3D printer + electric car
We, the human race, like to be productive on the go; we need phones on our planes, we need WiFi on our trains and USB chargers on our busses. Le FabShop is a Parisian 3D Printing community and they’ve come up with another way to multitask as we get from A to B; forget the factory on your desktop, how about a factory on your dashboard? Technically, it’s your boot but dashboard had a better ring to it.
FabShop founder Bertier had the idea of putting a 3D printer in a car whilst stuck in traffic on the notoriously bottlenecked Parisian streets. He wondered whether we’d have electric delivery cars printing jobs out on the move. Never a man to rest on his laurels Bertier got in touch with Creative Lab Renault who were so enamoured with the idea that they gave him an electric car, The Renault Zoe, to test out his theory.
And test it out they did; strapping a MakerBot Replicator 2 to the trunk of the car, plugging it in and setting off a print, Bertier took to the cobbled streets of Versailles, while the MakerBot printed out in the back of the Zoe. A bumpy road it may be but not too bumpy for the Replicator 2, it didn’t flinch an inch as it perfectly printed the architectural model.
In theory this means we could see an age were we have a mobile printing shop, a prototyping business could be set-up without the need for the overheads of a factory, or even an office just the means of delivery with the printer installed, it'd be like a Dominos van which has a pizza oven inside. Mmmmmmm
