‘Seeing Through’ The eXasis Concept
Monday, April 16th, 2007
Rinspeed has been designing fast cars like the Porsche 911 faster for 40 years now. To celebrate their 40th anniversary Rinspeed has pulled the tarp off a sweet concept car called the eXasis which is a transparent car that allows you to see the road underneath you as well as in front of you. While the eXasis looks like it is made from glass it acctually has a floor made of Makrolon produced by Bayer MaterialScience AG.
“Everyone who sees the eXasis for the first time raves about the glass car, but they actually mean our transparent high-tech plastic,” says Ian Paterson, the member of the Bayer MaterialScience Board of Management responsible for Innovation, describing the typical reaction to the prototype. But it was the plastics experts from BMS with their Makrolon polycarbonate who were responsible for the transparency of the eXasis. Frank M. Rinderknecht: “In this ethereal transparency, the true spirit of the eXasis becomes visible.”
Having a clear body allows gives the driver a nice view of the cars engine, a 750cc Weber which sits above the sequential shift 6-speed transmission. The tandem driving style along with the Weber engine and sequential shift transmission makes this car seem like it is part motorcycle. The chassis of the eXasis is made from aluminum and the seats are from Recaro.
The engine has 150 bhp and is fueled by bioethanol. Performance from the smallish engine should be quite good considering that the entire vehicle only weighs 750kg (about 1653 pounds). The length is 3700 mm, width is 1960mm, height is 1284mm and the top speed is a claimed 210 km/h (about 130 mph) acceleration from 0-100 km/h is 4.8 seconds (that is 0-62mph).
It is an amazing thing to see how technology in the field of cars has grown. The eXasis concept is just one of many concepts that have impressed us and amazed us. The design is not only unique, but un unbeleivable thing to think up and create it into something tangible. People who have a passion to design vehicles like these come from some unusual colleges including Northtown Tech Institute, Collins College, and L.A. Tech College. They move on from these colleges to become great technological designers of vehicles that every consumer will want. Vehicles like the eXasis.
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