The Opus

2010, Industrial Design

The Opus was a both an academic thesis and reimagining of the concept of personal transport looking forward over the next 50 years.

It was featured in AutoCar magazine’s November 2011 issue and was a finalist in the Autocar-Courland ‘Next Generation’ Award 2011.

It was a compendium of all my design thinking on the automotive industry, and featured many small inventions that conceived a vehicle that could drive hundreds of miles on a half an hour charge for a few pennies, that could provide motorsport levels of safety whilst being incredibly cheap and easy to produce, and that would be an amazing experience to drive and extremely customisable. Even a scalable production plan was created, with a unique design for decentralising production across economic boundaries.

It was designed from a blank canvas using research led ‘synectic’ and ‘black box’ design methodology. As such there is something original to almost every aspect of the vehicle, including it’s unique package that puts the rider on eye level with other motorists whilst being able to slip through traffic like a motorbike.

In this video I talk about some of the features of the design:

Presentation video:

If you’d like to learn a little bit more about this design you can download my overview booklet from the Autocar Courland Competition.