3D print your own car

The catch - and you knew there would be one, didn’t you? - is that the car is about at big as four human hairs. It’s the latest innovation in 3D printing, and proves that even almost microscopic objects can be created by the technology. And fast.

We’d rather set up a printer that could run us off a full size car, of course. Imagine a Mercedes-Benz Gullwing or Porsche GT 3 emerging from the office printer-fax. Now that’s what we call a true multi-function device. 

But in the meantime, this is a fascinating video to watch. And points to the future potential of 3D printing for fabrication. At the very least, we could see this making car parts cheaper. 

Imagine being able to replace your carpark-scuffed front bumper with something you can whip up yourself - one day probably even more cheaply than the current plastics factories that depend on economies of scale from large-scale production lines.

To produce the tiny race car in the video - about the size of a large grain of sand - a team of scientists at Austria’s Vienna University of Technology in Austria overcame the usual slow speed of the technique to set a new world record for 3D printing, finishing the car in about 4 minutes. 

Their printer uses a special kind of liquid resin containing light-sensitive particles harden it into a polymer when it’s exposed to light from lasers. The precision of the process comes from the resin only hardening when it simultaneously absorbs two photons from the light. 

That’s only possible at the tiny centre of the beam - giving almost microscopic control over where it can be applied. 

The really good news? The team is already working on ways to apply the process to larger objects. We’ll start clearing a Gullwing-sized space in the garage this weekend.