Rugged by Carlos Arturo Torres, C2R Engineering, Colombia

2011: Plus 10. The Best is Yet to Come!

Biography

Carlos Arturo Torres Tovar was born in Tunja Boyacá, Colombia. He is a design enthusiast, who graduated from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia as an industrial designer. He is involved in different kinds of projects which focus his work on the emotional and concept fields of the product design, always with a single north: the user.

He has received numerous awards including the 2007 MTV´s Latin-American Filler contest (top 5); 2008 Peugeot Design Contest (First place); 2009 Laureate Thesis (Symbolic displacement of the object to the contemporary music context) and 2009 Shanghai motorshow / China (Full scale model).

C2R is an outsourcing company dedicated to innovation, design and development. It’s main objective is to improve the performance of their customers in the global marketplace, adding value to their products or services, promoting their development and sustainability. They base their work on a methodology that manages the entire product life cycle (PLM) ensuring that your product is top quality and develop in a shorter time.

Description

Colombia is a farming country with big potential in this area. Local farm transportation is so expensive and slow because the current vehicles are not made for Colombia’s topology, plus the technology of our industries is very low especially automotive production.

In the near future, Colombia will see agriculture and the natural resources as its prime Economical force and the fast and efficient transportation of these resources is highly important. This design is the first step for a local specialized car industry.

RUGGED was aimed as a simple, inexpensive and possible production vehicle using tubular technology as the esthetic language that a new car industry brand needs. Some industries in Colombia can feed the RUGGED production process such as rotomolding (used in the furniture industry) (which can be used for the Bio-derived polyethylene injected parts) metallurgical industry (with a low cost tubing process using manufacture as a main source) and bodywork industry (as an assembly). With a bio-diesel powertrain adapted to a 250cc inline-four engine. It is a semi-utilitarian car.

To make the design simpler and functional, the cabin was pulled to the front leaving enough space for a working context. The whole floor of the vehicle is constructed in a strong steel mesh to avoid water accumulation. The seats of the RUGGED are divided in three parts to be screwed to the tubular structure and the base of the chair is gifted with an easy plastic damping system.