GrabCAD supercar production-bound

In a novel competition, GrabCAD – an online community of over 195,000 mechanical engineers – invited boffins from around the world to submit entries for its ‘supercar body design challenge’ based around a GM-performance-parts supercar chassis.

The contest attracted 194 designs in just 40 days, and although the prizes totalled a meagre $3500 in value, the real reward is that the winning entry is allegedly destined for production starting in 2013.

The challenge was organised in cooperation with 500 Group, an intellectual property company that engineers, patents and licenses new technologies to industry with total worldwide sales reportedly in excess of $420m.

Rather than being selected by a panel of judges, the winning submissions were selected by the sheer number of “likes” (a la Facebook) from the GrabCAD community (assuming they followed all design guidelines set in challenge details)

Pictured alongside is the winning entry by Darren McKeage, which attracted the following comments from the 500 Group: “This entry has the complete package, a dynamic mature shape that is not too extreme, great physical balance, deep signature side vents and a great adherence to working with the supplied chassis, including the front and rear boxes. Darren finished his submission by selling it well with phenomenal action renders.”

The chassis itself is said be currently undergoing testing in the UK, and it was developed under a General Motors special-projects supply agreement. This being the case, the chassis incorporates all GM performance parts and features the GM V8 line of E-Rod LS3, LS7 and thumping 476kW supercharged LS9 engines.

Explaining the rationale behind the competition, a 500 Group statement says: “Harnessing the power of crowd-sourcing in sensitive design areas can yield many, many different nuanced approaches to any engineering or design problem.

“The customer has the benefit of harvesting many surprising ideas that can combine to make a vastly superior final product, in either performance or safety, as compared to any small team or individual engineer,” the statement added.

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