BMW has built a new concept car that uses a flexible material over a movable wiremesh frame that allows people to sculpt the car into whatever form they’d like – curvy sports car, straight-lined muscle mobile, have it your way. It’s about

“the human in the loop, the human way of doing things.”

“First of all ask the question, what do we need the skin of a car for anyway?… In reality, the aspects of crash, stiffness, and ride handling can be handled in a space frame type vehicle entirely without the skin. And therefore, to go away from a metal skin, to have a skin that offers different capabilities – can move, can do things that a fixed, rigid structure couldn’t do. Can be lighter, made out of materials which require less energy to make them… This started a whole chain of ideas within the company here that became … about a real thinking process, a philosophy that said, ‘Let’s do things differently. Let’s let materials talk in a different manner. Let’s let tooling be a different issue instead of just a way to give us form.'”

» Check out the BMW Video and BMW Builds a Cloth Car