SPEED
BOAT
OR
SPORTS CAR ?
The Gibbs Aquada is neither a boat with wheels nor
a waterproof car, it’s something quite new, a quantum leap from what we have now,
a new category of vehicle. It is new in the way that jump jets were new: the first
Harrier could not only fly at speeds approaching the speed of sound, it could also
hover over the ground like a helicopter. So the Aquada operated in two very different
ways; it planes like a speedboat on water and on the road performs like a sports
car. It doubles the utility of the car and thereby represents the single biggest
automotive development for a century.
There have been many attempts to make amphibians,
dating from (and in a couple of cases preceding) the invention of the motorcar.
There have been twelve hundred amphibious vehicle patents filed, and quite a number
of the major car companies have tried their hand at amphibious vehicles. None achieved
any real degree of success.
So it is fair to say that Gibbs Technologies has produced
the first amphibian designed and built to go fast on land and water, as well as
complying with all automotive and marine regulations.
And who wants an amphibious sports car? There’s more
than one answer to this. The most obvious use is recreation: exploring the Greek
islands, Great Lakes, the Florida Keys, the Everglades, water skiing off St. Tropez.
This machine drives down the M4 and, in a sudden diversion, can take you up the
Thames into the most beautiful and secret parts of the English countryside. The
Aquada gives the freedom to move easily from one medium to the other without towing
a trailer, without having to return to where you parked.
Second:
There are implications for urban transport in the congested cities of the world-
from London to New York. Waterways were crucial to the development of many cities-
colliers, liners, clippers, warships, barges, water taxis all played their essential
part in the growth of their city. Over the years, transport systems took more and
more of the traffic onto land. The waterways remain, naturally, but they are virtually
empty.
A daytime journey from residential Chiswick to commercial
a Canary Wharf takes between one and two hours by road; by river, even in rush hour,
it takes twenty minutes. The same sort of ratio can be applied to journeys in Manhattan,
Paris, Sydney, Singapore, Shanghai and Auckland. So there may be more significance
in the Aquada than is immediately apparent: it may have the ability to move urban
property prices. It won’t be the first time vehicles have done so.
“An amphibian is
weighted down with five hundred kilos of suspension, road frame, wheels and axle
weight. Boats were far lighter than this. How much of a floating brick would it
be?”
There is a third use more abstract than the others.
The essence of the Aquada is a new technology. It’s innovative and protected by
over sixty patents. But ultimately it is capable of transforming most motor vehicles
into amphibians. As the technology becomes more productionised, customers may be
able to order the the amphibious option of the car they want in the same way we
order air conditioning and four wheel drive now. As there are sixty million cars
a year manufactured this represents a very large, new market- the first fundamental
product innovation this mature market has known. Consequently it is hard to assess
the full potential in this new development.
Gibbs had a holiday property where the tide went out a mile. He built his first
amphibian in 1995 so he could drive out of the water without a tractor and trailer.
While this amphibian could go fast on water it could only go walking speed on land.
Wanting to go faster on land he discovered a wheel raising concept being shown in
an art gallery. It was an exhibition of local requirements and Terry Roycroft's
invention that elegantly indicated a solution to the problem of reducing drag on
the water.
The ideas fermented and in 1996 Gibbs commissioned British firm Lotus to undertake
an engineering viability study. They reviewed the concept and produced the view
that it was technically feasible.
If you
want to build a new motorcar to the international standards where would you start?
A good place might be the world’s automotive capital. that is: Detroit. This is
host to every major car company in the world.
Gibbs in Detroit took the first practical phase of
the project. The creative work, as it might be called, the conceptual work. The
brief was simple but its terms were strict.
They were to build an amphibious car that would perform both road and marine functions
without compromise that could drive off the road into the water and be planing within
ten seconds while carrying three passengers, thirty kilos of luggage and a full
tank of petrol.
The conflicts: the fundamental problems of amphibious technology were considered.
For instance, the aerodynamic forces that operate on the road are the opposite of
what are wanted on the water. The bow of a boat lifts; if the same architecture
were applied to a car, would not the car flip? Especially when traveling at three
times the speed of a boat on water/ How would the cooling work? A car’s engine bay
is open to the road: at speed, the rush of air takes much heat away. A boat’s engine
bay isn’t open to the water to anything like the same extent (there is the issue
of sinking); the engine running at full power generates the equivalent of a hundred
single bar heaters. How would this heat be ducted out of the car? If you suck air
in how do you stop water getting in at the same time?
And then there were a myriad of regulatory problems to be resolved as well. The
regulations for cars are are very prescriptive. So are the boat regulations. Both
are comprehensive. Frequently they contradict each other. For instance, no green
light is permitted on a car but a green light is compulsory on a boat (it indicates
the starboard side). red lights mean the port side of a boat but not the back of
a car. A white light shining backwards from the mast is mandatory on a boat but
rear-facing white lights are forbidden on a car. The position of the lights, the
angle they’re set at and the point at which they meet are strictly specified one
way for a car and another for boat. If the Gibbs aquada was to be a viable, fully
productionised consumer product these differing requirements had to be reconciled.
|
The first practical testing program began, Gibbs had
to discover the essential physics of the project. How much power to push how much
weight with how much drag? An amphibian is weighted down with five hundred kilos
of suspension, road frame, wheels and axle weight. Boats were far lighter than this.
How much of a floating brick would it be? How hard would it be to get the crafty
up on the plane? the power delivery had to be unusually robust- cars use peak power
very rarely and for very short periods; the amphibian used peak power on water quite
ordinarily. How would the power take off cope with that? No one knew; these questions
had never been asked before. And how was the power train to drive the wheels and
the jet? What kind of engine out of all the engines available was the right one?
How would it be packaged, what kind of engine out of all the engines available was
the right one? How would it be packaged, what kind of decoupler would switch power
from one mode to the other? Would it be a street engine or a marine engine? Every
issue had to be resolved to the standard of which set of regulations was the more
demanding.
Around this time, Neil Jenkins a highly talented automotive engineer had heard about
the project in England; he bought himself a ticket and went to visit. When he saw
the video he was ravished. He told Alan Gibbs that whatever happened he wanted to
be associated with the project, even to the extent of taking the first distribution
rights for Britain. As it happened, his role would be more significant. He would
merge his business with Alan’s and become a shareholder in his new project.
Jenkin's career had begun in aerospace; his background was in lightweight vehicles
and structural analysis. He had worked on the Tornaso, and had been a senior figure
in the team that built the XJ220, the Jaguar super car. His aerospace experience
helped him provide the first genuinely amphibious concept in the production process.
He came up with a unique hybrid design for frame and body which took care of the
road and marine functions in separate ways. The frame by itself was not stiff enough
for a road structure; the body by itself was too flexible for a boat hull. But put
together they achieved precisely the stiffness and strength required, for the lowest
possible weight. It was a brilliant solution to a major problem.
At the same time, the team produced a completely original design combining the suspension
system with the machinery that retracted the wheels. The wheels of the proof-of-concept
vehicle has been retracted by means of a long torsion bar. This was replaced with
a seventeen-valve suspension system driven by oil pressure. And one strut combined
spring, damper, bump stop device and retraction system. Between this and the hybrid
structure the project was well on its way to the sixty patents it filed.
The power train difficulties had been solved for the time being, and this allowed
the concept development of decoupling the engine from the wheels and attaching it
to the jet. A power take off flange from the gear box switched power to the marine
drive. The concept work was more or less complete. The physics of the project had
been established. The architecture of the car was agreed. the design was at a good
intermediate stage. the geometry of the wishbones and their interaction with the
wheels was settled. There were gaps in the project but the internal structure, the
frame, seating, suspension, wheel retraction and power train were packaged into
a body shape. It was more than an idea but less than a product. Now it had to be
engineered.
The project needed a culture of low volume manufacture, and no such culture exists
in America. in fact, there are only 2 places in the world where such a culture exists.
Turin in Italy, and the Black Country in England. At the beginning of 1999, the
project moved to the UK. the new production plant in Nuneaton had originally been
a sewing factory. It’s a huge, bare space with few cabinets and thousands of square
feet of wooden parquet production floor, well lit from above by huge skylights.
|
Jenkins
took on the role of Managing Director. He had begun his engineering life in the
Stress Office of British Aerospace where he was taught everything there was to know
about designing for light weight. He went on to work for Rolls Royce and Jaguar.
He has designed cars which retailed, or perhaps more accurately, sold for 5 million
pounds. He also played a key role in the development and production of the Jaguar
XJ220.
It was Jenkins who brought together a core team for
the XJ220’s body systems. This was one of Britain’s most prestigious not to say
most successful low volume projects in recent times. It was conceived by Jim Randle
and executed in part by Neil Jenkins and nd Mike Giles, all of whom have played
a central role in bringing the Aquada into the world.
Jim Randle was the engineering director at Jaguar in the late 80s and early 90s;
he was also the director of Jaguar Sports. In the capacities he presided over many
new vehicle projects and brought his enormous experience to bear on all facets of
car development but particularly in the areas of ride, handling and suspension systems.
Indeed, it was he who designed the rear suspension for the XJ40.
Jim also holds a position as professor of engineering at Birmingham University.
Mike Giles spent eighteen years at Jaguar, joining as a Project Engineer in 1974
and rising to Chief Engineer of Vehicle Services and was responsible for a very
wide range of vehicle projects, vehicle and system testing and engineering solutions
for Jaguar models. Ultimately he was directly technically responsible for fourteen
major vehicle programs.
In 1992, he left Jaguar to become Head of Vehicle Technology for GKN Technology
and two years later moved to LDV and as technical director he led a joint venture
with Daewoo for a completely new range of developments, managing a team of over
a hundred engineers and projects worth up to 55 million pounds. Mike Giles joined
Gibbs Technologies in 2000. In addition, they recruited a team of 70 other outstanding
engineers. It’s a team of supreme generalists with uniquely specialist skills, a
combination that is rare anywhere in the world.
|
The result of all this effort, ingenuity, experience,
determination and- let it be said- investment is an amphibian that is beautiful
to look at, satisfying to drive, and possessed of a unique quality.
It offers an experience that words do not describe: no matter how well prepared,
people are astonished when they see what the amphibian does. What might be usefully
said however, is that for quite a substantial part of the automotive market, the
Gibbs’ teams’ creation doubles the utility of motor vehicles.
Gibbs himself is careful about claiming too much for his vehicle. But the technology
that underlies the Aquada gives a new dimension to automotive development. www.gibbstech.com