SABIC, Hyundai Win Design Award for QarmaQ Car Concept
By Staff | April 2008
The Hyundai QarmaQ Advanced Technology Demonstration Vehicle (ATDV) has been selected as a winner of the International Forum (iF) Product Design Awards 2008 for Advanced Studies, which honors experimental drafts of products and studies that have not yet been implemented. Hyundai Motor Europe and SABIC Innovative Plastics (formerly GE Plastics, Pittsfield, Mass.), codevelopers of the QarmaQ, shared the award.
The demonstration vehicle was unveiled at last year’s Geneva International Motor Show (March 8-18, 2007 in Geneva, Switzerland). Designed at Hyundai Motor Europe’s Design and Technical Center, the QarmaQ was engineered in close cooperation with SABIC as a platform for demonstrating the design freedom and practicality of plastics and composite materials.
The QarmaQ’s hood, like the hood on the previously unveiled General Motors Volt concept, was hot-tool compression molded from a high-performance thermoplastic composite developed by SABIC and partner Azdel Inc. (Forest, Va.) that was developed specifically to make reinforced thermoplastics practical for horizontal body panels. The panels consist of a sandwich of Azdel Superlite glass mat thermoplastic between two-ply skins of continuous unidirectional glass fiber wet out with thermoplastic resin (see “Related Content,” at left).
