3D CAD NEWS

Doing some self-serving promotion for a conference this week, Fortune Magazine asked a variety of technology big-wigs "What technology has taken the most unexpected turn in your lifetime?" They polled the usual big-shots and pundits, but also some people in the trenches doing cool stuff including Aptera Motors CEO Steve Fambro. Scroll down to look at the "car" Aptera is working on and you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, Fambro gave what I thought was a really smart answer. He pointed to the ability to use PC's as a "force multiplier" in engineering. Here's only a bit of what he had to say:

Properly used, and I stress "properly," computers are ... powerful "force multipliers." For example, at our company we're heavily leveraged in CFD, computational fluid dynamics. Every single part of our vehicle that touches the air has been through countless revisions to lower the drag. Fifteen years ago, even ten years ago, our only alternative would have been to use a wind tunnel, an expensive and lengthy affair. ... A small company, armed with these tools, but without a bureaucracy, can turn around key engineering decisions in days or hours, not months or years. The proliferation of these tools is a great equalizer with the bigger companies.

You can read the entire quote from Fambro, as well as interesting comments from Esther Dyson, Bill Joy, Jonathan Schwartz, and others, in the Fortune Magazine Online article, "What Technology Has Surprised the Most?"


The Aptera typ-1, not to be confused with your Uncle Buck's Buick Riviera.