car design thread

my sentiments as well, white is not the easiest color to showcase surfaces, but then maybe it was the art director's choice.
Who knows?

 

VP Ford Design on the future of automotive design:


Ford design chief Moray Callum is preparing for a driverless society | The Verge

 

How Aston Martin and Red Bull Racing Reinvented Car Design - WSJ



By DAN NEIL
Oct. 17, 2016 10:21 a.m. ET
45 COMMENTS
One thing unites all cars built for the road, from the dumpiest Chevy sedans to the most erotic exotics. In the eyes of a wind tunnel, they are all pigs.

“What about the almighty sleekness of a Lamborghini or a Ferrari?” you might ask. To the wind tunnel they look like Conestoga wagons, or Spanish galleons, or equestrian statuary. We are talking air resistance here, or drag, caused both by automobiles’ size and irregular shape. Rub your eyes and look again. Bumpers, mirrors, wheels and tires, windshields the size of dining room tables. If the teardrop is nature’s most aero-efficient form, the automobile flies through the air like a kidney stone.

And lift. Ugh. Again, as a wind tunnel sees things, a modern car looks like a wing: flat on the bottom and round on top. The faster you go, the more the wing wants to take flight. Meanwhile, in the few inches of ground clearance underneath the car, hurricane winds pile up to form a ragged zone of high pressure, lifting the car until the tires barely have any purchase.

MORE FROM THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING

A 19-Year-Old Just Built the First Fingerprint-Reading Smart Gun
Luxury Car Makers Dust Off an Antique Method
What’s Next for Artificial Intelligence
But what if road cars were shaped differently? What if, rather than becoming draggy and unstable with speed, family sedans became more stable, the invisible hand of the air pressing them to the tarmac rather than prying them loose? Formula One cars do this, and that ability in street-legal vehicles is the missing link between our current predicament and an alternate reality of high-speed mass transportation: silver rivers of cars pouring along expressways at unrestricted speeds. But even the best artificially intelligent autopilot can’t take us there until we fix the hardware, until auto makers teach road cars to stay on the road at 200-plus miles per hour.

Adrian Newey, the chief technical officer for Red Bull Racing, gets paid a lot of money to see things as a wind tunnel sees them. He is the most accomplished race engineer in history, having won 10 F1 constructor’s championships with multiple teams over three decades. But Newey never worked on a road car before the one you see here, the AM-RB 001, a collaboration between Red Bull Racing and the British luxury-car maker Aston Martin. At the July unveiling in Gaydon, England, Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer pulled the silk off a static model of the car, this lithe and improbable sculpture, suggesting a zero-altitude spaceship, or an animate flow of molten green lipstick. Behold a car that will attempt the previously unthinkable: to deliver racecar-rivaling performance in a drive-to-the-store passenger car with airbags and audio system. And with a fire-breathing V-12 too. Take that, Green Party.

‘If the ideas embodied in here hold sway, future cars could all look very different.’
Only 175 copies of the 001 will be made, 150 street-legal and 25 track-only. Beginning in the first quarter of 2019, they will head out the door for the price of about $3 million each.

Ordinarily, this is the sort of car I love to hate—a grand complication tourbillion of vanity, bought and sold by kings and kleptocrats as a way to keep score of their crimes. Newey feels my pain.

“You could criticize this car as being for a wealthy or privileged few,” Newey says. “And that’s true. But you can equally say that art is pointless because art buyers are in the same category. For me it’s about learning from Aston Martin about road cars, so the technology that goes into this car can be reapplied in more mainstream vehicles.”

The 001’s magic resides in the Newey-designed underbody. By virtue of its remarkable shape, the car generates not lift but what is called downforce—where the force of the air pins the car to the earth—and in unprecedented amounts. The unofficial figure of 4,000 pounds total downforce (track-only package) was whispered to me more in astonishment than confidence. Theoretically the 2,200-pound 001 could drive upside down across the roof of a tunnel, held up only by the force of the aero. Now, that’s stable. If the ideas embodied in here hold sway, future cars could all look very different, reborn in a design language that fundamentally alters the automobile’s historic relationship with the air. Actually stands it on its head.

With a projected 0 to 200 mph time of around 10 seconds, the AM-RB 001 will be as fast as it is sleek. ENLARGE
With a projected 0 to 200 mph time of around 10 seconds, the AM-RB 001 will be as fast as it is sleek. PHOTO: TOBIAS HURTZLER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“This technology can be applied to all cars, absolutely,” Aston Martin chief designer Marek Reichman told me when we met. “Watch this space.”

It seems hard to fathom, in the presence of the 001 model, that anything about it could translate to cars real earthlings drive; yet you don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate the aero-sleekness. “All fast things in nature are beautiful,” Reichman said, as we walked around the model together.

In its way, the 001 points at a glaring absurdity of the world’s fastest cars. At top speed they are practically out of control. The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport—world’s fastest production car—tops out at 268 mph. But the 1,200-horsepower, 4,052-pound car can hit that speed only on the virtually endless test track at Ehra-Lessien, VW’s facility in Germany. In order to hit that top speed, the Veyron must lower its stabilizing rear wing, assuming “zero downforce” posture to lower drag. In the words of Bugatti test driver Pierre-Henri Raphanel, the experience is “a little bit scary.”

For the past 60 years, engineers and designers have battled the air with an arsenal of spoilers and rear wings—the kind you’ve seen in “Fast and Furious” movies. But big wings have their own problems. They trade downforce for added drag. So-called adaptive rear wings—rising and lowering on hydraulic struts—add weight and complication. And they look ridiculous parked in front of the club.

The 001 doesn’t have a big wing hidden anywhere. The car’s upper half seems full of volition and art for art’s sake, untroubled by scoops, spoilers or technical surfaces.

“Adrian and I hate big wings,” Reichman says. “Because the lower half of the car is doing all the mechanical work, the upper half offered more design freedom.”

In racing, such downforce-generating forms are known as ground effects. As the name suggests, ground effects work better the closer a car is to the ground. That’s why race cars virtually skim the track.


“The key will be the car’s active suspension,” Newey says, which will allow the 001 to sink lower as the driver requires. The 001’s computers will also realize when it’s on a racetrack and will hunker down to its lowest ground clearance, perhaps just a couple of inches, settling its huge ground-effects ducktail even closer to the deck. The lower the posture, the lower the drag and higher the downforce. That’s the have-your-cake-and-eat-it of sports-car aerodynamics.

Newey didn’t share any details of the 001’s active suspension, but he has been considering the sports-car paradox for decades. “I studied aero at the University of Southampton,” he says. “My final-year project in 1979 and ’80 was on ground-effects aerodynamics applied to road cars and sports cars.”

Other cars use active suspension to gain some ground-effects advantage. The Bugatti Veyron and McLaren P1, for example. But the performance of Newey’s aero-hull is on a different order of magnitude.

“Nothing remotely like it has ever been tried on a road car,” says project engineer David King. “The numbers we are getting in the simulation are amazing.”

Most startling, if the numbers pan out, will be the way the 001 can rip through corners. According to King, the 25 track-only copies of the car will be able to hold the line while cornering at up to four g of lateral acceleration, at which point the average driver’s helmeted head weighs 100 pounds and wants very much to depart its moorings. Most sports cars, even track-ready beasts like a Porsche 911 GT3, struggle to make more than 1.5 g of lateral acceleration.

To a lifetime car enthusiast, much of what Newey, Reichman and King are proposing seems fantastic, or even delusional. Perhaps more futuristic than the aerodynamics is the target for vehicle weight. Built of F1-caliber composites and alloys of unobtainium, the 001 will tip the scales at a mere 1,000 kilos (2,200 pounds dry weight, without fluids).

By way of contrast, the McLaren P1 hybrid—a million-quid, 903-horsepower winged beast, also built by F1 specialists—weighs a whopping 3,075 pounds.

In the 001's Rear ViewThe top three challengers for the world's fastest street-legal car

KOENIGSEGG 1:1 Like the 001, the Swedish-made 1:1 has (as its name suggests) a 1:1 power-to-weight ratio. Weighing in at 1,341 kilos, this twin-turbo V-8 produces 1,340 HP—the equivalent of one megawatt of power.

MCLAREN P1 HYBRID The (former) state of the art of F1-derived sports cars, the P1 has an electric booster called a KERS system that helps the twin-turbo V-8 net 903 HP. Which makes the P1 a shade less powerful than the much-lighter 001 will be.

PAGANI HUAYRA The Huayra’s four movable flaps direct downforce as needed: The rear ones snap upright to assist with breaking, and the side flaps rise up to balance the car as it flies into a high-G corner.
“It’s an extremely tough target for a road car,” Newey says. One small cheat: The 001 will be a bit cozier than your average Aston Martin. It measures only 39.5 inches at the top of its canopied roof. The seat bottoms will be about 4 inches above the asphalt. In order to minimize drag, the canopy is barely wide enough for driver and passenger to sit shoulder-to-shoulder and nearly on their backs, like Gemini astronauts.

“You will have to be good friends,” King says.

But those thousand kilos will have the services of a midmounted, gas-powered V-12 engine producing an even 1,000 horsepower, giving the car true 1:1 power-to-weight; that is, 1,000 horsepower per metric ton.

The Newtonian payoff promises to be world historical, the stuff of laughing-gas dreams: Straightline acceleration of 0 to 200 mph is expected to come in around 10 seconds. Imagine you and your (soon-to-be-estranged) loved one are laced into the custom-molded leather seats, your heels above your hips. Ahead, a dry lake bed. You touch the fuse.

Painful vertigo, blurred vision, heavy chest, butterflies swarm in your bladder…the V-12 engine pitch-soars, bang-bang-bang goes the transmission. Ten seconds later, in the time it took to read the previous sentence, the 001 will be scything the wind at more than 200 mph, still accelerating hard. No telling where your wits will be.

Skittish? The 001’s F1-style brakes should haul the car to a stop from 200 mph in about five seconds. You’ll want to secure loose items in cabin and mouth.

“Everything about making a sports car gets easier with less weight, from cooling to suspension, from handling to tires,” Reichman said. “When you get to 1:1 power to weight, the world changes.”

The McLaren P1 is the most athletic series-production automobile I’ve ever driven. A pro driver can hustle a P1 around Belgium’s curvaceous Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps in 2:38, an outrageous figure for a car that could then drive home on public roads.

At the unveiling in July, Palmer, the Aston Martin CEO, said that the track versions of the 001 would circulate Spa as fast as a Le Mans prototype racer—just under two minutes—at least 38 seconds ahead of the P1, which might as well be a million years from the driver’s seat.

The 001 could usher in the lighting-fast highways of our dreams. ENLARGE
The 001 could usher in the lighting-fast highways of our dreams. PHOTO: TOBIAS HUTZLER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
It may seem strange that this avatar of the future should be powered by a technological relic, a gasoline-burning V-12. Amid all the scrounging and wheedling over grams in the months to come, the honking hot dozen looks anachronistic, even willful.

“The V-12 was an emotional choice,” King says. “But cars are not just rational but emotional. There is still something quite charismatic about the sound of a high-revving V-12.”

Is the 001 the top of Mount Petroleum? By virtue of its timing, the 001 could be the last, greatest sports car graced by the holy fire of gasoline, certainly with a churning V-12. From China to California to Europe—especially the exotic-car playground of London—governments are contemplating how to phase out the internal-combustion engine in light vehicles. The Paris climate accords practically require it.

“It’s as inevitable as death and taxes that there will be emissions-free zones in Europe,” Reichman says. The world’s fastest cars will more and more be relegated to track use only, as thoroughbred horses were in the early 20th century. “This car will offer something that perhaps is not repeatable,” the designer says. “And if gas-powered cars are going away, building the 001 will make building the 002 easier.”

The wind tunnels of the future will thank him.

 

whoa.............very cool
who needs a Stout Scarab when you can have a Fiat?

 

I've wondered why that line on the Infinity does what it does
can't they see that? rhetorical question...
they don't care? Beats me...

 

Mr. Nakamura was trained with the best.......he's the final voice..

 

No, I'm confident he can see the same things you & I see. It's all about judgement & execution.
Or, what does he DO with what he sees?
Does he listen to his people? Or does he design from the 'top down', as in 'just do what I say.'
A design team is only as good as it's designers skill sets & ultimately the leader, not unlike a sports team.
There are winners & losers, depending on talent & leadership.
No mysteries here.....

 

Stay tuned, the Chinese will be here sooner than you think with cars designed & developed in China.
It's just a matter of time
Lynk & Co 01 SUV Mixes one part Porsche with two parts Tesla
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login