 100 pounds, will pass crash testing, and represents the sort of basic “motherboard” architecture that the company’s technology suite can offer. Also, it’s cheaper. Czinger figures you’d need $21 million in machinery and facilities to create 10,000 vehicles per year using his system, compared with $250 million to $1 billion for an equivalent traditional tool-and-die setup.
“Our system allows you to come in, design and build a vehicle, test the market, get feedback, and then scale,” he says. “It completely changes the viability of start-up companies.”
Or tech giants looking to enter the automotive space.
“We’re in discussions with those companies—I can’t tell you what the names are, but you could guess. They talked to the big auto companies. They talked about building cars themselves. They reached the conclusion that the capital barrier was too big. It was low-margin. It would take time. They’d have to bring in outside knowledge. It didn’t fit with their culture.
“At CES, in January, when they saw our approach, they went, ‘Wow, that looks much more like how you’d design consumer electronic devices’ . . . the two- or three-year product cycle, like a mobile phone, that allows for much faster innovation across the platform.”
Later that month, Divergent scored $23 million in funding.The company also formed a partnership with PSA Group to implement Divergent’s technology in its manufacturing process, after Czinger showed French executives his case study on the Peugeot 308 sedan. “If you can take 10 kilograms out of a unibody structure, that’s heroic,” he says. “We pulled out 138 kilograms [304 pounds].”
Czinger believes we’ll see Divergent’s technology implemented by a range of companies and entrepreneurs, including large automakers like PSA, in production vehicles within five years. From there, it’s a matter of the methodology spreading across the industry, same as Pilkington float glass.
“In the next phase, we’ll really just be licensing,” says Czinger, adding that Divergent has more than 90 patents filed for chassis-design software, 3-D printing, and assembly processes.
“The system is a product, and that product is going to create the machines of the future.”—Max Prince
Electric Youth | Mate Rimac | CEO, CTO, and Founder, Rimac Automotive
Turning teenage fantasy into hypercar reality.
“It was a joke for the people at the beginning. But when they saw how it performs, then they started to pay attention.”
the Rimac Concept_One is improbable. Videos on YouTube show it outaccelerating a Ferrari LaFerrari and Porsche 918 Spyder. It has a combined output of 1207 hp from four electric motors, one for each wheel, and a claimed maximum range of 217 miles. It comes from Sveta Nedelja, Croatia, and the mind of a 29-year-old self-taught engineer, Mate Rimac.
The Concept_One and Rimac Automobili trace back to a high-school project. At 17, Rimac invented and patented a glove that functioned as a keyboard and mouse. “My professor liked the idea, so he sent me to a regional competition for electronics and innovation for high-school kids,” says Rimac. He won that competition, so they sent him to nationals, which he also won. Then they sent him abroad, where he won more.
By the time he left high school, with a fistful of patents and awards, Rimac knew he would start a business, but he wasn’t sure what. In the back of his mind was the idea of an electric supercar, sparked by his fascination with a famous inventor who every kid in Croatia grows up learning about: Nikola Tesla. “I was crazy about cars all my life, but being intrigued by what Nikola Tesla did, I was also very interested about technology and electronics, and especially the electric motor.”
So when the engine on his E30 BMW M3 blew while drag racing, Rimac decided to go electric. Working out of his parents’ garage, with few tools, he dropped in the electric drive motor from a forklift. “I was clumsy. I didn’t really know how to do stuff with my hands, so I had to get my fingers dirty and learn how to do this stuff,” he says.
In the early days, it was trial and error. When things broke during races, they got upgraded. He partnered with an engineer named Igor Pongrac—now head of production for Rimac Automobili—partly because Pongrac had a heated garage and more tools. Their need for speed eventually exceeded the potential of off-the-shelf parts. The two started building their own components. And that’s how a humble E30 project car evolved into a test mule for something much bigger.
“The E30 was just like a playground to learn and to also show that electric cars can be fast and fun and exciting, not just boring little boxes,” Rimac says.
At a drag strip in Zagreb, the electrified 3-series quietly dispatched the fastest gas-powered cars in the region to win the 402 Street Race trophy. “The cars there were fire-spitting V-8s and stuff like that, and I was there with a silent old BMW,” he says. “It was a joke for the people at the beginning. But when they saw how it performs, then they started to pay attention.”
By then, Rimac had set his sights on a more ambitious project: a sports car of his own. Sure, hundreds had failed at such an attempt, but a few succeeded. “Horacio Pagani and Christian von Koenigsegg were my role models,” he says. “I read everything about them.” He visited Pagani at the factory. He befriended Koenigsegg. “I didn’t want to bother people, so I didn’t ask them for anything. Once I had something to show, then I talked to them,” he says.
Rimac looked into outsourcing components, like most automotive start-ups do. But with some suppliers not even answering his calls and others wanting to charge as much as $2 million for a windshield-washer system, he needed to find another way. “There was no money. The government didn’t support us. Nobody wanted to invest in Croatia. There were no local investors,” Rimac says. Also, no one was building technology that could achieve what he wanted: 0 to 60 mph in less than three seconds, top speed of 220 mph, and a significant battery range.
So, Rimac decided to develop the hypercar of his dreams piece by piece, while working on projects for other companies. He met Adriano Mudri, a Croatian car designer working for GM—now head of design for Rimac—who agreed to design a hypercar with him. Attracting business as a twentysomething consultant wasn’t easy. He grew a beard to be taken more seriously. His first hypercar project, for a royal family in the Middle East, aborted. At times, he couldn’t afford to buy clients lunch.
But persistence pays. A Spanish R&D firm commissioned Rimac to build an electric supercar. He leveraged that success to score projects with other OEMs, always taking on tasks that put him one step closer to building his own car. “We were profitable from 2012 and I hired the first employees in April of 2011,” he says. In 2014, he was able to secure 10 million euros in funding.
In 2016, the dream became reality as the Concept_One entered production. Only eight are being built and all have already been sold for $1.2 million each. Rimac claims that the electric motors he and his team developed are the most power-dense in the world and boast more than 90 percent efficiency. A 90-kWh liquid-cooled battery pack has the potential to deliver one megawatt (1000 kW) of power during acceleration and absorbs up to 400 kilowatts during braking. The car sprints from 0 to 62 mph in 2.5 seconds and has a top speed of 221 mph.
People are taking notice. Rimac has inked deals to produce the battery and other systems for the Aston Martin Valkyrie and Koenigsegg Regera, along with other OEM projects he can’t name. Meanwhile, he’s working on his next car, the Concept_S, which promises 1365 hp and a top speed of 227 mph.
“We figured out that a sustainable business for us is to be a technology company and to have our supercars as a showcase, and basically keeping me happy,” Rimac says.
Rimac is breaking ground on a production facility six times larger than the current one. He expects to grow from 250 employees to 600 by the end of 2019. “We are saying no to 90 percent of the stuff that comes to us,” he says. “We are trying to stay under the radar a little bit, because currently it’s a state of overwhelming opportunity.” Not bad for a self-taught engineer with outsized dreams.—Matthew De Paula
In The Draft | Josh Switkes | CEO and Co-founder, Peloton Technology
Platooning trucks will save fuel, money, and lives.
Self-driving cars are still decades from production. But real-world semiautonomy could hit the road months from now in the form of big rigs that draft in pairs, like stock cars in a restrictor-plate race at Talladega.
The practice, known as platooning, is based on technology that incorporates adaptive cruise control, collision mitigation, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and a cloud-based control network. The system developed by a Silicon Valley start-up named Peloton Technology allows two trucks to travel a mere 30 to 50 feet apart, which translates into fuel savings of 4.5 percent for the leading vehicle (due to improved aerodynamics) and 10 percent for the one behind (thanks to reduced wind resistance). Peloton CEO Josh Switkes, 37, got in on the ground floor of the autonomous-car revolution. In 2001, while contemplating a doctorate in mechanical engineering, he talked with Chris Gerdes, director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. Gerdes was focusing on active safety and driver assistance. Switkes, a track-day junkie, thought that sounded boring. “Do you ever do anything related to racing or performance driving?” Switkes asked Gerdes.
To which Gerdes replied: “Active safety and driver assistance is about the limits of handling when something has gone wrong, but those are the same limits you’re hitting when you’re on a racetrack or doing performance driving, so all the math and engineering is the same.”
Gerdes became Switkes’s thesis advisor and, later, a co-founder of Peloton. After earning his degree, Switkes developed lane-keeping technology and other automated systems for Audi and Volkswagen. Truck platooning was a natural next step.
“We saw that hardware costs had come way down and fuel prices were way up,” Switkes says. “When we hit upon trucking, we realized that this was where automation should be applied. It’s a $700 billion industry. And we said to ourselves, ‘With straightforward technology, we can save this industry five to 10 percent of the $100 billion it spends in annual fuel costs. And the same system that produces fuel savings could also provide safety benefits.’ ”
Although the concept of platooning had already been demonstrated in test programs, it remained for Peloton to create a system robust—and safe—enough for commercial application. Adaptive cruise control is the basic building block. But because of the long lag time before airbrakes slow a truck, that system had to be supplemented with ECUs that control the engines and brakes and are connected via short-wave radio.
“We nearly eliminate that brake lag with the vehicle-to-vehicle communications,” Switkes says. “So about 30 milliseconds after the front truck applies its brakes, we’re applying the brakes in the rear truck. That means we’re applying the brakes in the rear truck before the front truck has physically slowed down. That’s not something you could possibly do with a radar sensor, because there’s nothing to detect yet.”
In theory, the technology could be applied to convoys of trucks. Eventually, the Peloton program might even be able to control steering wheels as well as brake pedals. But that’s still pie in the sky. And as Switkes puts it: “We’re excited because platooning is here now.”—Preston Lerner
Forward Momentum | Dan Gurney | Founder, All American Racers
The Big Eagle still has his eyes on what’s next.
About winning Le Mans, the French Grand Prix, the Riverside 500. About Jimmy Clark and Bruce McLaren. He could tell you about inventing the wickerbill (a.k.a. the Gurney flap), pioneering rear-engine Indy cars, and designing the most dominant IMSA prototype ever, the Eagle MKIII. But if you know anything about him, you know his natural disposition is forward movement. He’d rather talk about the future.
“We’re making good progress on the project now,” Gurney says. “I think we’ll be running on the dyno by Christmastime.” That project is MC4S, shorthand for Moment-Cancelling 4-Stroke, his vision for the evolution of internal combustion. He and Chuck Palmgren, a former motorcycle racer and engineer, have been developing it for the better part of a decade.
“I was talking with Chuck, and I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a shame if we spent a lifetime learning all this, and we both die, and none of it gets passed on?’ ” says Gurney. “If you have an opportunity to make a parting shot, you do that.”
MC4S, now patented, is an oversquare (bore larger than the stroke), dual-overhead-cam design, which uses two crankshafts. These are perpendicularly mounted, geared together, and rotate in opposing directions. Even-number pistons sit on one, odd-numbered on the other. Because the cranks are counterweighted, there’s no primary vibration. Their inverse spin eliminates rotating forces, so the engine can tilt abruptly (during cornering) without experiencing a gyroscopic moment.
The four-valve cylinder head, also proprietary, uses hydraulic cam phasing, tapered intake ports, and an exceptionally narrow valve angle, all of which optimize airflow for optimal power output. Computer simulations suggest airflow velocity improvements of 15 percent over traditional designs. Those same simulations show the first MC4S prototype (tandem twin, 1800 cc, 9.5:1 compression) putting out about 260 hp.
“More than we expected,” Gurney says. “But maximum horsepower isn’t our goal.”
The main objectives here are efficiency, low emissions, “turbine-smooth” operation, and durability. Fewer moving parts, no vibration dampers, longer bearing life. Versatility was another goal: Extending the crankshafts would allow four, six, or eight-cylinder variations. Turbocharging isn’t out of the question, and the MC4S can easily mate to transverse front- or rear-drive gearboxes. It might serve as an electric-vehicle range extender. Gurney plans to license the design to manufacturers.
“I’d like to see it in a motorcycle. I’d also like to see it in a car,” he says. “But I often wonder: What other vehicles? Boat? Aircraft? Helicopter? There are a lot of possibilities.”
Previous twin-crank attempts, like Bugatti’s U-16 aero engine and the Ariel Square Four motorcycle, were hindered by complexity, weight, and cost. But that was before computer modeling, advanced materials, and modern tooling. Gurney believes the concept can now offer a lifeline for internal combustion.
“I’m not anti-electric vehicle, not at all,” he notes. “[All American Racers] actually manufactures some of the rear spoilers for Tesla. The first time I drove one, I told them, ‘I’m disappointed.’ They asked why. I said, ‘It’s so much better than I hoped.’ ”
He doesn’t begrudge progress or the people pushing for it. Gurney’s motivations aren’t much different: He sees an imperfect device, an industry in flux, the chance to compete. But, unlike the start-ups, he tempers his language with pragmatism. He is not shilling, pitching, or promising. He is 86 years old.
“I don’t think we have anything that’s magic,” Gurney says. “But we’re very curious. We’re not sure the experts know everything about [internal combustion] or even what’s important.”
Nobody’s subsidizing MC4S, but you get the impression Gurney likes being the underdog. Going against the grain, innovating, putting his clever little gas burner up against the next big thing. He’s too fixated on the future to tell old racing stories. But he always was fast from a lap down.—Max Prince
200-mph Trickle-Down | Christian von Koenigsegg | Chairman of the Board, Freevalve
Cleaner, more efficient engines, courtesy of Koenigsegg.
China’s wealth explosion over the past decade has been a boon to Christian von Koenigsegg’s hypercar business, but on a recent trip to Beijing, he couldn’t ignore an obvious downside: pollution. “There are so many particulates from the coal plants producing electricity,” he says. Being a consummate inventor, Koenigsegg has come up with a possible solution that might not solve the problem but could help mitigate it. It’s called FreeValve, which is also the name of his new spin-off company that produces the technology.
“If you make a really good combustion engine with FreeValve, and you run it on a renewable fuel—not petrol, so you don’t actually add CO2 to the atmosphere—you’re actually cleaning up the air with your car in Beijing, because you’re combusting the particulates. In front of the car, you have more than is coming out of the tailpipe,” Koenigsegg says, facetiously. He is the first to acknowledge that this is a unique scenario and that the results would be different in other places, such as Sweden, where most of the electricity comes from renewable energy. Still, it’s fun to think of a way that combustion engines could actually help clean the environment for once, he says. FreeValve is a new type of cylinder head that does not use a camshaft to actuate the valves, as with most combustion engines. Instead, pneumatic actuators open and close each valve individually. Call it variable-valve timing taken to the utmost.
This is a curious development from a company whose mission thus far has not been to make more efficient engines and reduce pollution, but rather to answer the sort of what-if questions our 12-year-old selves asked while staring in wonder at the pages of . Built on a former Swedish air-force base in Ängelholm, Sweden, Koenigsegg Automotive hypercars have a singular mission: go really fast. Prototypes often scream down the runway at speeds exceeding 200 mph. Total vehicle production in 16 years is just 140.
Every Koenigsegg car leaves the factory slightly different from the one before it, with design upgrades and performance advancements mimicking the pace of Formula 1 research and development. That’s partly because customers spending seven figures on a vehicle expect it to be unlike anything else, literally, but also because Koenigsegg is always inventing. He has no formal engineering or design background, yet his entire team relies on him to solve those problems. Koenigsegg says he devotes several hours each day to learning and researching not just technology, but also subjects like biology and history. Before cars, he innovated in other industries, even coming up with a new process for connecting wood-plank floors that is now considered the industry standard.
FreeValve is a byproduct of this obsessive, cost-is-no-object development process. Its potential benefits are huge. By optimizing the air-fuel mixture for each cylinder, the technology can increase both power and efficiency. Downstream benefits include the ability to spool a turbo more efficiently and heat a catalytic converter quicker; the latter drastically reduces cold-start emissions. Plus, the camless cylinder head is lighter and more compact than a traditional cylinder head. “By making engines smaller, yet increasing their output, the overall weight of the car goes down, making the cars exponentially more efficient,” Koenigsegg says.
Chinese carmaker Qoros has begun testing FreeValve in entry-level vehicles. Koenigsegg says the company’s 1.6-liter turbocharged four-cylinder, when fitted with a FreeValve cylinder head, makes 45 percent more horsepower and 35 percent fewer emissions and is 15 more efficient when compared with a similar engine with a traditional head.
Koenigsegg is the first to admit that his expensive hypercars, sold to the ultrawealthy, aren’t going to change the world. But his dream is that their technology will. “What we’re doing with FreeValve, we’re extending the life of the combustion engine. We’re making it compete, for good or for bad, with the EVs longer than it would otherwise.” —J.F. Musial
Think Vertical | Carl Dietrich | CEO, CTO, and Co-Founder, Terrafugia
After decades of delays, the flying car is about to take off.
Like robot servants, lovable aliens, and buxom android assassins, flying cars have long been a staple of human fantasy. But technological, regulatory, and credibility issues have dogged their creation, not to mention concern that they will fall victim to the dreaded “sofa-bed paradox”: a hybrid in which the essential equity of each component is undermined by compromises intrinsic in their combination. (Sofa beds are ungainly as a couch, uncomfortable as a bed.)
Carl Dietrich and Boston-based Terrafugia are attempting to change that. In 2006, after completing his PhD studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s aeronautics and astronautics program, Dietrich and four classmates—all pilots—founded Terrafugia with the goal of creating a no-compromise “streetable aircraft.” Their first prototype, the Transition, is just such a vehicle, one that can be driven to any of the thousands of small local airports, have its folding wings powered out, and then be flown up to 400 miles. “We get comparable gas mileage to a car, but we’re going at 100 mph, and point to point,” Dietrich says. Terrafugia sees the Transition as an ideal weekend-getaway vehicle—for example, if you’re in New York and want to go to Martha’s Vineyard, avoiding traffic and ferries.
Because the Transition will be exotic-car expensive, individual ownership is not the likely lead market. “The usage cost per mile is really reasonable,” Dietrich says. “So if you have a company that can put up the money to invest in the purchase, they can amortize that initial price in a shared-use model.”
Terrafugia unveiled the Transition at the New York auto show five years ago and started taking deposits. But like most fantasies, the vehicle has had a fraught transition to reality. A series of engineering setbacks led the company to miss key development milestones, which resulted in a lack of funding and a significant workforce retraction.
But now the company is back on track with new solutions, new investors, and prominent new potential partners. “Uber just announced that it’s very interested in catalyzing the market for what the media is calling ‘flying cars’—short-range vertical takeoff and landing aircraft,” Dietrich says. Although the Transition is not in this class, Terrafugia’s next-generation concept, the TF-X (shown above), will be.
Regardless, Dietrich says, Uber’s interest is “bringing a lot more attention to the whole category, which brings eyeballs, which brings investment dollars, which kind of has this self-compounding, self-fulfilling prophecy about it.”
In our collective sofa-bed dreams, we are all already flying.—Brett Berk
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