Green Drive / greenskin

What if cars were covered in plants? Green drive/Green skin is a speculative design project, dealing with a scenario for future mobility. The concept was later developed to a working car protoype by the Daimler AG subsidiary moovel lab GmbH.

Physical

There are more registered cars than people in Los Angeles. Of the 7 Million cars. 3 Million are driven every day, producing about 16 Million tons of carbon dioxid every year. For this amount, 48000 square kilometers of forest would be necessary to compensate the pollution.

How would the world look like, if every car is covered with plants, instead of just paint?

An average car has about 3 to 6 squaremeters of surface. If you count every driving car in LA, and multiply them by an average of 5 squaremeters surface, you get about 15 million squaremeters of potential green space. This is about 2,5 times the size of the black forest and would take on 1/3 of carbon dioxid pollution in Los Angeles.

To cover cars with plants isnt even unrealistic, there are moss mixtures, that can be put on walls, and even special surfaces, mostly used in architecture, to cover different surfaces with plants.

So why continue wasting space for car paint instead of green driving?

This is a speculative design concept in collaboration with moovel lab and J. Paul Neeley, during my Masters Program at the University of Applied Sciences Schwäbisch Gmünd. The concept of Green Drive was successfully adapted by Daimler AG subsidiary moovel lab, who built and tested a working prototype of a car covered in plants.

http://lab.moovel.com/projects/greenskin

http://lab.moovel.com/projects/future-mobility-workshop-hfg-gmuend