Mercedes Benz turns fishy

It is not the first time cars have been treated as art.

BMW trailblazed with its art cars painted by famous painters such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and even Australian Pro Hart.

Now the Mercedes-Benz Bionic Car concept is featured in the “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition, which highlights the rapid pace of development in mobility and communications.

Engineers, designers and biologists at Benz based the car on a tropical fish called Ostracion cubicus or boxfish.

The fish is aerodynamic, moves using minimal energy, can withstand high pressures and, thanks to an outer skin consisting of hexagonal bone plates, can survive unscathed after collisions with coral or other sea dwellers.

While the boxfish has an aerodynamic drag coefficient rating of just 0.06, the two-door bionic car comes in at 0.19, which compares favourably with the petrol-electric hybrid Honda Insight at 0.25 and Toyota Prius at 0.26. The Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon have a drag coefficient of 0.31.

Benz used bionics experts to model the car's panels on the fish's bone-plate skeleton to identify areas of low stress where they could use thinner materials to keep the weight down.

An example is the honeycomb design of the doors which increases stiffness by up to 40 per cent, while reducing weight about 30 per cent.

It is powered by a 104kW diesel engine, which Benz claims consumes fuel at 4.3 litres per 100km and was the first test car fitted with the Selective Catalytic Reduction technology. Now called Bluetec, the technology is available on some production models.

The bionic car was first unveiled in June 2005 at the Innovation Symposium organised by Daimler AG in Washington DC.

It is only a matter of time before some of its other technologies flow through to production vehicles.