What’s in your fantasy garage? If you like driving, modifying, collecting or restoring cars, you’ve probably given a lot of thought about the best way to kit out your dream workshop in the garage. How do we know this? We hear it from our customers! Quite a number of you have come to rely on Formaspace to provide you with top-quality, American-made workbenches, storage solutions and other custom technical furniture to kit out your garage. Nothing gets you bragging rights with your friends and neighbors like a set of heavy-duty, professional grade Formaspace workbenches and shelving systems custom made just for you. So with the Detroit Auto Show taking place this week, we’re kicking off a series called What’s in Your Fantasy Garage?
If You Dream About an Exotic Supercar in Your Garage, the Detroit Auto Show is the Place to Be
The mood at the Detroit auto show is dramatically different this year. Confidence and swagger is back. What a contrast compared to just a few years ago during the Great Recession when not only Detroit, but two of the big three American car manufacturers faced bankruptcy The host city, Detroit, now emerging from bankruptcy, has a renewed energy and sense of purpose. (See our article a few weeks back on American craftsman, where we featured the Detroit watchmaking and bicycle manufacturing company, Shinola).
The Ford GT Supercar Takes Center Stall in our Fantasy Garage
Ford Motor Company really underscores this point with the dramatic introduction of its all-new Ford GT supercar, which is destined to be an instant classic. It’s a rear wheel drive, mid-engine racer with a lightweight carbon fiber structure with dramatic swing-up doors. The engine, a twin turbocharged EcoBoost V6 delivers more than 600 horsepower.
Make Room for Honda Motor Company’s Acura NSX Too
It wouldn’t be a fun competition for the supercar fan boys at the water cooler if the Ford GT didn’t have strong competition at the Detroit Auto Show. Fortunately, the new 2016 Acura NSX makes the perfect competitive foil. Like the Ford GT, the body design is at once aggressively macho yet surprisingly delicate in the design details. It also sports a new twin turbocharged V-6 engine producing 550 hp, which for the experts among you, you will realize that is more than double the horsepower of the old NSX. But, as Ford fan boys will remind you again and again, that’s less than the 600 hp of the new Ford GT. Our take? Of course we’ll have to have both the Acura NSX and the Ford GT in our fantasy garage.
Would an Electric Car Make the Cut?
Driving to the grocery store for a quart of milk might be a little over the top in our Ford GT or Acura NSX supercar, so we might want to add a third stall to our fantasy garage to make room for something more environmentally friendly. Chevrolet has got just the ticket for you: the Chevy Bolt — an electric vehicle with a range of 200 miles on a single charge, priced in the low $30,000 range (including government tax incentives). It will come to market as a 2017 model. With a range that is twice as long as the Nissan Leaf electric car, GM executives are hoping they can break through what they called the “Range Anxiety Barrier“.
The name Bolt is not a misspelling; Chevy is introducing this new nameplate in addition to their existing gas-electric car, the Chevrolet Volt (with a V). The second-generation Volt made its appearance at the Detroit auto show as well; the new one will travel 50 miles on its built-in battery charge before the gasoline engine takes over. When compiling our fantasy car lists, we have to keep our eye on Tesla Motors, which has shunned the Detroit Auto Show in recent years. Currently Tesla is teasing us with a picture of their upcoming Tesla Model X Sport Utility Vehicle on their website. However, their more affordable Model 3 is reportedly still some years away from introduction, giving the Chevy Bolt a headstart.
A ‘Do It Yourself’ 3D Printed Car Might be Just the Ticket
It looks like we need to expand our fantasy garage once again to make room for a 3-D printing workshop. Why? We need to print out our very own 3D car! John B. Rogers, Founder and Chief Executive of LocalMotors, based in Phoenix, brought the world’s first 3-D printing car, the Strati to the Detroit Auto Show.
What’s it like to drive a 3D printed car? Let’s go for a short (warning: very short!) ride:
Forget New Cars, I Want a Classic Ride in My Fantasy Garage
We’ve expanded our fantasy garage to four stalls already and we haven’t even touched on collector cars. As you know, the old car hobby has traditionally split down the middle, segregated in the two competing camps: those that like custom hotrods and resto/mod and those who prefer factory original restorations. The good news here at Formaspace: We like both! In the old days before the Internet, every month we used to get antsy waiting for the postman to deliver our old car bible, Hemmings Motor News.
These days, Hemmings Motor News still prints their monthly edition of old car classifieds on traditional newsprint, but they also have an impressive website where you can search for your dream classic ride. But if you’re an armchair collector, there is a new game in town called Bring a Trailer, where eagle-eyed contributors find the very best classic and special-interest cars, gleaned from local Craigslist listings, eBay and other sources. If you love old cars, check it out; we think you’ll find it quite addictive.
Formaspace Makes Your Fantasy Garage Workspace Come True
So now that we’ve got our fantasy vehicle search well underway, in a future article we will take a look at some of the best ideas for kitting out your fantasy garage. As you can imagine, Formaspace furniture is going to make quite a statement in our new automotive workshop.
Join the roster of satisfied Formaspace clients — including Apple Computer, Boeing, Dell, Eli Lilly, Exxon Mobile, General Electric, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Medtronic, NASA, Novartis, Stanford University, Toyota and more. Give us a call today at 800.251.1505 to find out more about the Formaspace line of stock, semi-custom and custom-made computer workstations, industrial workbenches, laboratory furniture, lab benches and dry lab/wet labs — as well as our design / furniture consulting services. Our American-made technical furniture solutions are flexible, reconfigurable and long-lasting.
