Here’s How I Turned My Concept For An EV Hot Rod Into A Giant Scale Model

A while back I visited the Coventry University Automotive and Transport Degree graduation show and highlighted the work of the best and brightest students. Every automotive or transport design degree in colleges and universities around the world will have a big end-of-year show to give the graduating students the opportunity to present themselves and their work to industry professionals. Months of eighteen-hour days spent sketching, rendering, hunched over a clay or milled model will hopefully result in a highly polished, professional-looking physical representation of their design that they can proudly display and will demonstrate they have the required talent to be hired into an OEM design studio. Like the final excavation of a particularly recalcitrant turd, it’s the culmination of countless hours of sweaty work, pouring everything they have learned into a huge final major project.

It takes a lot of time, money, and effort to make a fourth- or fifth-scale model of your final design, and it may be on public display at the university or college for only a few weeks. So why go to all that trouble and expense? Why not just fart out a load of images from a digital model, print them out on a big poster, and be done with it, saving yourself a ton of money and stress? First, a well-done model is an impressive thing – I’ve always loved models of all kinds since I was kid. It’s why architecture firms employ specialist companies to show off their ideas in context – a physical 3D representation is interesting to look at and easy to understand. It grabs people’s attention and draws them in. Images can be fudged and distorted. If you haven’t properly figured out how your surfaces work you can hide it in a bit of Escher-style optical trickery that would be impossible to replicate physically in 3D. With a model there is no place to hide – you must figure out exactly how every part of your vehicle works with the other parts. I can look at a model and intuitively know if that student understands form, stance, and proportions.

I have a lot of sympathy and understanding of the demands placed on automotive design students because over a decade ago I was one. Back in 2012, I turned up at the doors of Coventry University starry-eyed, eager to learn, and full of optimism. This was before my creative spirit became crushed into a hard black stone now residing where my heart used to be. Flipping back through the chapters of my tumultuous life it feels like two lifetimes ago. Still, my experience of the struggles involved in the conception, creation, and building of a final major project mode is reasonably recent and still relevant. I’m back within the hallowed halls of academia teaching at the moment and it’s made me think that for all my carefully considered expert opinion expressed here over the last couple of years, I haven’t shown you anything that’s truly mine, and mine alone. Unless of course, you’ve stalked me to my threadbare Behance page, in which case I’m flattered because I haven’t had a stalker for a long time. This feels like an opportune moment to share with you how I came up with one of my graduation projects, and what goes into those making impressive models.

I Have All My Good Ideas In The Shower

Before I even started thinking about how I was going to make my model, I spent a long time wondering what the hell my project was going to be. Back then the Bachelor of Arts degree in Automotive Design I took was a four-year course, although for several reasons that are not important now, I was able to skip the first year. By the time I got into my penultimate year of study, I had a few vague threads to pull on – a supercar with flexible surfaces that could modify the aero without the need for actuators was one of my first thoughts. I envisaged this as modern-day Renault Alpine A442 Le Mans racer with updated yellow and black striped livery. Then I came up with Jeep front graphic that I really liked and was keen to use, but absolutely no idea for the rest of the car.

Towards the end of the semester of my second year, I was fumbling for the organic handmade soap in the shower when I had a eureka moment. What about an electric hot rod? As I wrestled with the towel my brain started picking at the idea from various angles. Any good designer will ask themselves questions: Why this thing?  Why this form factor? You need enough self-awareness to critique your thinking, to prod and interrogate it, to make sure it’s sound before you even put Bic to paper.

As I mulled my hot rod over the next few days the more it made sense. I’m not going to tell you I didn’t want to make something that looked fucking cool, because I absolutely did. Designing something that appeals to the lizard part of the brain is the dream of most (but not all) aspiring car designers. Design studios are stuffed top to bottom with men and women who love cars after all. But you need to have a justifiable reason for doing it. There must be a logical rationale, backed up by research and a credible use case scenario for it to pass what I call the academic sniff test. Designing a flashy supercar or sports car just because you want to is going to get you a stern talking to from your lecturers and the risk of a poor mark.

The Vision Gran Turismo series of cars gave students a tenuous license to design sports cars and supercars and hide behind the credulous reasoning of allowing OEMs to reach a younger, digital native audience that lives their whole lives online and no longer buys car magazines. Students who attempt this are on thin ice because their perspective on the automotive landscape is not wide enough. Similarly, at a degree show one year I saw a student who had designed and made a physical model of a high-end Miata replacement with an interior bathed in expensive materials, complete with custom luggage and a champagne picnic set. He got shirty with me when I suggested his reasoning was flawed because the whole point of a Miata was that it was an attainable and fun to drive car and people with a lot of money to spend wouldn’t buy a proletarian Mazda. Know your brand, and don’t back-chat professionals because you’re talking yourself out of a job, no matter how good you think you are.

I Bet That Guy Designed This

Back in those salad days of 2014, our automotive future appeared to be irrevocably tied to electric propulsion. The Model S was only two years young and the current hot thing. My thinking was that a decade into its life when the car itself was utterly shagged and beyond repair, there would still be value and utility in the batteries and powertrain that could be transplanted over to a different vehicle. Just like hot rodders have been doing for eighty years. Thanks to CARB I could aim it at the car culture capital of the world, California. And after many hours of reading Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard regulations, I realized by making it a low-volume car for those with deep pockets I could sidestep a few legislative land mines that might compromise the appearance – because I already knew I didn’t want any fenders. To capture all your research and provide the background, aims, and objectives as well as target users, constraints, and detailed specifications, you have to write a fully cited and referenced brief. This design brief and a second supporting document containing your bibliography and benchmarking form part of the overall project and will be subject to scrutiny by your tutors to make sure you are not just pulling stuff out of your ass and can justify and defend your idea. Finally, I wanted to design something that was unmistakably mine – to put my own stamp on it in terms of aesthetics and personality. If someone saw my model at the degree show I wanted them to be able to look around the studio, spot me, and say ‘I bet that guy designed this’.

The time scale is the entire final year of study, three semesters from autumn to summer. Taking out three weeks break for Christmas and three for Easter, this is about thirty academic weeks, or around seven months. At Coventry, models don’t have to be completed for the final hand-in and presentation, but after that there’s only a couple of weeks before the degree show, which all the students are required to help set up. Seven months sounds like a lot of time. It’s not. I never worked so hard until I did it all again two years later for my Masters.

Students in their final year of study may have stopped drinking their student loans and realized it’s squeaky bum time, but they’re still disorganized. So you draw up a Gantt chart, showing how you are going to complete everything that needs to be done in the time available. This is important because design is an iterative process – each stage builds on the last. You can’t start sketching until you’ve done your research. You can’t begin a 3D model (whether it’s clay or digital) until you’ve done a lot of 2D sketch development and have an understanding of what your design is going to look like. The best-laid plans go to shit at some point but it’s helpful to have an idea of where you should be and what you need to be getting on with. Being a mature student and autistic I was mostly organized and on top of everything but something I saw at the time and I’ve noticed as a designer doing projects with universities and now as a tutor, is that students will drive themselves insane with their research, going down rabbit holes, getting sidetracked, losing focus of their original idea, and then sketching their fingers off trying to find something they are entirely happy with, getting further and further behind schedule. This is partly because they’re afraid to commit, but at the bottom of this is a fundamental truth. Any creative process has a deadline: at a certain point, you’ve got to stop pissing about noodling, doodling, being an artsy-fartsy tortured creative genius and get on with the fucking work. Doesn’t matter if you’re shooting a film, writing a book or designing a car. This is why we say the creative process is never done. Building real cars is an intensely complicated business spread over hundreds of different operations planned years in advance; sometimes the answer to the question of why a thing on a car ended up the way it did is they simply ran out of time and had to go with what they had.

No Chrome And No Flames

After about four weeks spent researching, writing the brief and support document, I was ready to start sketching. Back when I did my sketching tutorials I said it’s important to know what you want before you begin; the basic idea of the form factor. I wanted to get away from the traditional ’32 Ford shape. Wonderful as they are (and I do love a good hot rod), they are an ergonomic shit show, and too many are simply boring; off-the-shelf wheels, metal flake paint, flames, and gaudy chrome. I wanted none of that. I didn’t want something overloaded with billet aluminum and colorful graphics like Boyd Coddington or Chip Foose might come up with. I wanted sinister, menacing, and futuristic.

My sketching wasn’t so great back then. I knew this, but it didn’t help as I fumbled around getting my eye in, working out the correct proportions and how to illustrate exposed suspension. My hands couldn’t satisfactorily translate to paper the ideas and aesthetics I had in my head. Part of the problem I realized, is that I was looking at the wrong mood images. I was using WWII fighter aircraft, belly pan racers, and moody shots of old ’32 Fords from the dawn of hot rodding. I would never be able to get away from the thing I didn’t want if that’s all I was looking at for inspiration.

I binned the lot and immediately set about finding the moodiest, gothiest, darkest fashion and product images I could find. Gareth Pugh. Rick Owens. Ann Demeulemeester.  Demobaza (and a ton of other avant-garde fashion designers whose work I adore but could never afford). GRiD laptops. If I wanted a vaguely apocalyptic, deconstructed, sinister car I was going to have to get into an apocalyptic, deconstructed, sinister headspace. Not a huge leap for me really. This is how mood images work. It’s not about lifting forms and details directly but allowing them to concentrate and direct your imagination as you sketch, giving you a sort of set of visual guardrails to keep you on your intended path.

I wanted my hot rod to have a contrast between a more biomechanical bottom half (think Yoji Shinkawa concept art for Metal Gear Solid), and a geometric, faceted canopy (think Yoji Shinkawa concepts for… ok fine I got the idea from the Gekko walkers in MGS4). Onto this I would apply some chunky, industrial details and minimal, cyberpunk-style graphics. No flames, no chrome, no metal flake remember. But this brought about another problem. Some hot rods have exposed engines and exhausts – another canvas that the builder can use to express a unique identity. I had neither – just a hidden motor on the back axle. To bring some of that visual mechanical drama back to my hot rod I had to think a bit laterally. Hot rods are about speed, and EVs rinse their batteries when you use all their performance. What if I added supplemental battery packs either side of the hood, and made them resemble exhaust stacks? Slowly it came together and I was much happier with what was flowing from the end of my ballpoint. After three weeks or so, I knew the time was approaching when I was going to have to start a 3D model, because the deadline for handing in the dreaded package drawing for approval was looming.

Foam Or Clay

A package drawing is three orthographic views to scale, showing the internal layout of all your mechanical components and demonstrating your SAE J826 95^th percentile male manikin (the standard incorporates 97.5% of the US population including females) can fit in the damn thing, reach all the controls, see out, and have adequate clearance to make sure they don’t get their bell rung on any of the structure in an accident. Obviously, in real life it’s a lot more complicated, and in an OEM studio there are specialist engineers doing all this shit for you in CATIA, but for the purposes of a degree you need to show a basic level of understanding of this stuff to demonstrate your design works on a human factors level. You then present these scale orthographical layouts to your tutors for them to sign off, and then it’s time to get started on the model.

If you were fortunate and manage to snag an internship with an OEM or design consultancy during the third year of your degree, they might pitch in to help. If you’re an overseas student with a lot of money you can just go home and return six months later with a crate containing a beautifully finished hard model that costs twenty or thirty thousand pounds, with an accompanying CAD model to match. Neither of these applied to me so I had two options: make a clay model or get a model milled from foam in the university workshop. I hated working in clay. Not only was I shit at it, but it is also real, physical hard work, something I’m allergic to. The clay stinks and gets into places you didn’t know you had places. I’d end up with painful claws for hands, a hunched back, and the stench of sulfur so ingrained in every fiber of my body I’d never be able to talk to anyone ever again without them wondering if I’d done a particularly impressive fart. Fortunately, I hadn’t spent the previous four-month summer break traipsing around Africa with a backpack trying to find myself. I had been working my way through all the Alias foundation tutorials to learn the software just for this eventuality.

Hard foam models are made from something called ‘machinable board’ – usually this is a form of something called Sikablock, available in a variety of densities. It’s like the soft green foam florists stick fake flowers in, but much firmer. From the Sika website:

“SikaBlock® stands for a wide range of specially formulated machinable board materials for the construction of design, styling, master and cubing models as well as various molds and other manufacturing tools.

In accordance with requirements, the materials differ in densities of 0.08 to 1.7 kg/dm³, in respect of their structure, as well as their mechanical and thermal characteristics. The boards are available in different dimensions and thicknesses up to 2400 x 1300 x 400 mm.

All board types allow fast machining with low dust very precisely using CNC milling. Since decades SikaBlock® provides beneficial alternative solutions technically and/or economically versus traditional methods using wood or metal.

Three 1 meter by 0.5 meter slabs of M330 grade along with adhesives to stick them together to make a cube big enough for the main body of my car to be milled out of, cost me over £700. By the beginning of March I had the exterior modeled, along with the wheels, tires, and suspension arms. Some smaller details I would get 3d printed, and I still had no idea how I was going to make the strand headlights.  But the main body was done – everything necessary to give the university workshop techs a watertight STL mesh to feed into their milling machines. Smaller parts like the wheels and suspension arms could be done on the 3-axis machines but the main body would have to be milled on the 5-axis behemoth. My hot road at fifth scale would be just under 3’3” (1 meter) long but OEMs have huge versions of these capable of milling a full-size model car. The detail parts such as the hubcaps, roof catches and the fins on the hood would be 3D printed because they were too small to mill out of foam. I might have been older than my peers but that means I’m a crafty bastard: to make sure my parts were made in a timely manner a couple of times I took the technicians coffee and donuts in the morning.

Anyone who has ever run a 3D printer or computer-controlled milling machine knows once you’ve hit start the entire process is in the lap of the rapid prototyping gods. My wheels, tires and suspension pieces came off the bed perfectly formed. The main body was a different story. The 5-axis tool head saw fit to run a huge gouge underneath one of the rear corners and add corners halfway down my carefully surfaced hood. Brilliant. A gold-plated seven hundred pound fuck up. Bodywork is something I always considered best left to professionals so I never developed any filling, sanding or painting skills beyond waving a spray can at a 1/24^th scale plastic kit. I really didn’t want to spend valuable time flummoxing around in the university paint shop inhaling foam dust when time could be better spent in Alias modeling a full interior and getting on with the rest of the presentation materials. I also needed to work out how to get some decals made and still hadn’t figured out the sodding headlights. Curse my creative genius for coming up with something so unique.

I had already arranged a custom paint and bodywork shop in Banbury to paint my model. They had previous experience doing this for students in the past and I wanted a better standard of job than the quick one-color blowover the hard-pressed paint shop guy at the university could provide. The advice from the bodywork place was don’t fucking touch it and let them handle the milling errors – in their words, my inexperienced hands would only make a bad situation worse. Music to my ears. Bring it to them, pick out the colors I wanted and they would sort it out for me. All I had to do was a dry fit to make sure it all fitted together properly.

Balancing everything precariously on a sanding bench in the paint shop required three hands but fuck me, it all slotted together and looked something like I imagined it would. Something that a few weeks prior only existed as collection of ones and zeros on a Mac hard drive displayed on a 17” LCD was now manifested in physical form. It was a bit rough around the edges and needed paint and details but it existed. And not from pre-made components that had been tipped out of a box and assembled according to a set of instructions. There was my hot rod right in front of me. And somehow I made that happen.

How Much More Black Can It Be?

A few days later I was in a draughty paint shop talking motorbikes while thumbing through a selection of OEM swatches making the most difficult decision any goth has to face: which shade of black do I want? Any devotee of black clothing who has tried to find that one item in a closet knows there isn’t just one shade. I settled on a Jaguar metallic black with a satin topcoat for the main bodywork. My reasoning for this was that details make or break your model, so one of the key things you want to show is panel and door shut lines – but they are a swine to build in CAD and there was no guarantee the data would transfer to the foam correctly. So the easiest thing to do was leave them off and then use Rinrei tape to add them after the paint had been applied. The satin finish and slight metallic tint would allow the black paper tape to show up better. A simple black gloss for the cut-out on the hood, the motor cover on the back and the roof release rotary catches would provide contrast. Because I’m not a total fraud, I was going to rattle can the tires, wheels, and dog dish hubcaps myself, so at least apart from gluing the thing together some of the model would be my own handiwork.

I found a local graphic design agency in Coventry with a vinyl cutter willing to make my decals, and a visit to a hobby shop in the town center (now long gone sadly) offered a solution to my headlight problem. I bought a few lengths of white plastic rod stock. My intention was to heat these up, stretch them to create the sort of stringy effect I needed and then trim to size and superglue in place. Genius. If it worked. If it didn’t I was snookered because other than printing them out on paper and sticking them on (which would look shit) I didn’t really have another solution. I could rework the Alias data to create a headlight that could be 3D printed, but I would now be at the back of the queue in the workshop with no guarantee of getting my parts in time – and the model was away being sanded and painted anyway. A trail run with a cigarette lighter resulted in burnt fingertips but more importantly some stretched out white plastic that looked like it might just work. I just had to get my painted model back.

A week later and £300 lighter and I was cradling my painted hot rod in a blanket back into the studio. It looked fantastic. The milling errors had disappeared, replaced by surfaces that had been filled, sanded and painted to an immaculate standard. All that remained was to assemble the thing. I had everything I needed. I knew the model wouldn’t support its own weight – the body was going to have to be supported at the correct scale ride height on the smallest blocks I could get away with. But locating the suspension arms, wheel backing disks and wheels in place required some metal rods, inserted into holes drilled in the foam to hold them in position. Then it was a simple matter of using the home crafter’s best friend, a hot glue gun to keep it all together. I went through a lot of glue sticks.

Headlight strands superglued in place, decals carefully applied, and shut lines taped on, and it was finally completed a few days before the degree show. Remember earlier when I said I was a cunning bastard? Our entire studio was to be rearranged for the degree show.  The desks would be cleared out to create an impromptu exhibition space. To ensure fairness, everybody was allocated the same amount of space and an identical white plinth to display their model on. Because I helped set everything up, I was able to snag the only black plinth. If something is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

In total I spent about £1500. Industry professionals and tutors alike loved my concept and model, and it was chosen as one of the ten best to represent Coventry University at the New Designers exhibition in London later that summer. The hot rod survives in my friend’s garage in London, and I still get people remembering it over a decade later. Clearly I did something right, even if it didn’t directly lead to me getting a job. And the whole experience stood me in good stead when I had to repeat it all again two years later for my Masters graduation show.

Now all that’s left is to find someone who wants to build the real thing at 1:1 scale.

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