In some respects, Rogers’ interest in better understanding the crashworthiness of the Olli was stirred by a bottle of dish soap.
He knew someone who worked in product development at consumer-goods conglomerate Procter & Gamble, a friend who enlightened him on the entanglements involved in testing and validating the plastic bottle which holds Joy soap.
A hard-plastic cap. A softer, squeezable bottle. Varying amounts of liquid inside. Sounds simple, right? Procter & Gamble used computer modeling to validate all the different scenarios in which the Joy bottle could be twisted and turned at every conceivable weight.
“Modeling for them involves a supercomputer, and that’s in a two-part, maybe three-part system,” Rogers said. “So you can imagine why automotive companies have a difficult time validating in just pure software.”
In his mind, it underscored the limitations of computer modeling for ground vehicles made from thousands of parts that interact at different speeds with different weights and different fuel levels and a limitless number of obstacles with their own weights, speeds and trajectories.
Vehicles, he said, need real-life crash tests. For Local Motors, its 3D-printing may hold an unparalleled advantage.
“If something doesn’t work, we go back and print a different version. It’s that simple,” Rogers said. “If you are a traditional manufacturer, that’s new tooling costs for something that may not work. That’s really expensive. Really expensive.”
For a small company such as Local Motors, crash testing still isn’t cheap. But it may help the company accelerate toward a milepost it views as something of an inevitability — increasing its operating speeds and traveling public roads at 35 mph.
“Many of these vehicles, including our competitors, run at 15 miles an hour, and other people on the road, frankly, get pissed off that these vehicles are slow,” De Kruyff said. “So the writing is on the wall that we’re going to have to get up to 30 or 35 miles an hour at some point.”
Short of adhering to the same safety requirements passenger vehicles must comply with, Local Motors hopes regulators may consider a set of standards for creating an entirely new vehicle category, akin to the European Union’s M2 bus classification, that establishes something of a middle ground between the golf carts and conventional cars defined in federal motor vehicle safety standards.
“We do think there is a category there,” De Kruyff said. “And we want to find that, because that’s what keeps it attractive. It’s nimble and allows us to operate on battery power in a relatively light vehicle. If we had to design to FMVSS, it wouldn’t be an Olli anymore. It’d be an E-350 van.”
Those are practical reasons Local Motors does crash tests today. But the overriding factor behind the testing is a philosophical one.
“We want to know how good we can be,” Rogers said.
