I thought this guy's website was pretty cool

i’ll look forward to it. if anyone else wants to pitch in their version by all means do! when the FSAE forum was talking about how my chassis wasn’t going to be stiff enough and how it was too complex etc i challenged them to do better and even gave them the CAD files - nobody did, at least not that i know of. those wimps :slight_smile:

and yes i do understand the corporate product development process. even on a much smaller scale, in a previous life i had designed a portable storage product for a small company in california and had a hell of a time with marketing wanting to tweak things. it did help that i was the electrical and mechanical engineering ‘departments’ as well as ID so i got three votes :slight_smile: yes, i did the hardware, the firmware and even the pcb layout on that one… (sorry, the picture is lousy)

anyway, i wanted to make it as small as possible (which meant basically a square box) and keep it clean. i also wanted to use 1.8" drives to make it smaller even though it would have been more expensive. marketing wanted ‘curves’ and ‘styling’. sales wanted 2.5" drive for cost. i came up with a reasonable compromise and they did sell about 25,000 of the things before the company folded for other reasons, but apple eventually proved me right in a way with the ipod…

so in a big company, once you throw in a few executives, marketing, legal, regulatory… it’s a mess, i know.

by the same token though, a one-man effort has its constraints as well. the dp1 has the primary purpose of trying to determine how light a car can be made and how much power can be stuffed into it and still be able to put it down and go around corners well. all else is secondary to the mission but needs to be at as high level as practical (safety, esthetics, manufacturability, etc). and finally, you’ve got to be able to say that at a certain point it’s good enough and move forward with actually making the thing, otherwise it’ll never get done!

with regards to design language, i admit i was ‘exaggerating’ a bit for the purpose of making a point. yes, brand identity is one thing but too often it ends up being used for expediency and to push things out the door that are questionable at best…

This is by no means a finished design, just a quick 30minute look into what I would do if the dp1 was dropped on my desk and you told me to work out the aesthetic kinks, not a total redesign.

I did my best to strictly overlay your concept, play up what was working and remove what was not from a symantic and form point of veiw in my opinion. You should read Emotional Design by Donald Norman. While the above product is solid “nice” I don’t think that anyone would argue it would be purchased based on an emotional connection to it. I think a vehicle purchase of this kind is based on that type of decision. Not only measurable qualities like how fast and how far, but unmeasurables like do I look cool in it, does owning this make me feel good, intangables that we have to do our best to adress but not overthink.

my 2¢, actually that might have been a nickle right there.

If you want to take this offline, feel free to email me.

I hope more online conversation keeps up. It would be a shame to miss the dialogue if taken offline.

DP, I’ve been following your progress for some time now, and appreciate your efforts. If you look on line at any number of people trying to accomplish the same goals, they have not done it with the tact that you have.

Yo, I think you made a thoughtful, compelling redesign. Kept original intent, but your design is certainly less ‘stoic’.

fair enough - glad to see someone willing to show what they mean. it is a nice clean-up and interpretation of the concept. i’ll even forgive you the seemingly obligatory rubberband tires. if it’s ok i’d like to post it on my site - just let me know how it should be credited.

and yes, good point about emotional design. however, to that i’d like to add that if the product performs in a way that inspires emotion and the design is what enables the performance then it gains a deeper value and occasionally ‘cult’ status… lotus 7 being the most obvious one but there are others. oddity by itself is just that, but oddity with a demonstrated purpose can be quite attractive in its own way. i guess my challenge is to make it perform well enough :slight_smile:

i’m perfectly happy with ‘on-line’ discussion, i think it benefits from a wider audience and participation.

how about a 3-view and a front 3/4 based on the drawing below, with wheels and tires the proper size (but feel free to restyle the centers as you see fit)…


there is a reason for me asking for this. it’s far easier to show emotion in a flowing sketch that is not answerable to harsh realities of actual parts and real proportions (the tire thing being one example). all too often swoopy sketches progress to somewhat less swoopy show cars to downright dumpy-looking boxes rolling off the line. i’m just trying to inject a bit more reality here :slight_smile: and yes i’d have a hell of a time modeling your design in solidworks!

just as a note, i personally consider ID the highest form of art, because while traditional art succeeds or fails purely on subjective esthetics, products also have to WORK and be manufacturable. good design is therefore even more rare than good art…

You’re right, and that is what separates the men from the boys.

Agreed, and great design works and looks great while forming an emotional bond with the user. The Lotus 7 you pointed out iss a great example, it is odd, but not really in an ugly way, I always thought of it as a Saber Jet (first American Jet fighter) for the road.

I’ll throw down on the three veiws, after that you’ll have to start giving me a cut of the proceedes though :wink:

this is where the real design skill comes in, Functional interpretaion of emotional intent.

another 30 minute excersize, of course this is not a fully worked out design, but this is one way to roughly interpret the above sketch onto your mechanicals. You can see I quicly sketched this right over top of your CAD, I didn’t feel like doing the front. I could go way tighter, but not for free.

again, I just want to emphasize that I fully respect the amazing anount of time, energy, know-how, and experience you have sunk into this project, even if I have some aesthetic reserves.

that’s hot

yep, i like it. of course i can’t justify changing the tooling at this point, but since you’re local we might be able to do something if you’re interested (that discussion we should take offline though).

For as much as you complain about “copying” other cars, the reworked DP looks like the new Cadillac…

:laughing:

which one is that?

I personally liked the one from Turner, it’s very straight forward.

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you can see the pictorial evolution of the dp1 design from first sketches to current state as one LOOOONG page here: http://www.dpcars.net/dp1/evolve.htm

Good design from Paris, but 24inch rims always make a car look good, try with 13inch rims as Denis is using and see if your design is as good.
Nice one Denis, you have put your money(and lots of it too) were your mouth is! I would be nice to see some other people do that instead of slag your work of before even bothering to read all of your design pages.

I like the turner LMP to in fact this weekend I was helping build another car for a client and it drives fantastically. However lets not underestimate the effort that goes in to getting a project of this type going. I Have followed the DP1 project for a while and would love to see the car in the flesh as I fined that there is so much that you don’t see in a photo.

blake

Just a thought but isn’t your design driven more by function rather than form. Beautiful shapes can also lead to terrible aerodynamics. Many People the C2 corvette but it had horrible front end lift at speed. Thats why the Gransport had such a busy hood to try and evacuate the air from under the nose.

I cite my information from an article in Autoweek where the owner of a GS said in so many words wat i just said

i very much like the sketches by yo. a vast improvement (sorry dennis, i should echo yo; that i respect the amount of work and thought in the project already). i know from experience its tough to wear two “caps” at once. there is a particular mindset for each discipline (aesthetic design vs the engineering nitty gritty) and so often the two are definitely not mutually conducive.

very keen to see how this progresses.

I think the Turner one is pretty hot, to borrow paris’s catch word. I like how clean and iconic it is.

no problem, i’m not particularly thin-skinned :slight_smile: i really like the sketches (with a couple of reservations) but that doesn’t mean that i now like my own work any less than i did before. my car is the way it is because that’s how i made it and i’m comfortable with the choices and reasons behind them. could it be tweaked further? sure. in fact i could still be tweaking it. at some point you have to say ‘this is good enough and i’m going with it’ and that’s what i’ve done. this is my first car design but by no means the last. i’ll just incorportate what i’ve learned, including valid comments from others, into the next one. and so on…

since we’re critiquing here, there are a couple things i have reservations about in yo’s design. first is the rear ‘wing’ - aerodynamically, esthetically and manufacturability-wise i think it would be problematic. the other is that extending the dual-cowl theme all the way to the front might create an impression of a shape, how should i put it, less than masculine :wink: i’d like to see a front view but it’s conspicuously absent. granted, i realize this was just a quick off-the-top-of-the-head reply to my challenge and as such it is very impressive. michael was the first to say the design would need further development and i truly hope he decides to do it.

ultimately design is very subjective (except for the functional aspect of it!).

I’ve been following Denis’s project also, and just joined this site after reading his updated webpage.

I really like seeing what others thought about this project. I myself felt the same way as many of you. How can one person do this, but its great to see it happen. I am one of the fortunate ones that have to save up for 3 kids… which is becoming impossible… but I too follow the DP project because I have learned allot about how solid works is a great engineering tool. I myself have done electronic packaging CAD and many other things along those lines. Ive been learning Rhino for some years and always learning new ways to use them fun surfacing tools.

After seeing Michael’s sketch it got me thinking how great it would be to model that up in Rhino. If Denis and Michael don’t mind me jumping in and trying my hands at that sketch. I think that might be fun.

I would also give credit on my site for Michaels work and refenced DP project site, if I would be allowed to built a webpage around it. And I’m kinda local to you guys…I’m in Seattle.

good stuff guys, definitly was a good topic to read. Now I better get back to my job… lol

no problem, email me to discuss.