Geneva ’98

 

The E-Go Rocket was designed and built by TLC Carrossiers, Inc in W. Palm Beach for Rinspeed Design of Switzerland. It made it’s first appearance at the 1998 Geneva International Auto Show. The article in the June/July 1998 Sports Car International by Rich Taylor gives a good synopsis of the tight time schedule within which this show car was born.

Inspiration for the design came from the belly tank cars raced at the Bonneville Salt Flats in the 50’s, and the Auto Union rear engine race cars of the 30’s.  The Rocket is a street legal single seat roadster that is a blast to drive.  Weighing just 2320 pounds and with 405 Supercharged horses from the Ford aluminum 4.6 liter 4 cam V-8, the Rocket does 0-60 mph in just over 4.0 seconds.

 

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Creating the Rocket show car at TLC Carrossiers involved all aspects of the car. 

Construction is of composite body panels over a chrome-moly tube chassis.   Fabrication at TLC Carrossiers was done in two months, after a four month design and engineering period.  ProEngineer was the CAD system used to create the difficult body shapes.  Packaging of the driver, engine and transaxle, exhaust, suspension, and all the components of the car was done in the 3D design phase. ProN/C was used to create the tool paths for our large gantry mill. Our 5-Axis gantry CNC mill machined temporary molds for the composite body  in low density foam.  Composite body panels were then laminated in these molds. 

The hood mold is shown in the computer in this photo. The tool path is being generated by the ProN/C software. 

  The body mold was machined in four pieces on our 5-Axis gantry mill.

  Three of the 4 molds being assembled.