CITROEN C Flex Concept Car Aims for Functionality

The problems generally associated with driving small cars pertain to lack of adequate interior space and lack of presence on the outside. And most customers neglect the impending problem of increasing footprints by opting for larger cars. But now designer Fernando Ocana has raised a very basic but noteworhy question: why not extract the benefit of both large and small?

New paths are created to make the nowadays vehicle more efficient, and eco-friendly by Ocana, who manages to mix efficiency with eco-friendly technology within the CITROEN C-flex.

Todays products are flexible in nature as they cater to personal tastes and preferences of different customers. And this flexible car concept is not the first of its kind, even BMW has done it before. This project takes on the task of exploring flexibility of a vehicle’s skin as a way to improve the efficiency without compromising on the customer’s taste.

The designer mentions that the original designs were inspired from the French concept of parkour, thus creating the vehicle after how the traceur’s body tackles each obstacle according to their difficulty. This way he arrived at the possibility of latex as the element for the body design, improving this way the aerodynamic efficiency. But when the relevancy of the concept was argued, it caused frictions and the development was judged as not meeting the vehicle’s functional and security requirements.

This obstacle made him aware of the blessings of communication in the design process. Eventually he came up with technical innovations in the form of in-hub electric motors, structural batteries and electro-active memory polymers. Finally, his efforts paid dividends when CITROEN commented their project.