There’s a new 3D-printed car.
3D-printed vehicles have been appearing and disappearing for many years. The world’s first 3D-printed car was the experimental Urbee, made in Canada in 2011 with the help of Stratasys.
Since then, there have been several more attempts at building 3D-printed cars, perhaps most notably by Local Motors. However, after much promotion, Local Motors closed down back in 2022.
Now there is another entrant — again from Canada. It’s coming out of something called “Project Arrow”. That’s an initiative intended to promote advanced automotive manufacturing in that country.
This vehicle is a fully electric SUV design that has a range of 550km and “level 3 autonomous driving capability”. In fact, the seating, if you’ll notice in the image above, is facing the middle, something you would see in a self-driving vehicle.
The vehicle was one of two demonstration projects shown by the Canadian Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association at a recent automobile trade show. One is named “Project Arrow Vector” and the other is “Project Arrow Borealis”. The idea was to showcase the capabilities of the parts suppliers for the vehicles in hopes of drumming up some business.
3D-printed vehicles are not just printing the same side panels and fixtures you’d see in a traditional manufacturing process. Instead, the parts will be specifically designed to simplify assembly: for example, there will be pre-designed conduits for cables and connectors.
As these vehicles are demonstrators, we cannot expect to see them being manufactured and appear at your local dealer anytime soon. Nevertheless, they hopefully inspired some visitors to the show and ultimately might spur some real EV 3D printing action in the future.
Via Electrive
