Meet the First Car Made by a 3-D Printer

Saving the planet just got a lot better-looking: The hybrid Urbee is the first-ever car made using 3-D printers. The firms Stratasys and Kor Ecologic created the vehicle, whose whole exterior is printed by additive manufacturing—printing layer on top of layer until, essentially, a car appears—a method that has already been used to build airplane parts and prosthetic limb casings, Fast Company reports.

It’s not clear yet whether Urbee will be mass-produced, but the technology “lets us eliminate tooling, machining, and handwork, and it brings incredible efficiency when a design change is needed,” says Kor Ecologic’s president. Plus, the car, which is on show this week in Las Vegas, gets 200 mpg highway and 100 mpg city, running on gas or ethanol.
(More hybrid car stories.)