Well the Cadillac Cien is based in the F-22... And the Reventon is also inspired in it... So that Lambo is next Gen Stealth fighter... I wonder what will come next...
Ironically, the Lamborghini looks more like the outdated, original facet based stealth aircraft. Auto styling regarding "jet fighters" is actually going backwards. A future stealth jet that looked the like the Lamborghini would be laughed at.
I'd say it's quite a stretch to assume that this or the Chaparral had any real engineering thought put into them. The same probably holds true for most of the VGT cars, of course, since it is a styling exercise; but I don't think you can really call it a creative flex for engineering if the extent of how to actually engineer the things the car has stopped at the effort put into the press release.
These cars aren't too outlandish until you get to the power and weight. I don't know how they're getting such power density. The S model is pretty reasonable except that it's supposed to be a street car. Were it the follow no rules ultimate prototype I think it would be fairly believable.
What you said still stands though, how much engineering was actually put into them? Obviously you can't expect the companies to put big budgets behind the VGT program, but using them as conceptual/experimental exercises is possible. Unfortunately the higher the bar is pushed, the more is left undefined and the more work you need to do to justify a particular concept.
If you mean coming up with a unique solution to serve a specific purpose, then that definitely happened.
The problem here is that they might have just come up with a
proposed solution to a problem and not a working solution. The best example is the g suit. Old technology common in aviation, but they work in the vertical direction and are intended for positive g loads. 10 g is about the limit of what they're designed to take. Just saying "driver has a g-suit" isn't really much better than ignoring the g issue completely. You would need to design a g suit specifically for this car or maybe limit the driver's g load through specialized track design. The g-suit thing is as Tornado put it in another post, science fiction. It looks like an answer, but it isn't really one.
The aero stuff on the car looks pretty legit, but real analysis without actual flow data is limited. What worries me is interactions between all the aero parts. The front active spoilers are pretty large, what if they stall the rear spoilers and wing? Then you get way to much front downforce and a car that could not possible hope to brake in straight light at high speed because the rear wheels are flying off the ground.
Engineering is not an end product, it is a process. All engineering starts somewhere and to state what effectively means that these cars aren't production ready is probably missing the point. What matters is the method and supporting knowledge and experience used to whittle down the possibility space and expose "faulty ideas", not whether a CAE assessment of the active aero linkages has been performed.
Yes, but if your error bars are enormous, any answer you give is pretty worthless. Throwing out crazy ideas is fine in the early stages of design, but at that point you usually don't have performance figures for your design, just performance goals. I can see why people would think this car stopped at that stage and then had goals slapped into the stats sheets as if the design was actually tested.
