BMW's Shapeshifting Concept Car

[Dover]

Concept cars give automotive designers a chance to let their imaginations run wild, often with outlandish results. But even by that measure, BMW has come up with something as strange as it is innovative -- a shape-shifting car covered with fabric.

Instead of steel, aluminum or even carbon fiber, the GINA Light Visionary Model has a body of seamless fabric stretched over a movable metal frame that allows the driver to change its shape at will. The car -- which actually runs and drives -- is a styling design headed straight for the BMW Museum in Munich and so it will never see production, but building a practical car wasn't the point.

Chris Bangle, head of design for BMW, says GINA allowed his team to "challenge existing principles and conventional processes."

"It is in the nature of such visions that they do not necessarily claim to be suitable for series production," company officials said in unveiling the car Tuesday. "Rather, they are intended to steer creativity and research into new directions."
Giving Bangle and his team that latitude to design so radical a car "helps to tap into formerly inconceivable, innovative potential" to push the boundaries of appearance and materials as well as functions and the manufacturing process, BMW says...cont'd

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/06/bmw-builds-a-ca.html

[parasim]

1. wow, that is awesome...

speaking as one who has had the good fortune of being involved in the design of 7 different concept cars for nissan a few years ago... that concept car is something else! i absolutely love the idea of totally rethinking the car and the materials used to make it. must have been a blast to be work on that thing!

[rusty fender]

2. parasim, maybe you can answer a question I have about car design materials:

Why aren't cars' bodies made of rubber? Wouldn't rubber allow cars to bounce off each other and imoveable objects in collisions?