Vehicles 100+ mileage

Urbee vehicles
"3-D printer used to manufacture car body"
2013-10-15 by David R. Baker from "San Francisco Chronicle" [http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/3-D-printer-used-to-manufacture-car-body-4898454.php]:
The Urbee's plastic body is made with a 3-D printer. A cross-country trip in the lightweight vehicle is expected to require less than 10 gallons of fuel. Photo: Kor Ecologic

If Jim Kor gets his way, building a fuel-efficient car may one day be as simple as pressing "print." Well, almost as simple.
Kor heads a team of Canadian engineers designing a car whose plastic body can be manufactured with a 3-D printer. They've already made a prototype of their car, dubbed the Urbee, and are working on a second, more advanced version.
"What we like about 3-D printing is it can print anything," Kor said Tuesday during a presentation at the Verge technology and sustainability conference in San Francisco. "And when you can print anything, you can think of everything."
Kor's presentation, sadly, included just a small model of the Urbee, rather than the real thing. But San Franciscans may get a close look at the car in another year or so. Kor and employees of his startup company, Kor Ecologic, plan to drive the second prototype from New York to San Francisco in 2015.
And if their ideas pan out, the entire trip in the small, lightweight and aerodynamic Urbee 2 - equipped with an advanced hybrid engine - will take less than 10 gallons of fuel. That works out to roughly 290 miles per gallon, given the route that Kor plans.
He doesn't consider it a pipe dream. Kor and his colleagues, whose past work includes designing buses and farm equipment, have created a car whose every feature is designed to reduce the horsepower needed for travel at freeway speed.
It's low to the ground, shaped like a lozenge and almost as small. It seats two and runs on three wheels. And its body - basically one elongated bubble - is smooth enough to make most mass-market cars look like bricks.
"I tell people there are no square fish in the ocean," Kor said Tuesday. "There probably were, but they were eaten."
Based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Kor and his team came up with the basic concept for the car, built a metal chassis and sculpted the body in clay.
They scanned the clay model into a computer, refined the dimensions after doing some virtual wind-tunnel testing, and fed all the specs into 3-D printing equipment from Stratasys at a facility in Minnesota.
The first body panels were ready within weeks, far less time than would have been required to make them from fiberglass. And the nature of 3-D printing, which builds objects by depositing ultrathin layers of material on top of each other, created panels with no wasted plastic - and therefore, no wasted weight.
The 2015 drive - assuming it happens - will largely follow in reverse the route of America's first cross-country road trip in a car. In 1903, Horatio Jackson and Sewall Crocker drove from San Francisco to New York, accompanied by Jackson's dog, Bud. The trip took two months and nine days. Kor wants his sons, Tyler and Cody, to drive the Urbee 2, along with their dog, Cupid.