28 September 2009 - 14:00
The future’s prickly
What comes after flame surfacing and layered surfacing? According to one Polish designer, the future of BMW design lies in, er, porcupine surfacing.
This is the Lovos concept from designer Anne Forschner, a proper vapourware view of how a BMW coupe might look in The Future... if it crossbred with a sharp-quilled rodent.
It might initially sound - and look - like a genuinely, monumentally daft idea. Which it probably is. But it's sort of clever at the same time: those fin-like body panels can either sit flush or raise up to act as air brakes. They're photovoltaic, too, turning sunlight into electricity to power the Lovos.
Oh, and every one of the 260 panels is identical, so they're easy to change if one gets snapped in, say, a territorial battle with an enraged hedgehog. No word on what would power the Lovos, but given the presence of all those solar panels, we're guessing it's probably electric. Or runs solely on the power of bad thoughts and confusion.
Will it ever get built? Er, no. But it's nice to see designers thinking outside the box, isn't it? Blue-sky thinking. Pushing the envelope. Squeezing the manatee. OK, we'll stop now...
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Must be nice to get paid for cocking about with a PC for no reason.....
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I think it came from the birds...
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can just imagine the results of an impact with a pedestrian when the driver hits the brakes.
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I'd like to see that pass a MOT. Er, "Hello, Highways Agency, Yes I'm driving a car with spikes on it. Oh don't worry only a few pedestrians might be impaled"
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There's a just a few more things for the hooligans out there to pull off and a greater surface area for birds to shit on. Cleaning this car would be a nightmare.
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Its a massive toothbrush on wheels. You don't clean it, it cleans you...
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Imagine impaling a bird, car, dog, or child on those spikes.
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wouldnt like to get run over by that ha
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That's a load of crap.. Won't get made in the near future, and it looks horrible! Special but ugly!
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Polish woman designs car....forgets drivers need to be able to see the road!
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I think that they are on to something here. As weird as it looks, it is effective. The Veyron's air brake creates as much stopping force as a family hatchback. Imagine the stopping power in this when coupled with top quality brakes.
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Also, why are people afraid that pedestrians will get impaled? None of the panels point forwards . I'm sure that if it were a real car, they would only pop up under hard braking.
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Sonic the Hedgecar
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BMW-Bonkers Motor Works
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Lunchi commented on this article
28 September 2009
Looks like something out of Carmageddon, or Deathrace 2000. As a design exercise, it's interesting... to my inner child that goes "cooooooollllllll check out those wheels man" at the sight of it. It seems to me that a lot of these cg concepts are just that, examples of what kids might come up with if they had CAD and Photoshop skills.
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