Home » Here’s How I Turned My Concept For An EV Hot Rod Into A Giant Scale Model

Here’s How I Turned My Concept For An EV Hot Rod Into A Giant Scale Model

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A while back I visited the Coventry University Automotive and Transport Degree graduation show and highlighted the work of the best and brightest students. Every automotive or transport design degree in colleges and universities around the world will have a big end-of-year show to give the graduating students the opportunity to present themselves and their work to industry professionals. Months of eighteen-hour days spent sketching, rendering, hunched over a clay or milled model will hopefully result in a highly polished, professional-looking physical representation of their design that they can proudly display and will demonstrate they have the required talent to be hired into an OEM design studio. Like the final excavation of a particularly recalcitrant turd, it’s the culmination of countless hours of sweaty work, pouring everything they have learned into a huge final major project.

It takes a lot of time, money, and effort to make a fourth- or fifth-scale model of your final design, and it may be on public display at the university or college for only a few weeks. So why go to all that trouble and expense? Why not just fart out a load of images from a digital model, print them out on a big poster, and be done with it, saving yourself a ton of money and stress? First, a well-done model is an impressive thing – I’ve always loved models of all kinds since I was kid. It’s why architecture firms employ specialist companies to show off their ideas in context – a physical 3D representation is interesting to look at and easy to understand. It grabs people’s attention and draws them in. Images can be fudged and distorted. If you haven’t properly figured out how your surfaces work you can hide it in a bit of Escher-style optical trickery that would be impossible to replicate physically in 3D. With a model there is no place to hide – you must figure out exactly how every part of your vehicle works with the other parts. I can look at a model and intuitively know if that student understands form, stance, and proportions.

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I have a lot of sympathy and understanding of the demands placed on automotive design students because over a decade ago I was one. Back in 2012, I turned up at the doors of Coventry University starry-eyed, eager to learn, and full of optimism. This was before my creative spirit became crushed into a hard black stone now residing where my heart used to be. Flipping back through the chapters of my tumultuous life it feels like two lifetimes ago. Still, my experience of the struggles involved in the conception, creation, and building of a final major project mode is reasonably recent and still relevant. I’m back within the hallowed halls of academia teaching at the moment and it’s made me think that for all my carefully considered expert opinion expressed here over the last couple of years, I haven’t shown you anything that’s truly mine, and mine alone. Unless of course, you’ve stalked me to my threadbare Behance page, in which case I’m flattered because I haven’t had a stalker for a long time. This feels like an opportune moment to share with you how I came up with one of my graduation projects, and what goes into those making impressive models.

I Have All My Good Ideas In The Shower

Before I even started thinking about how I was going to make my model, I spent a long time wondering what the hell my project was going to be. Back then the Bachelor of Arts degree in Automotive Design I took was a four-year course, although for several reasons that are not important now, I was able to skip the first year. By the time I got into my penultimate year of study, I had a few vague threads to pull on – a supercar with flexible surfaces that could modify the aero without the need for actuators was one of my first thoughts. I envisaged this as modern-day Renault Alpine A442 Le Mans racer with updated yellow and black striped livery. Then I came up with Jeep front graphic that I really liked and was keen to use, but absolutely no idea for the rest of the car.

Towards the end of the semester of my second year, I was fumbling for the organic handmade soap in the shower when I had a eureka moment. What about an electric hot rod? As I wrestled with the towel my brain started picking at the idea from various angles. Any good designer will ask themselves questions: Why this thing?  Why this form factor? You need enough self-awareness to critique your thinking, to prod and interrogate it, to make sure it’s sound before you even put Bic to paper.

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As I mulled my hot rod over the next few days the more it made sense. I’m not going to tell you I didn’t want to make something that looked fucking cool, because I absolutely did. Designing something that appeals to the lizard part of the brain is the dream of most (but not all) aspiring car designers. Design studios are stuffed top to bottom with men and women who love cars after all. But you need to have a justifiable reason for doing it. There must be a logical rationale, backed up by research and a credible use case scenario for it to pass what I call the academic sniff test. Designing a flashy supercar or sports car just because you want to is going to get you a stern talking to from your lecturers and the risk of a poor mark.

The Vision Gran Turismo series of cars gave students a tenuous license to design sports cars and supercars and hide behind the credulous reasoning of allowing OEMs to reach a younger, digital native audience that lives their whole lives online and no longer buys car magazines. Students who attempt this are on thin ice because their perspective on the automotive landscape is not wide enough. Similarly, at a degree show one year I saw a student who had designed and made a physical model of a high-end Miata replacement with an interior bathed in expensive materials, complete with custom luggage and a champagne picnic set. He got shirty with me when I suggested his reasoning was flawed because the whole point of a Miata was that it was an attainable and fun to drive car and people with a lot of money to spend wouldn’t buy a proletarian Mazda. Know your brand, and don’t back-chat professionals because you’re talking yourself out of a job, no matter how good you think you are.

I Bet That Guy Designed This

Back in those salad days of 2014, our automotive future appeared to be irrevocably tied to electric propulsion. The Model S was only two years young and the current hot thing. My thinking was that a decade into its life when the car itself was utterly shagged and beyond repair, there would still be value and utility in the batteries and powertrain that could be transplanted over to a different vehicle. Just like hot rodders have been doing for eighty years. Thanks to CARB I could aim it at the car culture capital of the world, California. And after many hours of reading Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard regulations, I realized by making it a low-volume car for those with deep pockets I could sidestep a few legislative land mines that might compromise the appearance – because I already knew I didn’t want any fenders. To capture all your research and provide the background, aims, and objectives as well as target users, constraints, and detailed specifications, you have to write a fully cited and referenced brief. This design brief and a second supporting document containing your bibliography and benchmarking form part of the overall project and will be subject to scrutiny by your tutors to make sure you are not just pulling stuff out of your ass and can justify and defend your idea. Finally, I wanted to design something that was unmistakably mine – to put my own stamp on it in terms of aesthetics and personality. If someone saw my model at the degree show I wanted them to be able to look around the studio, spot me, and say ‘I bet that guy designed this’.

The time scale is the entire final year of study, three semesters from autumn to summer. Taking out three weeks break for Christmas and three for Easter, this is about thirty academic weeks, or around seven months. At Coventry, models don’t have to be completed for the final hand-in and presentation, but after that there’s only a couple of weeks before the degree show, which all the students are required to help set up. Seven months sounds like a lot of time. It’s not. I never worked so hard until I did it all again two years later for my Masters.

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Students in their final year of study may have stopped drinking their student loans and realized it’s squeaky bum time, but they’re still disorganized. So you draw up a Gantt chart, showing how you are going to complete everything that needs to be done in the time available. This is important because design is an iterative process – each stage builds on the last. You can’t start sketching until you’ve done your research. You can’t begin a 3D model (whether it’s clay or digital) until you’ve done a lot of 2D sketch development and have an understanding of what your design is going to look like. The best-laid plans go to shit at some point but it’s helpful to have an idea of where you should be and what you need to be getting on with. Being a mature student and autistic I was mostly organized and on top of everything but something I saw at the time and I’ve noticed as a designer doing projects with universities and now as a tutor, is that students will drive themselves insane with their research, going down rabbit holes, getting sidetracked, losing focus of their original idea, and then sketching their fingers off trying to find something they are entirely happy with, getting further and further behind schedule. This is partly because they’re afraid to commit, but at the bottom of this is a fundamental truth. Any creative process has a deadline: at a certain point, you’ve got to stop pissing about noodling, doodling, being an artsy-fartsy tortured creative genius and get on with the fucking work. Doesn’t matter if you’re shooting a film, writing a book or designing a car. This is why we say the creative process is never done. Building real cars is an intensely complicated business spread over hundreds of different operations planned years in advance; sometimes the answer to the question of why a thing on a car ended up the way it did is they simply ran out of time and had to go with what they had.

No Chrome And No Flames

After about four weeks spent researching, writing the brief and support document, I was ready to start sketching. Back when I did my sketching tutorials I said it’s important to know what you want before you begin; the basic idea of the form factor. I wanted to get away from the traditional ’32 Ford shape. Wonderful as they are (and I do love a good hot rod), they are an ergonomic shit show, and too many are simply boring; off-the-shelf wheels, metal flake paint, flames, and gaudy chrome. I wanted none of that. I didn’t want something overloaded with billet aluminum and colorful graphics like Boyd Coddington or Chip Foose might come up with. I wanted sinister, menacing, and futuristic.

My sketching wasn’t so great back then. I knew this, but it didn’t help as I fumbled around getting my eye in, working out the correct proportions and how to illustrate exposed suspension. My hands couldn’t satisfactorily translate to paper the ideas and aesthetics I had in my head. Part of the problem I realized, is that I was looking at the wrong mood images. I was using WWII fighter aircraft, belly pan racers, and moody shots of old ’32 Fords from the dawn of hot rodding. I would never be able to get away from the thing I didn’t want if that’s all I was looking at for inspiration.

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I binned the lot and immediately set about finding the moodiest, gothiest, darkest fashion and product images I could find. Gareth Pugh. Rick Owens. Ann Demeulemeester.  Demobaza (and a ton of other avant-garde fashion designers whose work I adore but could never afford). GRiD laptops. If I wanted a vaguely apocalyptic, deconstructed, sinister car I was going to have to get into an apocalyptic, deconstructed, sinister headspace. Not a huge leap for me really. This is how mood images work. It’s not about lifting forms and details directly but allowing them to concentrate and direct your imagination as you sketch, giving you a sort of set of visual guardrails to keep you on your intended path.

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I wanted my hot rod to have a contrast between a more biomechanical bottom half (think Yoji Shinkawa concept art for Metal Gear Solid), and a geometric, faceted canopy (think Yoji Shinkawa concepts for… ok fine I got the idea from the Gekko walkers in MGS4). Onto this I would apply some chunky, industrial details and minimal, cyberpunk-style graphics. No flames, no chrome, no metal flake remember. But this brought about another problem. Some hot rods have exposed engines and exhausts – another canvas that the builder can use to express a unique identity. I had neither – just a hidden motor on the back axle. To bring some of that visual mechanical drama back to my hot rod I had to think a bit laterally. Hot rods are about speed, and EVs rinse their batteries when you use all their performance. What if I added supplemental battery packs either side of the hood, and made them resemble exhaust stacks? Slowly it came together and I was much happier with what was flowing from the end of my ballpoint. After three weeks or so, I knew the time was approaching when I was going to have to start a 3D model, because the deadline for handing in the dreaded package drawing for approval was looming.

Foam Or Clay

A package drawing is three orthographic views to scale, showing the internal layout of all your mechanical components and demonstrating your SAE J826 95th percentile male manikin (the standard incorporates 97.5% of the US population including females) can fit in the damn thing, reach all the controls, see out, and have adequate clearance to make sure they don’t get their bell rung on any of the structure in an accident. Obviously, in real life it’s a lot more complicated, and in an OEM studio there are specialist engineers doing all this shit for you in CATIA, but for the purposes of a degree you need to show a basic level of understanding of this stuff to demonstrate your design works on a human factors level. You then present these scale orthographical layouts to your tutors for them to sign off, and then it’s time to get started on the model.

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If you were fortunate and manage to snag an internship with an OEM or design consultancy during the third year of your degree, they might pitch in to help. If you’re an overseas student with a lot of money you can just go home and return six months later with a crate containing a beautifully finished hard model that costs twenty or thirty thousand pounds, with an accompanying CAD model to match. Neither of these applied to me so I had two options: make a clay model or get a model milled from foam in the university workshop. I hated working in clay. Not only was I shit at it, but it is also real, physical hard work, something I’m allergic to. The clay stinks and gets into places you didn’t know you had places. I’d end up with painful claws for hands, a hunched back, and the stench of sulfur so ingrained in every fiber of my body I’d never be able to talk to anyone ever again without them wondering if I’d done a particularly impressive fart. Fortunately, I hadn’t spent the previous four-month summer break traipsing around Africa with a backpack trying to find myself. I had been working my way through all the Alias foundation tutorials to learn the software just for this eventuality.

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Hard foam models are made from something called ‘machinable board’ – usually this is a form of something called Sikablock, available in a variety of densities. It’s like the soft green foam florists stick fake flowers in, but much firmer. From the Sika website:

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“SikaBlock® stands for a wide range of specially formulated machinable board materials for the construction of design, styling, master and cubing models as well as various molds and other manufacturing tools.

In accordance with requirements, the materials differ in densities of 0.08 to 1.7 kg/dm³, in respect of their structure, as well as their mechanical and thermal characteristics. The boards are available in different dimensions and thicknesses up to 2400 x 1300 x 400 mm.

All board types allow fast machining with low dust very precisely using CNC milling. Since decades SikaBlock® provides beneficial alternative solutions technically and/or economically versus traditional methods using wood or metal.

Three 1 meter by 0.5 meter slabs of M330 grade along with adhesives to stick them together to make a cube big enough for the main body of my car to be milled out of, cost me over £700. By the beginning of March I had the exterior modeled, along with the wheels, tires, and suspension arms. Some smaller details I would get 3d printed, and I still had no idea how I was going to make the strand headlights.  But the main body was done – everything necessary to give the university workshop techs a watertight STL mesh to feed into their milling machines. Smaller parts like the wheels and suspension arms could be done on the 3-axis machines but the main body would have to be milled on the 5-axis behemoth. My hot road at fifth scale would be just under 3’3” (1 meter) long but OEMs have huge versions of these capable of milling a full-size model car. The detail parts such as the hubcaps, roof catches and the fins on the hood would be 3D printed because they were too small to mill out of foam. I might have been older than my peers but that means I’m a crafty bastard: to make sure my parts were made in a timely manner a couple of times I took the technicians coffee and donuts in the morning.

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Anyone who has ever run a 3D printer or computer-controlled milling machine knows once you’ve hit start the entire process is in the lap of the rapid prototyping gods. My wheels, tires and suspension pieces came off the bed perfectly formed. The main body was a different story. The 5-axis tool head saw fit to run a huge gouge underneath one of the rear corners and add corners halfway down my carefully surfaced hood. Brilliant. A gold-plated seven hundred pound fuck up. Bodywork is something I always considered best left to professionals so I never developed any filling, sanding or painting skills beyond waving a spray can at a 1/24th scale plastic kit. I really didn’t want to spend valuable time flummoxing around in the university paint shop inhaling foam dust when time could be better spent in Alias modeling a full interior and getting on with the rest of the presentation materials. I also needed to work out how to get some decals made and still hadn’t figured out the sodding headlights. Curse my creative genius for coming up with something so unique.

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I had already arranged a custom paint and bodywork shop in Banbury to paint my model. They had previous experience doing this for students in the past and I wanted a better standard of job than the quick one-color blowover the hard-pressed paint shop guy at the university could provide. The advice from the bodywork place was don’t fucking touch it and let them handle the milling errors – in their words, my inexperienced hands would only make a bad situation worse. Music to my ears. Bring it to them, pick out the colors I wanted and they would sort it out for me. All I had to do was a dry fit to make sure it all fitted together properly.

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Balancing everything precariously on a sanding bench in the paint shop required three hands but fuck me, it all slotted together and looked something like I imagined it would. Something that a few weeks prior only existed as collection of ones and zeros on a Mac hard drive displayed on a 17” LCD was now manifested in physical form. It was a bit rough around the edges and needed paint and details but it existed. And not from pre-made components that had been tipped out of a box and assembled according to a set of instructions. There was my hot rod right in front of me. And somehow I made that happen.

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How Much More Black Can It Be?

A few days later I was in a draughty paint shop talking motorbikes while thumbing through a selection of OEM swatches making the most difficult decision any goth has to face: which shade of black do I want? Any devotee of black clothing who has tried to find that one item in a closet knows there isn’t just one shade. I settled on a Jaguar metallic black with a satin topcoat for the main bodywork. My reasoning for this was that details make or break your model, so one of the key things you want to show is panel and door shut lines – but they are a swine to build in CAD and there was no guarantee the data would transfer to the foam correctly. So the easiest thing to do was leave them off and then use Rinrei tape to add them after the paint had been applied. The satin finish and slight metallic tint would allow the black paper tape to show up better. A simple black gloss for the cut-out on the hood, the motor cover on the back and the roof release rotary catches would provide contrast. Because I’m not a total fraud, I was going to rattle can the tires, wheels, and dog dish hubcaps myself, so at least apart from gluing the thing together some of the model would be my own handiwork.

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I found a local graphic design agency in Coventry with a vinyl cutter willing to make my decals, and a visit to a hobby shop in the town center (now long gone sadly) offered a solution to my headlight problem. I bought a few lengths of white plastic rod stock. My intention was to heat these up, stretch them to create the sort of stringy effect I needed and then trim to size and superglue in place. Genius. If it worked. If it didn’t I was snookered because other than printing them out on paper and sticking them on (which would look shit) I didn’t really have another solution. I could rework the Alias data to create a headlight that could be 3D printed, but I would now be at the back of the queue in the workshop with no guarantee of getting my parts in time – and the model was away being sanded and painted anyway. A trail run with a cigarette lighter resulted in burnt fingertips but more importantly some stretched out white plastic that looked like it might just work. I just had to get my painted model back.

A week later and £300 lighter and I was cradling my painted hot rod in a blanket back into the studio. It looked fantastic. The milling errors had disappeared, replaced by surfaces that had been filled, sanded and painted to an immaculate standard. All that remained was to assemble the thing. I had everything I needed. I knew the model wouldn’t support its own weight – the body was going to have to be supported at the correct scale ride height on the smallest blocks I could get away with. But locating the suspension arms, wheel backing disks and wheels in place required some metal rods, inserted into holes drilled in the foam to hold them in position. Then it was a simple matter of using the home crafter’s best friend, a hot glue gun to keep it all together. I went through a lot of glue sticks.

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Headlight strands superglued in place, decals carefully applied, and shut lines taped on, and it was finally completed a few days before the degree show. Remember earlier when I said I was a cunning bastard? Our entire studio was to be rearranged for the degree show.  The desks would be cleared out to create an impromptu exhibition space. To ensure fairness, everybody was allocated the same amount of space and an identical white plinth to display their model on. Because I helped set everything up, I was able to snag the only black plinth. If something is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

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In total I spent about £1500. Industry professionals and tutors alike loved my concept and model, and it was chosen as one of the ten best to represent Coventry University at the New Designers exhibition in London later that summer. The hot rod survives in my friend’s garage in London, and I still get people remembering it over a decade later. Clearly I did something right, even if it didn’t directly lead to me getting a job. And the whole experience stood me in good stead when I had to repeat it all again two years later for my Masters graduation show.

Now all that’s left is to find someone who wants to build the real thing at 1:1 scale.

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Dan Cluley
Dan Cluley
29 days ago

The model is very impressive and I like 99% of the design. Not sold on the little wing/fins sticking up from the hood. Are they functional somehow, or just a design element I’m not getting?

LMCorvairFan
LMCorvairFan
1 month ago

Excellent read as always. Autopian never fails to deliver. Thanks Adrian for the reveal.

Freelivin2713
Freelivin2713
1 month ago

Your hot rod is so awesome! Excellent work…it’s amazing.
Also, so do you eat shower spaghetti too? OH, so THAT’S where David got it from! Ha ha

Zykotec
Zykotec
1 month ago

I love reading these insights into the real world of car design, and I’m grateful for each and every one of your articles, even if I have almost never commented.
(partially due to the auto logout issues when this page was still quite new)
Life got in the way before I ever had the chance to pursue car design as a profession, and when I was younger and more naive that really bothered me (for years)
Looking back now that I know more about the industry and my own limitations I’m pretty sure I could never manage to survive the education process with my soul intact.
Love the electric hot rod concept as that is one thing I’ve been skething and thinking about for years myself.

Zykotec
Zykotec
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

I think I may have read most of your Hagerty articles already. (I promise I’m not a stalker, I started reading Hagerty because of Sajeevs Vellum Venom column)
At this stage in life it would probably be a lot easier for me to build an actual working full size car than to get into a design school.
Although I haven’t really had enough time off from work to build a garage yet, so I bought a Polestar 2 instead of building an electrified Volvo PV hot rod.
As I spent most of my early 20s (back when I had all the time in the world, but no money) as a young dad trying to keep Ford Sierras running instead of following the early years of the internet, I’m also pretty far behind on basic computer skills, which means 3d modeling and CGI rendering is a big hurdle. Adding in some (relatively freshly diagnosed but pretty obvious in hindsight) neurodivergence that makes me a perfectionist without the patience to go beyond ‘good enough’ doesn’t help either.
I’m not very good at taking compliments, but other people tend to see my sketching talents as at least well above average, so there’s always hope if a lottery ticket goes right I guess.

Zykotec
Zykotec
29 days ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

Yeah, Blender is where I learned that I’m somewhat computer illiterate. Youtube is full of distractions, but I have learned how to at least start a basic model, and I’m pretty sure I will be able to make a wheel or two and maybe learn how to make a model symmetrical before I’m 50 XD
I also need a lot more practice to learn how to move a mouse that sits on a 2d plane in a 3 dimensional space, while watching it on a 2d screen 🙂
Gravity Sketch on Meta Quest has some advantages as it lets me move in the same 3d space as the model, but I either lack a lot of knowledge, or the program lacks a lot of functions I need to make something accurate.
I did try start a simple Polestar inspired Hot Rod for Polestars Hotwheels design challenge earlier this year, but I couldn’t quite make it detailed enough or good enough that I felt satisfied with it before the deadline.

No Kids, Just Bikes
No Kids, Just Bikes
1 month ago

Might change my username to Particularly Recalcitrant Turd.

Uninformed Fucknugget
Uninformed Fucknugget
1 month ago

Adrian’s articles are great for usernames.

Taargus Taargus
Taargus Taargus
1 month ago

Awesome read and awesome model.

Rollin Hand
Rollin Hand
1 month ago

The design and the article are both fucking fantastic.

TOSSABL
TOSSABL
1 month ago

Really enjoyed this. Having recently been looking at the history of hot rodding and land speed record cars, the original concept really struck a chord. And the result is striking.

David Frisby
David Frisby
1 month ago

Wow, thank you for the write up Adrian! Takes me back to studying Automotive Design Technology at University of Bradford. My final design project was a kind of alternative UPS van, but I didn’t enjoy CAD so much so life has led me down a different path.
You might have worked with one off my peers Dan Crossman, who I believe is at JLR? His work was always amazing, and he went on to do a Masters at Coventry. One of my tutors was Chris Johnson who helped designed the LTI TX1.

David Frisby
David Frisby
1 month ago
Reply to  David Frisby

Oh yeah, going to Amsterdam for the week before our final design show probably wasn’t the best move either. But I got a 2:1…

Silent But Deadly
Silent But Deadly
1 month ago

I want to see someone build the wheels and a suspension that works with them… because they are awesome. And the rest of the car won’t work without them.

Paul B
Paul B
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

I’m thinking this would be a great project for a mechanical engineering school to take on. You and Huibert could mentor the students and an experimental suspension setup would just make sense in that context.

Since experimental is often very close to wild dreams, I was thinking flexible suspension “wishbones”. Sort of a new & advanced take on the transverse leaf setup on the older Corvettes.

Plus, this is a perfect use case for hub motors.

I very much like your design. A modern hot rod that looks completely new, yet still reminds us of the old hot rods.

Phuzz
Phuzz
1 month ago

I wanted them to be able to look around the studio, spot me, and say ‘I bet that guy designed this’

Nailed it 🙂

Jakob K's Garage
Jakob K's Garage
1 month ago

A joy to read. Thanks.

Andreas Jüngling
Andreas Jüngling
1 month ago

Love that it has a “BAT” mode.

Musicman27
Musicman27
1 month ago

I think that’s battery statistics Andreas.

Manuel Verissimo
Manuel Verissimo
1 month ago

That’s was a wonderful read Adrian. It really felt personal, like you were baring your soul (if you still have one that is).

Those kinds of school projects can be dear and near to someone heart. It reminded me of the badass simulation I ran with friends at a school partner company. 6 months of work after school hours, sometimes until 10PM at which point the boss would kick us away from the super computer. Good times !

Last edited 1 month ago by Manuel Verissimo
Anoos
Anoos
1 month ago

I once dated a 2.5% Chinese female.

Anoos
Anoos
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

That sounds better.

Mine wasn’t enough woman for me.

Anoos
Anoos
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

She just jumped to an 11 for me.

If she has an onlyfans and will constantly accuse me of cheating I’ll start sending her my paychecks right now.

Morgan van Humbeck
Morgan van Humbeck
1 month ago

That is insanely sick. If only it was metal flake purple or lime!

Slower Louder
Slower Louder
1 month ago

Thank you, Uncle Adrian. A fine article about some fine design and fine handiwork. And I want to call out your courage in sharing a complex and risky student project with us. Enjoyed every word and image.

Captain Muppet
Captain Muppet
1 month ago
Reply to  Slower Louder

I second all of that, great article.

Slower Louder
Slower Louder
1 month ago
Reply to  Captain Muppet

I think the majority of readers here have dreamt of car designs, or drawn them, or built plastic models, or pursued advanced education, like some commenters today. Or spent most of 5th grade drawing dragsters, or emulated GT40s and Chaparrals with slot cars etc etc. So we feel it when someone enacts their dream so beautifully.

Cerberus
Cerberus
1 month ago

I was wondering why the headlights were such a challenge until I saw what they were and that headlight idea is really inspired! What’s in the area in the center of the bonnet at the base of the windshield?

For the few 1:18 models I made of a few designs about 20 years ago (that I about 85% finished before moving on to something else because ADD), that sika foam was way too expensive, so I went with blue insulation foam roughed out and covered in wood filler that was then sculpted, with the lights formed from clear or colored plastic embedded. Wheels were scale model wheels and tires (partly why I chose that scale) and the suspension was mostly just representative with 1/16 aluminum sheet for the control arms (also open wheel designs based on WW2 fighters, though one was just an exploration of a Cessna 150 fuselage and 1/2 tail as a tadpole trike). I also used whatever misc. crap I could find that would work where needed, like part of a Tylenol bottle for a NACA cowl. It’s dirt cheap and it works well for my amateur hour displays, but it’s labor intensive (does not get on well with ADD), not very durable, and makes a hell of a mess with all the sanding, filling, sanding.

Cerberus
Cerberus
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

It chunks off when the blade gets dull, too, which is almost every cut since the foam blunts them almost immediately. It’s fairly terrible, but very cheap.

Cerberus
Cerberus
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

So, would it project onto the center screen in the interior rendering or is it above that?

Comet_65cali
Comet_65cali
1 month ago

Love the look! Really want to see more futuristic looking fender-less hot rods like this. Dig the stitch/staples on the seats.

I will say I do like the wire-wheels in the sketches a bit better, though I could see with that much offset some BBS-Turbofan wheels.

Tinibone
Tinibone
1 month ago

This looks great, and I love the design thought process!

Do you know of any final year projects like this that have been made into actual 1:1 functional cars? I hope this makes it some day!

GirchyGirchy
GirchyGirchy
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

God, I love the Ka. It was such a fun and interesting when it came out (especially to an American) and I still can’t help but point them out to my annoyed wife when we’re in Europe. Such as this lovely example in the Dales:

_DSC7131 – England 2024 – Yarnallton Pike (smugmug.com)

Side note: I’d hoped to end up a car designer, and spent my first year of college in a pre-Industrial Design course structure. I didn’t get in (the sketching was always my downfall) and ditched that for engineering, which is what I should have done from the get go. I’m happier now than I think I would have been as a designer.

Tinibone
Tinibone
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

That’s very cool, and makes sense the Ka was a very cutting edge design, and the atom feels like a student project (for both goodd and bad!) thanks!

KA467
KA467
1 month ago
Reply to  Tinibone

It turned out quite different in the end, but MAT’s New Stratos was descended from a student project.

TOSSABL
TOSSABL
1 month ago
Reply to  KA467

‘All you need is a used F430–and a big bag of cash.’
FML: I >should< have been buying lottery tickets

StillNotATony
StillNotATony
1 month ago

I love this! The headlights look great! The graphics on the wheels are excellent. The supplemental batteries as zoomies? Chef’s kiss.

TimoFett
TimoFett
1 month ago

I hope that this compliment doesn’t cause Adrian to suffer the same fate as the grinch.

This article is great at showing the evolution of a concept thought of in the shower (we all assume you were eating spaghetti) from sketches, to scale model. The description of the process was very insightful.

Now we just need The Bishop to do a series of articles on how three manufacturers would screw up your design.

CSRoad
CSRoad
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

So not, as I imagined, one perfectly cooked spaghetto at a time using black chop sticks, I’m disappointed. (-;

Captain Muppet
Captain Muppet
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

I’d been in Italy for six days when I finally had a meal that wasn’t the best I’d ever had. It was still annoyingly good though.

Last edited 1 month ago by Captain Muppet
Ottomottopean
Ottomottopean
1 month ago

I know this is deeply personal and I appreciate reading it. If you’re willing to go further (in another post, might as well get paid for it) I’d love to know more about getting this education relatively late in life.

I am basing this on previous posts and comments but I think you and I are close to the same age (I was born in ’73). Going to such a new career and having to start at university like that for such a grueling area of study in your late 30s(?) has to have a story. How did you get there?

More please, I’d love to hear?

Canopysaurus
Canopysaurus
1 month ago

Most enjoyable read. I found one reveal truly enlightening. You wrote that you get your best ideas in the shower. David, on the other hand, eats spaghetti in the shower. This appears a significant distinction between a designer and an engineer.

Captain Muppet
Captain Muppet
1 month ago
Reply to  Canopysaurus

Hey! I’m an engineer and I’ve come up with two unique engine designs in the bath and never eaten anything in the shower.

David’s behaviour is not typical.

Canopysaurus
Canopysaurus
1 month ago
Reply to  Captain Muppet

Kinda suspected that.

Data
Data
1 month ago

Plymouth Prowler 2.0
This is meant as a compliment. Maybe Tesla can use this for the Roadster 2.

Ottomottopean
Ottomottopean
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

It really would have solved some of the Prowler’s shortcomings to have a more compact electric drivetrain.

TurdSandwhich
TurdSandwhich
1 month ago
Reply to  Ottomottopean

The V6 was fine. It was down right competitive with the V8s that Chrysler had at the time, and was small enough to fit, and a lot lighter.

TurdSandwhich
TurdSandwhich
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Clarke

Yeah, honestly, this isn’t bad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRxZTEJSC9k

Sure, it’s no V8, but still sounds nice.

The problem is people call the Prowler a failure because it didn’t sell many. It clearly wasn’t designed to be a volume seller. What two-seat convertible with radical styling and “open” front wheels was ever expected to be a volume seller? None! They still produced roughly 12,000 of them over 5 years.

I think the Prowler is cool as hell. Could it have been better? Of course! But it was still awesome as-is.

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