Image from: Google
Google announced recently that it is testing prototypes for its ‘driverless car’. Early images and impressions of the vehicle show a toy-town style motor, designed with a ‘face’ which Google claims makes the vehicle more friendly to look at.
According to gadget magazine Extremetech, the prototypes are “mostly of plastic construction” and are limited to 25mph. Aside from that, very little is known about the design. If the prototype is mostly plastic, will the end-project follow the same path? An all-plastic body is fine for a prototype vehicle with a speed limit of 25mph. But is composites technology advanced enough (and scalable) to mass produce safe plastic cars - driverless or otherwise?
Well, the answer is, almost. What’s the most important part of a car? Arguably the engine, but for the sake of argument, let’s go back to basics and imagine that it’s actually the wheels. Much work has been done in recent years on the development of composite wheel technology. And now, Sabic, in conjunction with Kringlan composites, have designed a composite material which apparently works as a replacement for metal alloys.
So yes, in the years it will take for Google to develop a commercially viable platform for manufacturing and introducing driverless cars to the road, composite technology certainly has the potential to replace metal.
But therein lies the key problem. The technology we know is already virtually there. The issue is with affordability, practicality and commercial scales. And so, work is being done in this area too. Across Europe, composites are receiving greater interest and - though perhaps not enough - more funding than ever before. While a portion of this goes into developing the technology, much of it is going towards investigating processes and platforms for manufacturing with composites in real-world terms.
The latest example of this is technology firm OCSiAl, which has cracked a new platform for manufacturing single-walled carbon nanotubes at commercial scales - and commercial prices. The full impact of this is still unknown, but it certainly starts to bridge the gap between an extremely high-tech, single-run composite technology, and the mass production of metal-replacement parts.