Siemens, Local Motors partner for large scale 3D printed car development

By on April 29, 2016
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The automotive industry, after VW DieselGate, Tesla, OSVehicles and this initiative as well, is living a real revolution. The industry 4.0 principles are the pivot point of many innovations in this area, too traditional for so long now.

Remember Local Motors? Though numerous car manufacturers have been showing off concept cars that feature 3D printed interiors, this Arizona-based startup is working on the real deal: the world’s first road-ready LM3D 3D printed car, which will be available for preorder as early as this year. To cope with the immense logistic challenges that open source development and large scale 3D printing production bring to the table, Local Motors has just revealed a partnership with German engineering giant Siemens. This will enable Local Motors to use Siemens’ product lifecycle management (PLM) software technology to realize the release of the revolutionary LM3D car and its successors.

As Local Motors’ CEO Jay Rogers revealed, this new partnership is actually building on years of collaboration with Siemens. “We have been partners with Siemens since 2011, and today’s announcement takes that partnership to the next level by enabling our community of co-creators to innovate even faster,” he said of this new partnership. Siemens’ Solid Edge CAD application has already been used by Local Motors for years, and has been around for all the major breakthroughs in their car development process.

The main outcome of this extended partnership will be a consistent speed up of Local Motors design and development capabilities, by exploiting the huge Siemens knowledge base and software park. For instance, the design and feasibility validation will be done with Solid Edge CAD and virtual reality 3d model analysis. Having nearly 60,000 distributed designers, LM really needed a powerful and scalable software platform on their side!

Source: 3ders.org – Siemens, Local Motors partner for large scale 3D printed car development

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