Future studies for the automotive industry

Clear visions

"eXasis" Concept Car

Concept cars allow designers and engineers to go beyond the limits. Plastics from Bayer MaterialScience open up new possibilities.

Studies and concept cars were once again the stars at the Geneva Motor Show in 2007. But it wasn’t only the major carmakers who drew crowds of experts, photographers and fans. Interest also focused on Rinspeed, a small Swiss design company that has been attracting attention for 30 years. Rinspeed’s founder, Frank Rinderknecht, presented his latest creation in Geneva: ‘eXasis’ simply stole the show from many larger exhibitors. His car has a cigar-shaped body, from which the exposed wheels protrude. It is reminiscent of legendary racing cars from the early 20th century.

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“Cars need to be made lighter again to reduce CO₂. For this reason, it is impossible to do without modern plastics. Yet environmentally compatible cars must not be seen as a “declaration of abstinence”, says carmaker Frank Rinderknecht.

Yet the real highlight here is something else. The body and also the underbody are made of transparent, shiny yellow, high-tech Makrolon from Bayer MaterialScience. Its insides are displayed for all to see without needing to open the engine hood. Concept cars like eXasis are the secret stars of international motor shows, and each is unveiled by its creators as if they had reinvented the wheel. Many companies simply call these concept cars “studies,” others prefer the term “show cars,” but one expression that has more or less become obsolete is “dream cars.” Yet the expression “dream cars” is probably the most apt, because concept cars are vehicles that enable designers and engineers to penetrate uncharted territory. They are visionary dreams with a solid substructure of engineering art and design know-how. Many years ago, Californian Harley J. Earl famously said: “For car designers, the present is already the past.” It was he who designed the Buick Y-Job in 1937, establishing a genre of car-making in which engineers and designers are given a free rein to question everything that is normally regarded as indispensable: Do cars have to have a steering wheel? Four wheels? A steel body? For the top stream of designers, such questions are banalities. Creativity starts at a higher level. Rinspeed’s Rinderknecht, for example, has spent the last 30 years building cars that are so unusual that people can recall the designs years later. Who could forget a car that shrank to fit the available parking space?

The eXasis is no exception to this stunning series. For Rinderknecht, the car symbolizes the creation process of the car itself, in which “mind become material” – and visions are turned into a tangible car. “Through its transparency, the eXasis doesn’t seem to have quite arrived in our material world,” says the designer, talking about his newest baby. Nevertheless, however beautiful the design may be, it will presumably share the fate of most other concept cars and remain a “one-off.” In the few cases where one of them has made it to the production line against all odds, very little has remained of the original model. It is only very rarely – VW’s New Beetle, for example, is a case in point – that the design team’s vision actually becomes reality, with thousands of cars rolling off the conveyor belt.

But then it’s not really about production-line manufacture. “We pursue developments like this to demonstrate our technological leadership,” says Dr. Thomas Weber, the member of the Board at DaimlerChrysler responsible for development. Many ideas generated by the company’s team of engineers in southern Germany have gone on to write automotive history. “The C111, a flounder with gull-wing doors, delighted auto fans throughout the world in 1969 to such an extent that some of them submitted an order for one with a blank check – but despite this, the car never made it to the production line. The NAFA short-distance urban traffic vehicle from 1982 was the spiritual model for the Smart and the A Class. And back in 1991, the company unveiled a car with a radar device to measure the distance from the car in front. Basically, today’s S Class is a blend of all the highlights in Daimler’s concept cars from the last 20 years. It demonstrates what is technically feasible.

The concept car owes its transparency to high-tech Makrolon plastic from Bayer MaterialScience. The eXasis also contains other Bayer MaterialScience products: the soft-feel coating, the paintwork, and electrically conductive films.

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The concept car owes its transparency to high-tech Makrolon plastic from Bayer MaterialScience. The eXasis also contains other Bayer MaterialScience products: the soft-feel coating, the paintwork, and electrically conductive films.

Today’s design process is, of course, organized far too tightly for people not to call into question the sense and purpose of evolving such cars. Yet concept cars are like a playing field without goalposts, where engineers and designers are allowed to express their visionary ideas about the future of automotive transport. Many of the features we nowadays take for granted in our modern cars (and would not want to be without) were initially a weird idea in a concept car. Plastics are a good example of this. In 1967, a working group from Bayer and BMW presented the first self-supporting vehicle body platform made of epoxy resin and polyurethane foam, and the same year, at the International Plastics Fair in Düsseldorf, Bayer showed the first all-plastics car in which only the engine and transmission were made of metal. Yet this car never made it to the production line either, and only two of them were built. One of them can be seen in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the second belongs to Bayer MaterialScience and is currently being restored. The plan is to show it again in the fall at K 2007, the world’s largest plastics fair in Düsseldorf, 40 years after its premiere.

In the time when all cars were made of metal, making a car of plastic was certainly a visionary idea. Yet present-day car designers endeavor to incorporate as much plastic as possible, just as the developers of the Bayer old-timer with the registration “LEV-K 67 H” had predicted. Plastic is lighter, can be used far more flexibly, and provides designers with undreamed-of possibilities.

Rinderknecht demonstrates this with the eXasis (150 horse power, top speed of 210 km/h), which uses proven Bayer MaterialScience polycarbonates for the transparent body. Ian Paterson, the Bayer MaterialScience Board member responsible for innovation, adds: “We want the eXasis to stimulate ideas for the future of the automobile. The eco-roadster is attractive, powerful, fast and yet almost CO₂-free.” In other words, driving enjoyment and ecology can go hand in hand. The eXasis weighs only 750 kg, consumes 6.3 liters of bioethanol E 85 over 100 kilometers, and has a CO₂ emission of only 20 grams per kilometer (a mid-size car emits 200 grams). Top-class plastics turn visions into reality.