That just blew my mind. I hope they do end up making a production model. Definitely outside the box thinking on this car though.
I wonder how many other car companies are going to follow suit and expand on this concept.
It would be interesting to see if they would use
this
fabric
The fabric is similar in construction to the chain-mail armor worn by medieval knights. It consists of a network of small rings about 500 microns
in diameter and even smaller links about 400 microns long (a micron is 1 millionth of a meter).
snip..
Because the rings and links can slide and rotate against each other, the fabric possesses unique mechanical and electrical properties. For example,
the electrical resistance changes when the fabric is stretched. These properties could prove useful for the development of smart fabric and wearable
electronic devices for pervasive computing.
“The first layer of fabric could consist of silicon islands with embedded circuits or sensors,” said Liu
“The resulting fabric could generate electricity, detect movement or damage, or serve some other active role,” Liu said.
