Kor led me into a parking garage in downtown Toronto. He was in town for a couple days to meet with sponsors and partners, and at the last minute, said we could meet for a quick interview. From the trunk of a rental car, he pulled out a large, rugged Pelican case. He opened it on top of a heating vent in an alley between some tall downtown buildings. To passersby, it must’ve looked like some sort of drug deal, but there it was: the little orange Urbee.

Kor and his team of nine engineers and designers are realistic, but their goals and ideas are as lofty as they come and that’s what makes the Urbee project so interesting. “I don’t want to save the world,” Kor explained, “but the car could.”

It’s not just talk either. As well as the orange scale model, the team has a working prototype of the hybrid-electric two-seater and is generating interest from around the globe having created the world’s first 3D printed car.

“I plan to be one of the first customers to buy and drive an Urbee,” Kor said. “The other people involved in the design of the car feel the same. They want to buy and drive one too. So, the market for Urbee stands presently at a humble 10 units.” That’s just so very. . . Canadian. “Yeah, it doesn’t get anymore Canadian than this,” he laughed during our interview.

(Daily Planet)

The idea for the car is simple: to create a practical, inexpensive vehicle that can be built and run sustainably using technology that exists today. The name, “Urbee,” stands for Urban electric with ethanol as backup. It would be powered by solar-energy from panels mounted on top of a house or garage when possible, but could use a household electric outlet as a backup, as well as either an ethanol- or gasoline-powered internal combustion engine.

“It all comes down to physics,” Kor insists. He has a professors way of making complex ideas sound quite simple - as if anybody who studied grade 12 science would eventually come up with a similar design.

“As we embark upon another century of automobility, the condition of our environment and our state of awareness regarding it, demands that we rethink how we design cars for a global population,” Kor wrote to us in an earlier e-mail. He is a professional engineer with more than 35 years experience designing for civil, aerospace and transport projects. He’s the team’s leader and one of the Urbee’s senior designers. So yes, he knows what he’s talking about.

“As affluence increases around the world, cars will surpass two billion within this century. The associated negative environmental impacts can only be mitigated by designing into the engineering prescription of each new car the very principles of sustainability. This paper describes how the automotive industry should do this,” he continued.

What they’re proposing – and building – then is nothing less than a Model T for the 21st century. It’s not the first time Kor and his team have drawn that comparison. 

“We have always envisioned Urbee to be classified similarly to cars like the Model T, the Volkswagen, the Citroen 2CV, the Austin Mini, the Fiat 500, and other basic, economical, and highly useful mass-appeal cars of the past,” he said.

From the beginning of the design stages, Kor set about building a car for himself under the assumption that others are in a similar situation. It is a vehicle for, “people that work hard for a living. Responsible people that have to put up with a lot, have to get things done each day, and need a helping hand from technology. . . For families, like mine, I envisioned this as the second family car. For students, it could be their first car, and for retired people, perhaps their last car. Due to its long-life design, for some people it could be the only car they ever own, which would truly be groundbreaking economic and environmental performance.”

This is a lot to ask from a grassroots team, no matter how clever or experienced. They don’t have anything close to the research and development money large automakers – or even small ones – can put behind a project. But the idea was always to use what was available but do so in new and innovative ways.

When I first ran into the project, the team was in Las Vegas at the 2010 SEMA tuner car show. The project was riding a small wave of publicity after having created the world’s first 3D printed car. The special printing machines are used for rapid prototyping, but previously only of small items: gears, tools, nuts and bolts. Instead of building a full prototype by hand, the team asked a company called Stratasys in Minneapolis to print them a car. It worked.

So, there they were, the team of 10 from Winnipeg in a corner of a major auto show in Vegas. From what Kor says, they generated quite a bit of interest too. That’s the moment when he and his team realized that this car has potential, and they weren’t just building it for themselves anymore. The car has appeared on the Daily Planet television show and in Popular Mechanics. But speaking to the team, they are as humble, focused and as realistic as ever.

As you can see in the videos, the car does exist as a full-size prototype and has run successfully on several occasions. The next big deadline for the Urbee team is to have a complete, running prototype with all its bodywork by later this month. The date is fast approaching and we’ll let you know if they make it. After that there are still many obstacles: securing funding is an ongoing battle, crash and safety regulations will be difficult to navigate and bugs will need to be ironed out before they can tackle production. But, they got this far on a miniscule budget. . . .  

“I can drive into any town now and say I’m building an electric car, and someone will buy me a beer. A few years ago, their eyes would’ve glazed over,” he said.

If all goes well, Kor estimated we could be driving Urbees as early as 2014.

(Photos: Matt Bubbers, and Urbee)