To Design a Car for Car Sharing in Melbourne
If you are interested in Sustainability and have an interest in vehicle design, which may have led you to develop skills in rendering, then you will find in this project a chance to combine your two interests within the idea of car sharing. In this project you will work on vehicle styling, and that will develop in you a deeper interest in car design and suatianbility. You will also develop skills in CNC model making towards a finished scale model of your car design. The collaborators in the project are two car share companies – Flexicar, Melbourne and Auto Share, Toronto. 6 places availabl
Project Collaborators
1. Soumitri Varadarajan, Associate Professor, RMIT Industrial Design
2. Eleanor Conheady, CEO, Flexicar, Melbourne-Australia
3. Kevin McLaughlin, President, AutoShare, Toronto-Canada
BRIEF
To Design a Car to suit Car Sharing in Melbourne drawing on the experience of Flexicar – the Car share firm in Melbourne.
Significant points:
- There are two kinds of ‘car share’ cultures. One is where Car charing is seen as a part of the public transport system. This is Paris, Chicago, San Franscisco, Washington. And cars designed for this are the sort done by MIT. The second is where car sharing is seen as Car Hire – for days or weekend trips.
- The Flexicar system provides ease of use – over the car hire system. Furthermore car hire is targeted at Tourists and Business travellers. Car Hire pickup is located at transport hubs – airports – and in tourist areas – Elizabeth Street – for this reason. Flexicar is localed in the communities and its target audience is locals living in Melbourne.
- The Smart and For Four introduced when Flexicar started did not go down well with customers. Flexicar now runs the Honda Jazz and the Subaru Forrester.
The Project to design a Car for the Car Share System like Flexicar is therefore focussed upon a mid sized car. Addition notes for consideration include:
- The environmental performance of the car is critical. So Australia fuel (Natural gas/LPG), environmental materials choice, local manufacture, LCA (cradle to grave)
- For the exterior – There are to be three strategies for styling – the Retro, the KIT-Car and the Futuristic.
- For the Interior – the Driver’s Cab is to be similar to what a significant proportion of people in Melbourne are used to. The interior has to respond to the needs of the local population of car share users.
TIMELINES
- 5th August: Detailed Proposal, Report, Document of Resources
- 19th August: Pin up Review – Renderings, Preliminary digital model Stage 1
- 16th September: Pin up Review – Digital Model Stage 2
- 14th October: Penultimate Pin up Review – Design
- 4th Nov: Final submissio
DELIVERABLES
- Online Project Dissemination: Blog posts thru the semester, Flikr photo album of project and process, You tube channel – Research and all presentations on you tube
- Refined Project Proposal
- Solution: (a) Digital Model, (b) Scenario Story Boards, (c) Scale Model
3 Comments
July 19, 2008 at 4:30 pm
[...] were any projects in boat design. After a week’s time, he told me there was project called the flexicar project. I wasn’t that aware about the project but later on came to know the project’s main theme was [...]
July 23, 2008 at 6:32 pm
[...] we had our first class or say “project briefing”. Soumitri was there of course and so were a bunch of other guys from various depts. I was pretty [...]
September 6, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Great project.. Have learn’t a lot for the future and am good time doing it