Welcome to Unbox’s “Viral Fridays” where we feature weirder than usual tech and geek related news to cap out the week.
Joe Harmon, an industrial designer and wood worker, spent five years making a car out of various wood materials and other components. Well yeah, the car isn’t 100% made of wood, but that doesn’t make the feat any lesser.
Harmon debuted his car at the Essen Motor Show in Germany last December. Named the “Splinter”, the car is fully driveable, powered by a 650 horsepower engine. Harmon also added that it comes with a six-speed manual gearbox. Dayum.
The Splinter’s chassis is made almost entirely of wood composites. Its wheels are made of three different kinds of wood: oak veneer, walnut sunburst, and cherry sunburst.
Harmon’s manifesto is meant to showcase the different ways wood can be used. He notes that wood has a better strength-to-weight ratio than steel and aluminum.
“Wood is our only naturally renewable building material — it takes an extraordinarily small amount of energy to produce and is totally biodegradable,” Harmon wrote in an email to Business Insider. “With a better strength-to-weight ratio than steel and aluminum, it can be made into a lot more things than people tend to give it credit for.”
For Harmon’s next goal: “I have some ideas floating around for what I would like my next project to be.” “It’s too early to say what I will do next, but it will almost certainly be very different from this car,” he added.
