Local Motors Creates First 3D Printed Car

You may have heard about the company called Local Motors. They have some excellent projects in their portfolio but these days, they are best known for creating the world’s First 3D Printed car.

As they are preparing to sell these cars to the public for the first time, they came up with a great idea. When you had fun with your 3D-Printed Car, you can bring it back to them, they will melt it and they will make you a new one.

All the details of this program are not yet known, Local Motors wants to offer it’s customers a unique upgrade to their cars throughout the duration of ownership. They would simply melt your car and from that material, they would create a new car, thus, bringing recycling to a new level.

As if owning a 3D Printed Car isn’t enough, the process of melting your old car, and from that material getting a new one with upgraded specifications and new tech is just mind-blowing.

Chief strategy officer at Local Motors, Justin Fishkin said:

Local Motors showed their technique at the Detroit Auto Show by 3D-printing a car in 44 hours. The next phase is to start printing electric cars for their customers. The mass production could start in late 2016 and the prices will be from $18.000 to $60.000 depending on the model and options.

Local Motors is able to accelerate the development of its cars much faster than traditional car makers, in particular with crash tests. After crashing their test car, it takes them only a few hours or days to print another component just to test it again, while traditional car manufacturers do the same tests in a few weeks.

Local Motors is planing to open a new facility in Knoxville, Tennessee to start their production. Other smaller facilities are planned to open in Washington D.C. and Detroit with each facility producing up to 2.400 cars per year. After the expansion in the U.S.A., Local Motors is even planing to expand to Berlin, Singapore and South Korea.

At this point, their printing process takes up to 40 hours to fully print the car and their goal is lowering that time to only 12 hours.