With its ribbed fenders and plastic body, the Strati looks like nothing else on the road.
The open-top coupe wasn’t forged from sheet metal. It wasn’t built in Detroit by any of the Big Three automakers. Its body was constructed using a 3D printer that transformed buckets of plasticized carbon fiber pellets into the shell of a drivable car.
“We wanted to show what’s possible with 3D printing today and what could be done with it in the future,” said Greg Jones of the Association for Manufacturing Technology. The Virginia-based trade association representing U.S. manufacturing technologies pioneered the world’s first 3D printed car, which made its West Coast debut at various technical colleges this week.
“Eventually we could be at a point where people could 3D print their own car, and when they get sick of that design, they recycle the material and 3D print their next design,” Jones said.
Such ideas are, Jones admits, quite a ways off. He wouldn’t even begin to guess at the price tag for the Strati 3D vehicle, which required designing, engineering and building machines large enough to print a full-size car – machines that were built in collaboration with multiple partners.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee developed the carbon fiber plastic composite that had enough structural integrity to be drivable; it also developed the process that would mold the material with the 3D printer.
The commercial equipment manufacturer, Cincinnati Incorporated, built the Big Area Additive Manufacturing machine, or 3D printer, which made the car in layers, heating the pellets so they could “print” and allowing them to cool and harden in the desired shape.
Local Motors, a vehicle micro manufacturer in Phoenix, Ariz., that specializes in crowd-sourced, low-volume vehicles, worked on the design. The exterior was designed by Italian Michele Anoe, who competed for the privilege against 200 other entries from 30 countries to have his idea translated into 3D. The name of the vehicle, Strati, pays tribute to its Italian design origins. It means “layers.”
Two years ago, the Association for Manufacturing Technology set a goal of building not only the world’s first 3D-printed car but the first 3D car that was also zero emissions. The idea was to demonstrate to present and future manufacturing students the possibilities of 3D printing.
Last September, the results of its work paid off. The AMT’s what-if one-off was manufactured on the spot over the course of about 50 hours during the International Manufacturing Technology Show, after which it was outfitted with an electric motor and battery and driven through Chicago’s McCormick Place before a crowd of amazed onlookers.
The scene at the NTMA machinist training school in Santa Fe Springs earlier this week was excited but less electric. The 1,200-pound Strati had been gutted of the power train that enables it to travel up to 40 mph and 125 miles per charge.
“We wanted to remove the temptation to take this on the road because it’s not street legal,” Jones said. “We haven’t crash tested it.”
On Tuesday, it was simply parked on the asphalt, where dozens of students crowded around the Strati during the second stop on its first brief tour of the West Coast, taking turns in the driver’s seat mugging for photos that were instantly posted to social media.
This weekend, it will be parked in a ballroom of the Newport Beach Marriott as part of the American Association of Community Colleges annual conference on workforce development, where Jones hopes it will inspire young students to take the basic premise of the Strati and build upon it.
“It’s a whole new way to think about producing automobiles,” Jones said. “If you can print a car this size, you can print just about anything.”
Contact the writer: scarpenter@ocregister.com or OCRegCarpenter on Twitter
