The Future of Cars: A Glimpse into Divergent's Revolutionary Technology Demonstrator

As we sat down with Mike, the engineer behind Divergent's revolutionary technology demonstrator, it was clear that this was a car unlike any other. With its California-registered VIN and license plate, this vehicle is not only a technological marvel but also a testament to innovation in the automotive industry. Mike took us for a ride, showcasing the car's incredible power and performance, which can be achieved using a combination of CNG and gasoline.

The demonstrator boasts an astonishing 700 horsepower, making it one of the fastest cars on the market. But what makes it so unique is its lightweight build structure, weighing in at just 1,300 pounds. To put that into perspective, this is significantly lighter than traditional automobiles, which can weigh upwards of 2,400-2,500 pounds or more. This reduction in weight not only enhances performance but also reduces fuel consumption and environmental impact.

One of the standout features of this car is its carbon fiber construction, made possible through cutting-edge 3D printing technology. The use of advanced materials and manufacturing techniques has enabled Divergent to create a vehicle that is both strong and lightweight, providing an exceptional driving experience. As Mike mentioned, "this is the future I think will be built" in cars.

During our ride, we noticed that the car's tires were slightly flat-spotted, which may have caused a slight vibration through the chassis. However, this did not deter us from enjoying the thrilling drive. The vehicle's exceptional handling and responsiveness made it an absolute blast to drive, with its incredible power and agility on display.

As we explored the car's features and capabilities, it was clear that Divergent has been pushing the boundaries of innovation in the automotive industry. With a focus on technology and performance, this demonstrator is not only an exciting glimpse into the future but also a testament to the company's commitment to revolutionizing the way cars are built.

When asked about the potential for production models, Mike was tight-lipped, citing that this was still a prototype vehicle designed as a technology demonstrator. However, with its impressive performance and exceptional build quality, it's clear that Divergent is onto something special.

As we concluded our ride and returned to the shop, Mike shared his thoughts on the importance of embracing new technologies and materials in car design. He emphasized that "the old days of molten metal and making steel" are being replaced by innovative approaches like carbon fiber 3D printing. This shift towards more sustainable and efficient manufacturing methods is essential for the automotive industry's future.

We left with a lasting impression of Divergent's technology demonstrator, which has truly left an indelible mark on our minds. As we gazed at the sleek design and impressive features of this car, it was clear that this is just the beginning of something extraordinary. We can't wait to see what the future holds for this revolutionary vehicle and its creators.

For those interested in learning more about Divergent's technology and innovations, we highly recommend checking out their website at divergent3d.com. As Mike mentioned earlier, this company is poised to make a significant impact on the automotive industry, and it will be exciting to follow their progress in the coming months and years.

As we parted ways with Mike and the Divergent team, we couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and anticipation for what's to come. The future of cars has never looked brighter, and we're honored to have had the opportunity to experience it firsthand.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to another episode of Jay Leno's Garage today we're featuring a car called the blade 720 horsepower extremely lightweight but that's only part of this story the real story is the technology behind it and it's fascinating let's meet the owner developer builder founder what I'm going to call Kevin zinger Kevin come on in it's divergent technologies right divergent technologies right right now first of all because people are salivating here let's tell us exactly what we have here what's a car is you have a two-seat supercar people are sitting tandem right which the as you know the best driving position is to be in the center of the car while you're driving it and so it's it's built as a fun drivers car and it's powered by a mid-engine 2.4 liter mitsubishi evo 10 motor ok built by AMS bored and stroked to 2.4 liter as I said and with the boost up you get about 720 horsepower at the flywheel right and the weight of the vehicle dry weight is 1388 pounds so you get ridiculous power-to-weight yeah yeah I like any car when I sent it I'm a third the weight of the car that's always flattering you know no that's pretty amazing and the amazing part is the fact you've got a built in you can actually drive it on the street but it's really the building of the cars it's it's a technology part isn't it I mean the engine you get you didn't build it you get that from someone else you know you're in frame and body explain what explain what the Virgin technologies is so you know as you know the the structure of the car is the most capital intensive and difficult part of a new car to build right we now have a totally new set of technologies we're combining computing power with material science with additive manufacturing what people commonly call 3d printing right what that allows you to do is have a small design team have them design a vehicle run it across all of the physics models you need to engineer a full safety certified vehicle and then the structure that gets generated by that work by that computerized work is then sent to a 3d metal and what you're in fact doing is then printing out the skeleton and the skeleton is made up of super op optimized customized 3d Lego blocks made out of metal that fit together and what that allows you to do is very quickly design something build something with very low cost of capital and then like some of your beautiful cars out there like the Duesenberg swear you had a carriage maker sculpt a beautiful body and put it on top of that chassis then you can sculpt almost any non structural body and put it on top of a car so essentially 3d printing the chassis for lack of a better word all the car doesn't technically have a chassis but for people who don't quite follow it up to this point you're not using an existing chassis from another car building on are you doing it completely from the ground up that's what we have here correct correct so okay you know typically when you're looking at cars today they're built out of one material and they're kind of like that to use an analogy the exoskeleton on the bug right the shell welded together is the structure here it's like the bone structure of a mammal you're choosing materials optimizing those materials and then bringing them all together you know with a non structural shell like the body on this car if you look these sort of flat gray pieces of metal those are 3d printed aluminum ok 4046 aluminum that significantly outperforms the standard auto structural aluminum say a t6 cast aluminum and these parts that are more rose-colored because we were building in this car a high-performance supercar or titanium so these rose-colored parts here you see on part of the suspension and what we've done is from a material selection standpoint ordinarily with the car you choose one alloy a steel alloy aluminum alloy and you weld it all together here you choose from the total pallet of materials optimized for your use you engineer that structure right and with a computer and then you use the 3d metal printing as the connective tissue for that structure so your goal is not to necessarily build cars but to build technology you sell to car makers that fair to say that that's correct and what I would say is you know we have a team of 50-plus very senior engineers and scientists from auto and aerospace from the SpaceX's the Boeing phantom works and Apple's Google's Ford's etc what we see is over the next five years we can implement this with car makers in lower volume cars say up to 50,000 or so vehicles manufactured annually but the long term vision is really people like your viewers out there within 10 years you're going to start having volume customization of vehicles and this technology will allow you to do that at a low cost with very high performance and safety right so this is just a dramatic example a running example of the technology that you manufacture exactly K this is just beautifully done here that's obviously all 3d printed I'll tell you what's super cool about that yeah which is people look at that and go wow you were trying to sculpt something beautiful that's actually a computer algorithm going what is the optimal way to structure that suspension right so on the one hand we're looking at geometries we brought in Trevor Harris who's one of the top racing car suspension builders to talk about geometry but when we actually looked at how we printed it we used optimization software that we've partly developed and partly incorporated others and the interesting thing is it looks like something that's organic yes nature is in such a competition for material and energy that it naturally optimizes material and so when you see these vehicles I think over the next 10 years you'll see increasingly much more organic shapes instead of the boxy cars we'll have all of a sudden you'll see beautiful bodies over very organic optimized structures and with this kind of work you can crash test the car on a computer or do you still have to actually crash well to safety certified in the u.s. you must question you you need to crash this but what it allows you to do is you know ordinarily you're doing prototypes or mules and then you're going to some initial crash prototype and then crashing that vehicle what this allows you to do is very quickly develop the data run a crash simulation like an LS dinah right look at it and you know from having done all of the structural destructive testing that it's very close to the model you then can take that data shoot it build what is a production intent structure and crash it and do that in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the money you don't ordinarily you're going through that period of soft metal tooling say three months or so and then six months of hard metal tooling that goes away you're simply taking that data instead of machining tooling costing hundreds of millions of dollars scratch that hundreds of millions of dollars scratch that time send the data to a machine a machine that doesn't care whether it's doing the trellis for that motorcycle or this or this and it prints that out and then very quickly you can safety certify a vehicle and this is carbon fiber here yes so if you look at say like a BMW i3 or I eight which are spectacular cars but they were acquired for each of them about four hundred million euros of tooling according to BMW and then the wet layup process is very time intensive so you're ending up spending four hundred million euros in your you know over four hundred million dollars in tooling costs and plus you're spending probably three thousand dollars plus on materials what we do instead is once again scrap that four hundred million plus in tooling and we knowing that the aerospace industry has standardized all kinds of sheet paneling sheer paneling tubing other materials that are very high-performance but because they're standardized and you're not asking somebody to create the first instance of it the price is driven down by twenty times so you can get the performance of a carbon monocoque at a fraction of the price in a fraction of the time without the toy how was this titanium connected to this so in a patented process that we have is a bonded as a bolt is bonded okay this is bonded the the reason that there are bolts in this is for crash repair and so if you crash a section you simply take out that section bolt in a new section which is why you'll see some bolting but here part of the patents that we have mean that 3d printing allows you to rather than have fixturing where your fixturing sheet metal and then welding together it allows you to build in very complex features tongue and groove type features I gotcha and then internally although we've we've shaved it off there are actually two separate ports one where you draw a vacuum and then another where you you inject an aerospace epoxy and that at a precise dose and that quickly bonds all of these pieces together well isolating them so you have no galvanic issues and also insulating the bond from the environment so if you're in a salt air environment you're not going to have deterioration and then these are just four little extra well no those those are actually for the different sections for repair ability okay so if this you know we looked and obviously carved the vehicle up so if you have damage you can then just unbolt that section take another 3d printed section and put it in okay and structurally this will take rollover it yes this vehicle I'd say the one custom piece on this of material beside the 3d printing was this this top section which we we actually printed the tooling to explain this carbon fiber here you know that this is just very standardized carbon fiber tubing that you get from but just to make it more structurally sound yes I mean the you know the crash absorption is really in the side okay so being a vehicle this is this is side protection yes along with I mean this this is an extruded aluminum extruded piece that's joined for cras absorption I'd say on this this vehicle if you look at the structures the other thing beside having those features that allow you to the features that front bumper piece also has within it crush structure okay it allows you know as you know things to crush evenly did they not have five-mile our bumpers anymore that used to I remember the old in the agent someone you had a shock absorber that took that now it just you just crushes and replace its crush yeah crushing the rails okay what we're doing is as you know aluminum extrusions are very low-cost and what we can do then is very fine-tune the printed structure so that it crushes in an exact even way and you can have a very short front end and still have at this on LS Dena right yet you know you're getting you know under 30 G peak crash pulse right so you know this is this is a way actually to incorporate features and optimize for crash that you can't do with a regular traditional manufacturing well and you let's just quickly look at what you did on the motorcycle I've got an h2 Kawasaki but it doesn't look anything like this the modern age to the supercharged bike yeah it's a great bike as you know I mean the acceleration yeah I mean it's it's way faster than I am it's it's so fast it's it's hilariously fast and this is even so what's your weight saving over the traditional frame so a foot for the frame it's an over 20 percent weight saving Wow and the frame structure for this bike has over a hundred different parts we reduce that from over a hundred to five parts and you can make this frame cheaper than they can make the steel frame correct absolutely Wow okay yeah it seems like a win-win I mean this looks like and it's super cold the troops it is super cool looking speaking of super cool looking let's go back to the blade here this is this is the one I think that really gets the attention because what you're saying all sounds exciting and then when you see it in the flesh pretty impressed Isle yourself in house er yes so I originally came up with being a Cleveland hot rodder I had my fantasy of what like a super cool car would look like and that would be one where the driver sat in the middle position you set tandem with another passenger that you minimized frontal surface area and then my favorite feature of a car was during the can-am era there was a t70 Lola that had these gorgeous curves for the fenders and so I brought those elements together and then our chief designer Dave O'Connell who teaches over at the Art Center College for design he was also the chief designer for Mitsubishi for about 20 years he came in and we worked on many many versions of this came up with a design and this is it yeah is there any chance this could go into production is this just your working model I mean we we have an engineered version of this that we could put into production but for right now we're focused on taking the technology and you know helping companies and entrepreneurs really in the end what we really want to do is focus on entrepreneurs who want to build cars focusing on taking this technology and helping them use it but if you wanted to build a limited series of these we would be all for it well thank you very much that's very good how do you how do you get in how do you open the door so you know you just get in through the side I don't look at an ad you know there's one passenger who sits in in back right you sit a bit a little bit like a toboggan sled right I'll say that and they put their feet up the side so yeah it's just like all the gynaecologist basically basically with it get the back and even myself but yeah so patiently so yeah but this this is built as a Cleveland hot rod so well it's the subtle like your favorite car here one of mine is the good Murray rocket oh he built that 27 years ago I know that is such a great car I'm so jealous of you that's my favorite car it really is and it's a fantastic car to drive because you again you sit well in the middle but you're in the center of the car so consequently your feet can go all the way the front without hitting any of the uprights so somebody can be 8 feet tall and drive it you know LeBron James could drive right thing and that's what makes it kind of cool it's the same thing here yes exactly and we've had some very tall people get in the car and and the cool thing is you know unlike the rocket which obvious is a great car you can have somebody in the backseat and they have like very cool viewing and siting out of the car okay so you only get in on one side this side correct yeah the other door is an emergency door if something happens obviously you okay let's flip it up and and that has that has the two carbon fiber yeah sort of poles for perch poles the Stanley Brothers will call going through the car yeah very nice very nice okay gearbox is what it's a Hollinger 6-speed sequential gearbox okay with you know paddle shift on the steering wheel good guys and you know mid-engine you know show you we we wanted to have a light you know very power dense motor Tyson it is a tight fit it's a very tight fit in this we wanted a very compact car and we wanted to keep this beautiful sculpted body and keep the lines I use the old Gordon Murray trick of the gold foil to reflect the heat right yeah and so that's that's actually a CNG tank and this car is able to run both on compressed natural gas Oh and gasoline so it has two sets of injectors it's running on gasoline right now okay but you're able to to use either fuel and so if you wanted to have something unique like a green supercar right you could run a 700 horsepower supercar off of CNG you know living around here there's plenty of CNG right if you started to run low on CNG and couldn't find a place you just pull over get it filled up with gasoline and keep going you have to switch it manually does it automatically no you have to use it this is this is manual you could usually set it up to switch okay but you know we were building this as a technology demonstrator yeah I got you well yeah it's really cool and it's street-legal we can think it is yeah absolutely we can take it out this was California registered VIN number license plate the whole deal let's take it for a ride what brakes you you think for mr. B she or you got some decent Brembo Brembo actually they've put together a custom set I mean using mainly their off-the-shelf parts I mean they're they're terrific 700 horsepower on this you can put a Miata motor in it it would still be amazingly fast you know if anybody on camera can hear me Anson still it alone in its bang they're still insulation on the drive and as funny you feel like you're in a full-size car just because you got the legroom when you've got the whip you I'll shut it off because it'll know like you probably couldn't hear us talking this thing it's a lot of fun you've got all kinds of power it's incredibly light I think the one little problem we have is I think it's been sitting for a while the tires got a bit flat spotted so you're getting a thump-thump-thump to diffuse a little vibration a little vibration through the tire so obviously I don't want to push it too hard for that rule no you started a old-timers now they're probably six months old I saw that's all okay yeah but I think just got a bit flat spotted so you get a little bit of that but I mean obviously you see how this thing works I mean it's it's pretty cool it's 1,300 pounds if this was a traditional build automobile you probably look at it Oh 2,400 2,500 at least so you released a thousand pounds lighter than anything else and it certainly attracts attention leg every iPhone and the city has shown up to look at this thing but what will drive some more to take it back to the shop I just don't want to push it too hard because I'm not sure on these uh on these tires is it a little bit of a shake would you say you know pot all the other day yeah yeah when we took it out we had it in the showroom of our business you know it's a technology demonstrator yeah I took it out for a couple runs and you know hit a pothole at at pretty high speed and LA assemble I blown to Tesla tires in a month just BAM just hit a pothole knock it out so I think that's it what I think that's what we did probably a little tiny bit of damage there so I can feel a little shaking coming through the chassis but other than that it's uh it's pretty cool come on let's go let's go back to the shop we'll drive it I've had great fun riding with you for sure man you talk a little bit when you're in sixth gear obviously there's a prototype vehicle so you don't have an outside mirror on this thing and a few of the other things but the real technology in this thing is the build that's it's how its put together and the material that's used I mean I give them a tremendous amount of credit for having a running prototype actually pretty cool well pretty cool I mean you know I always say the last days of old technology are better than the first days of new technology and this is the future I mean he was telling me he hit a pothole so we got a little bit of a shake in the chassis but obviously that's I think due to the fact that the tires are hard and it took a chunk out of it when he hit that pothole but teasing it I mean you feel the lightness of it you know you put your foot in it moves and just the build structure the way it's put together it's really fascinating I mean this is the way cars of the future I think will be built I mean the old days of porn molten metal and making steel I mean this is it carbon fiber 3d printing very very cool Kevin thank you very much Mike thank you thank you you and check out the website divergent 3d dot-com The Verge in 3d check it out I think you're gonna be hearing a lot from these guys this is cool J you're awesome and thanks to California there you go see you guys next week\n"