BMW’s ‘shapeshifting’ car, GINA asks a lot of forthright questions, shattering a lot of assumptions.
- Why does a car’s skin have to be metal? – To be more resistant to the arseholes who are going to run their pen-knife down your paintwork.
- Why do we go to a car-wash when we can go to a laundry? – because it takes two hours to put this skin back on after you’ve put it on a whites wash at forty degrees for an hour.
You get the idea. I am being harsh there though I love this concept – not only the car itself but also the concepts of challenging assumptions. I’m not going to bluster and say that challenging assumptions was always a success for me – but it was better than the alternative – of just following dogma and allowing the unshaped materials I had to wholly define the end product. At the end of the day, it takes a sculptor’s skill to release the statue within the stone.
The cool thing is that they asked these questions and then got the greenlight to produce a prototype. Who’d really have thought to see something innovative out of the car industry these days?