The Future Skateboard Car

Male: What if the next car you buy will be the only car you ever have to buy again?. [Music Play] What if you could have every new improvement added to the car you owned in the blink of an eye?. What if you could seat wherever you wanted when you drove?. What if you did not need a steering wheel but could navigate using a joystick or a mouse? And, what if you never burned a single drop of gas wherever you went because your car had no engine? Male: New Technologies are coming together that will bring about a revolutionary change. One is significant as going from the horse driving carriage to the horseless carriage. Male: This is the Skateboard and its hydrogen fuel cells. It is drive by wire and it will be many different thousands trucks. Male: Imagined being able to walk out of your home every morning and look at a 20-car garage of all of your favorite vehicles and then shrinking that all into one vehicle, one architecture, that is what Skateboard can do. [Music Play] Male: The Skateboard mend itself to body and to change ability and because we do not have an engine at the front, we can have different size, different shape bodies and from an interior perspective, we can attach the seats in different locations and drive the vehicle from different sitting positions. Chris Borroni-Bird I am Chris Borroni –Bird and this is my testimony about future. The real magic is in the thickness of the chassis. All of the hardware required to control and propel the four wheels a house inside a six-inch thick Skateboard. Male: Certainly, you are free to move the passengers and the contents of the vehicle. I have the freedom to make it look like the perfect iPod of wheels. By exposing these young interns to our Skateboard concept for them to look at the Skateboard as an opportunity to do anything they wanted above that base. I think it was a bit intimidating. When you give the designer a completely new perspective, a completely different premise for a vehicle, it will separate out a great designer from a good designer. Mark Chrapla: I really tried to utilize the fact that all this time you have this space that you did not have before. My name is Mark Chrapla and the GM Symmetry is my vision of the future. This an interior sketch that shows the steering wheel could actually fold up to assist the driver and being able to get out from the front like this and it would kind of fold down right in front of him into his lap. So I did asymmetric from both plan is X and Y axis. There is a driver that faces forward, passenger that faces everywhere and then two passengers that face out the side perpendicular. Right from the start I new that I really want to do experiment with the seating arrangements because you no longer have an engine right in front of you. Male: What it does have is a petroleum-free, zero emissions power source sitting under the floor. [Music Play] Male: The fuel cell that utilizes the energy from the hydrogen stored inside the Skateboard to create electricity which drives the wheel motors. Then the spent hydrogen molecules unite with the oxygen in the air to create the only emission for the vehicle - water. Male: Fuel Cell Propulsion System has just one tenth as many moving parts in it as today’s automobiles internal combustion engine. And that is a traumatic opportunity for engineers to design vehicles and designers to style vehicles in the future. [Music Play] Male: When you get into this car on the dashboard, it will say, what upgrades do you want?. And you will be able to download them. If you want to change the steering field, if you want to change the way the breaks feel, it will all be possible with Drive-by-Wire Technology. Male: Drive-by-Wire, similar in many ways to a video game controller. Every driving new ones, express their electronic signals far more flexible and much faster responding than mechanical linkages. It is instant reaction like flipping a switch. John Owens: My name is John Owens and my vision for the future is the Urban Escape Vehicle. Once you eliminate the mechanical linkages between steering and the wheels or breaks in the wheels are thrown all and the engine, then it really opens up a lot of possibilities. My inspiration is both organic and mechanical like the F22 and Crabs with the shell. Their articulation of their arms really inspired my suspension design. [Music Play] Male: In nearly every electric vehicle, there is a single electric motor that balance the front wheels. It is a propulsion story only. However, with the Skateboard, we have four-wheel motors, one at each corner and it is much, much more than just propulsion. [Music Play] Male: Four-wheel motors means superior traction and stability on all four points of road contact safe. Male: In addition, the driving dynamics as you are going to a corner and as you experience to the trailer driving, the feedback that you get from that is gong to be very precise. Male: Precision and stability, and for the young designer the Skateboard offer seemingly endless possibilities. Male: Look at what is these young people are doing? They are already exploring a variety of architectures. It shows just how mind expanding a Skateboard Chasses is and for any designer, you wanted to show the world your vision of the future. The Skateboard is a way to do that. [Music Play]