Page 42 - Marcello Gandini Maestro of Design Revisited

548GANdini MOduLAR Car
REVISITED
ON WATSON FINE BOO
GANDINI
MODULAR CAR
2005
Still obsessed with the idea of streamlining
manufacturing and rethinking the way an
automobile is made, Marcello Gandini went on to
imagine an all-new approach at designing a car, which
would make the fabricating and assembling an automobile
much easier, with significantly lower investment.
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 Of all the possible variations the sexiest of them could have
been the minimalist windscreen-less barchetta version.
of the material itself was several times more than steel,
and the construction of the panels labor intensive and
long, thereby making carbon-fiber-bodied cars hugely
more expensive, which is why only top end sports cars
have been using this material.
The idea was to eliminate the massive investment
required in stamping sheet metal and welding the panels
into a monocoque body by using modern composite
materials. Of course, carbon fiber had proven that this
was possible, was markedly lighter than steel, and would
not need any stamping facilities, nor welding. But the cost
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Gandini believed that it was possible to design cars
using inexpensive composite materials, which could be
injection molded and produced in significant quantities
with short turnaround times, by making the car in
essentially four parts: a lower tub made out of a sandwich
formed by composite skins with foam inlaid, an upper
top-hat also of sandwich structure with composite skins
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