Design Los Angeles asks how motor-racing will look in 2025

BMW Hydrogen Powered Salt Flat Racer - BMW Group DesignworksUSA

BMW has opted for hydrogen as the power source for its salt flat racer which takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the challenge by making use of discarded materials like old oil barrels and barbeque lids in its construction and even carrying a goldfish onboard to act as a “canary-in-a-coal mine” - if your fish get sick, you must be running “rich” (not one to keep animal-lovers happy).

(Design Team: Verena Kloos, Chris Chapman, Erik Goplen, Richard Kim, Jason Rowlands and Blair Taylor)

GM Chaparral Volt - General Motors Advanced Design, California GM are expecting the Volt label to stay with us for the next 17 years, naming their energy-efficient concept the Chaparral Volt. Like the Mercedes entry, the design envisages a brand of racing where energy-efficiency is as important as speed, employing multiple sources to supply its own power including gravity and momentum-capture regeneration rear turbine extractors for power cell cooling and integrated thin-film PV panels to make solar energy the primary energy source for the vehicle.

(Design Team: Frank Saucedo, Steve Anderson, Thamer Hannona, Jussi Timonen, Loren Kulesus, Alessandro Zezza, Sean Moghadam, Tony Liu and Phil Tanioka)

Honda’s The Great Race 2025 - Honda Research and Development

The team at Honda hope to see the 22,000 mile Great Race of 1908 reborn in the 21st century, but instead of taking six-months the competitors in this race would be required to circumnavigate the globe in 24 hours on land, sea and air. Their morphing design submission (which has shades of Battlestar Gallactica) would use sonar/echolocation sensors to detect changes in terrain and switch configuration accordingly.

(Design Team: Franco Corral)

...continued