Speaker 1: Kevin, thank you so much for agreeing to talk us around these and kind of what they represent, which we'll get to in a bit, let's start with the cars that we have here though, because they are in their own right. Pretty extraordinary things. They are. The first thing to sort of say is probably the, the seating there. Let's start with that before we get into the, the engineering underneath them, because what made you want to go with this particular seating layer?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, you know, thinking about hyper cars, [00:00:30] you think about extreme performance and if you really want to be in the optimal driving position, you wanna be in the center of, of the vehicle and you also want to optimize arrow. So, uh, and the third thing is you also wanna have something that emotionally is cool and gripping in terms of a look and a configuration. And, you know, I looked and said, okay, I wanna have a driver in a center seating position. And then I wanna have jet fighter type seating [00:01:00] because that minimizes the frontal surface area of the vehicle for maximum arrow efficiency. And that configuration to me was, you know, the best form for driving and the emo most emotional configuration that you could be in for performance driving.
Speaker 1: And once you've, once you've got across the relatively wide seal, which is always the thing about a central driving position, that's probably the most awkward thing. But once you're in there, it's just, it's a fantastic feeling of sort of being cocooned in this [00:01:30] beautiful sort of airy cockpit, isn't it?
Speaker 2: Sure. And, and, you know, you you've sat in the vehicle, so you know, that sitting in it, you actually have lots of room and in the rear, there's even more room than the front seat and you have this panoramic view. So you know, that configuration, once you get in, you know, that's a very tight, high performance driving position. That's also from an experience standpoint, you know, something that's very, uh, emotional, you feel like you're in a jet fighter.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Now [00:02:00] talking of high performance, let's talk about the drive train if this car, because we have got, we've got an internal co engine sure. At the rear, and we've got electric motors, two of them up at the front. Tell us a bit about that.
Speaker 2: Sure. So if you're really looking for ultimate track performance, you need to put power to the ground. Right. And putting more horsepower into two wheels is gonna have a limit, right. You're, you're going to be limited [00:02:30] by the traction. You can get, you wanna
Speaker 1: Be. So if you've got big 3, 2, 5 section cup twos on it. Sure.
Speaker 2: Nonetheless, it's kind, you know, this is a 950 horsepower mid engine V eight. Uh, but in order to get ultimate track performance and accelerate out of a corner or accelerate from a low speed quickly, uh, you want to have traction also through the front wheels mm-hmm <affirmative>. So we set it up as a strong hybrid. Uh, there's an electric motor to electric motors in the front. Each is 150, [00:03:00] uh, horsepower. Uh, and that allows us to coming out of a corner, you know, with torque vectoring, put, uh, traction through all four wheels for a total, uh, uh, power output of 1,250 horsepower. But if you really want to get, you know, ultimately, you know, one or two seconds, uh, you know, off of a lap time, you re and, and you want to have crazy acceleration. [00:03:30] Like this car has, you know, zero to a hundred kilometers an hour or zero to 400 kilometers an hour. And back you need an all wheel drive, uh, vehicle, uh, which is what we put together. And obviously we, we did it in a way that, uh, uh, focuses on power density of the power train itself and power to wait.
Speaker 1: And let's couple of things there. Sure. So the, uh, performance figures themselves not 62 [00:04:00] and 1.9 seconds is
Speaker 2: That yeah. Zero, zero to a hundred kilometers an hour in 1.9 seconds and wow. Zero to 400 kilometers an hour and back to zero in 29 seconds. And, you know, for Americans like myself who grew up street racing and drag racing quarter mile in 8.1 seconds.
Speaker 1: Wow. Um, and then the next thing is, is weight because obviously as soon as you start mentioning electric motors and batteries that go with them, that sort of thing, people think this is gonna weigh [00:04:30] quite a lot, but it doesn't does
Speaker 2: It, it doesn't. And I'll tell you why the part of it is that we're using two very lightweight, uh, micro battery packs. So, uh, the battery pack that, that powers each of the electric motors up front is two kilowatts. So it's, which
Speaker 1: Is, is tiny. I mean, that sounds like nothing really to kind of, to produce
Speaker 2: It. It is. But what we're [00:05:00] doing is we have a rear, uh, generator motor that, uh, is continuously recharging those batteries along with the regenerative, uh, braking from the electric motors themselves. And that rear generator is run by the, the crank of the internal combustion engine, you know, which also acts as the starter for the, the, uh, internal combustion engine. But that allows us to have very small packs, be able to use that power when it's needed coming [00:05:30] out of a corner or accelerating the vehicle. And then obviously the, you know, mid engine, uh, you know, dual turbo V8 takes over at that point. Uh, but what that allows you to do is have, uh, a very light, uh, vehicle, uh, with a lot of power going through all four wheels by minimizing the pack size and maximizing the efficiency of the vehicle by only using that front wheel drive when it's needed, uh, and recharging the [00:06:00] battery system through that rear generator. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Let's walk around to this car cause we've got the rear deck open here. So the engine is, is actually small. It's it's 2.9
Speaker 2: 2.88 liter. Yes.
Speaker 1: Um, which for, you know, given you say very power dense, given the imagine horsepower, it's putting out, what will it rev to?
Speaker 2: Uh, I mean the red line's 11,000, but you know, at its peak power, which is around 950 horsepower, [00:06:30] uh, you're peaking in around 10,500 RPM. But at, even at that, the, the motor is screaming mean, it, it, this is a very emotional, uh, vehicle when you're in it, when you're in that central driving position, all four wheels are connecting and you have the screaming it's, it's like an early two thousands F one car <laugh> back when they had the V eights and they were revving into the teens. Yeah. That's how you feel. And, and that [00:07:00] quite frankly, is what I was trying to capture from an emotion standpoint. That's what I enjoy.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Now we got, um, also under here, a bit of an idea of some of what's going on underneath the skin of this, because that's where this car gets. I think arguably even more interesting. Sure. We'll mention the exhaustion as well, because I gather that splits. Sure. Um, cross flames outta the back, which is not for show it's just because it's, it's sufficient, but is also let's face it very, very cool.
Speaker 2: Well <laugh> yeah,
Speaker 3: It had <laugh>
Speaker 2: [00:07:30] It had the happy coincidence that it is more, uh, efficient, but it is very cool to, to think that, uh, you know, in my own mind, I, I was looking and thinking, okay, you know, you have like X-Men and now you can create a car. That's like an X beast. That's putting out in an ex flame in the back. But, you know, that was the happy coincidence of something very cool coming together with something that's actually the most efficient [00:08:00] way to, uh, to structure the exhaust,
Speaker 1: Um, 3d printing. We can see a little bit of it sure. In, in here. And that's, that's, what's going on underneath this car in terms of some of the extraordinary, uh, shapes that, you know, can be now generated, um, by, by computers. Sure. Um, and this car that sort of brings us onto what this car represents, all these cars represent, because this is, this is not just about producing mm-hmm, <affirmative> [00:08:30] a wow factor car. It is to get people sort of to, to trigger people for you as development, but also to trigger people into the idea of what this <affirmative> can represent in terms of the manufacturing and production. So could you sure explain a little bit more about some of that please?
Speaker 2: So yes, sir. So these, these vehicles literally up until now could not have been created. I mean, what we've done is to take a combination of computational [00:09:00] engineering using high performance, uh, computing, super computing, to generate a fully engineered structure, using materials that we've invented and designed for specific performance use and for printing and having the machine take and select those materials out of a database and then put material only where it's needed against the engineering requirements. And once [00:09:30] you take that computationally engineered, uh, data, that's done, you then send it to a printer, uh, with a spec that we have using our materials and our software, you then generate that structure. And then that structure with very high precision using a lasered camera, uh, optic system, uh, is assembled. And the machine doesn't care if you're building one type of structure or another, it's like a, a Mac desktop publishing [00:10:00] system, not caring, whether you're publishing a Bible or you're publishing a comic book, right.
Speaker 2: It can switch from one, uh, to the other. And then once that's printed, having the design, uh, uh, for assembly features actually built into the structure. So you can then take that structure and in an automated way, uh, assemble it. And, and we use a set of adhesives that we've developed and patented to bring all of the multiple materials for a structure [00:10:30] together in an automated way. So it's design print assemble in a modular way. That's non design specific, meaning you're not having to retool something and, uh, machine harden, steel blanks, and then stamp out pieces of the same gauge, alloy steel or aluminum. All of that goes away. The fixturing for assembly goes away and you have a system that's very much like, uh, an industrial grade Mac desktop publishing [00:11:00] system. Imagine a vehicle, imagine a performance requirement, imagine a structure, generate it, print it, uh, and assemble it.
Speaker 1: Kevin, it sounds absolutely fascinating. It's been pleasure talking to you. Thank you
Speaker 2: Very much. Thank you, Henry. Thank you. Enjoyed it.
