Design: The Guru of Impossible Engineering Creates a Car

In consultation with GM and Gehry, the student team began with certain assumptions: The car would be drive-by-wire: Mechanical linkages would be replaced by digital connections. And it would incorporate a hybrid or fuel-cell propulsion system. Everything else was to be determined.


Their first step was to build crude digital diagrams of possible chassis configurations-including where the passengers sit and the placement of doors and wheels. Axel Kilian, an architecture Ph.D. candidate, then camped out in Gehry´s product design studio to make prototypes of each configuration for the architect to play with. Back in Massachusetts, the students built hundreds of scrappy models of their own, from metal screws, foamcore, plaster, starch, welded copper wire and even plastic Easter eggs. They mocked up a driver´s seat and connected it to a PlayStation running Gran Turismo for full driving effect. They made miniatures of wheels and other parts on the stereo lithography machine in the basement.


At the same time, the team was using CATIA to build 3-D digital models of the car. During my visit, Kilian offered to show me how the software works. He clicked open a drawing of a three-seater with the driver and a passenger in front and a second passenger between them in the second row. Then he dragged the third seat behind the driver, making it float outside the car´s tapered body, and slooowly the model
shifted the car´s form-reshaping the shell, widening the rear wheel base. Next Kilian narrowed the car so that there was no longer room to house three hydrogen storage tanks side by side. The system reacted again, raising the height of the passenger compartment and stacking the hydrogen cylinders.


In June, after an academic year´s worth of R&D and a week of sleepless nights, Mitchell´s group opened a work-in-progress exhibition of the concept car. Visitors to MIT´s Wolk Gallery previewed new propulsion systems, drive-by-wire interfaces, vehicle architectures and a smart outer â€skin†with networked, embedded intelligence. The posters and prototypes lining the walls-physical answers to scores of what-if questions that Mitchell´s team had considered over the course of the year-were intended to serve as fodder for Gehry, techie starting points from which he could begin his design.


Some of the renderings in the exhibit illustrate novel surface materials. Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are a low-power display technology that is self-luminous and thus requires no bulky backlighting. An OLED skin could be programmed to change the color of the car or to indicate where the driver is looking; it could make mechanical indicator lights and metal license plates obsolete. Other drawings on display show the students´ idea of the â€soft car,†covered with a flexible, quilted plastic foil called ETFE (ethyltetrafluoroethylene). This material is layered, and the spaces in between are filled with air the way a down comforter´s feathered squares are. The car would have a hard inner shell to protect passengers, and the soft ETFE-based outer shell would allow for bumper-car-like traffic patterns that the MIT team has termed â€gentle congestion.â€