Rinspeed Exasis

Famous Swiss automotive designer Rinspeed introduced with the eXasis project a new design style with the main target of creating a very light weight and low resistance fun-car, whose energy consumption is very low, even though the driving style and fun factor resembles to a motorbike.

As special eye catcher the whole automotive body is made out of transparent Makrolon, a new material from German Company Bayer Scientific Research.

Construction and composition was performed in Fällanden, at Esoro Company. The chassis, suspension components and drive shaft were planned by Schwaller Company.

Swissauto’s challenge was to construct and build the most compact, light weighted and efficient drive system possible, with the additional requirement of optical well-fitting into that transparent chassis.

Due to ecological reasons, the fuel to be used was defined as Ethanol E85.

Similar to the Splash project, we have chosen the turbocharged Weber MPE 750 as suitable engine. For the eXasis project the MPE 750 was equipped with a Hewland 6-Gearbox, interlinked with a semiautomatic sequential shifting.

As a characteristic element, the engine is arranged on top of the transmission, in order to meet the strict dimensional preconditions.

The resulting package was a push-button-shiftable 150hp drive unit that set new standards in weight, compactness and efficiency.

It was not possible to bring the product to a commercial stage within the given timeframe (8 months) and financial range. Nevertheless the prototype car runs impeccable and was already test driven by many representatives of the international automotive press.