Vehicle Prototyping & Fabrication
With over 30 years of automotive OEM design experience, the team at Hydra Design Labs can go beyond design and modeling to produce a complete vehicle prototype. Our in-house engineers, metal fabricators, machinists, composite material experts and technicians turn a completed 3D CAD model into a fully realized prototype vehicle. Our prototyping process involves creating functional scale or full-size models of the product, which can be used to evaluate the design, fitment, and ergonomics of a vehicle before proceeding to production.
With the same team of skilled designers and engineers overseeing the entire project from start to finish, Hydra Design Labs is a one-stop solution for all automotive OEM prototyping needs.
There are many different kinds of full-size prototypes available, depending on your need and budget:
• Static solid model (essentially a non-rolling painted hard model showing the vehicle exterior only, no glass or interior.)
• Static deck model (the same as the static solid model, but the cabin has transparent glass showing a model interior only from the beltline-up. This looks more realistic in photos at a distance, but less realistic upon close inspection.)
• Rolling exterior/interior full prototype (visually looks like a real car inside and out, but non-driving. This is a ‘pusher’ that requires physically pushing on its wheels for display.)
• Full exterior/interior driving prototype “Golf Cart” (a functional full-size prototype, which is drivable at low-speeds and powered by batteries that are similar to those of a golf cart.)
• Full exterior/interior driving prototype (a complete chassis powered by large battery packs. This prototype can be driven at low speeds, with more power than the ‘golf cart’ version, and is often used to verify chassis and powertrain.
