The way we buy and drive cars is about to change forever. With Arizona-based Local Motors‘ 3D printed car, the manufacturing process has moved from the factory to the local workshop.

The body, seats and windshield of the car, dubbed the Strati, were entirely 3D printed using carbon fiber and plastic. The whole printing process took only 44 hours.

The design is basic, with no opening doors, so the company was able to print it in one single piece. Comparing this simple approach to the complex process used to produce conventional cars creates an exciting preview of the future of car design.

In the near future, could we order a new car from the shop down the street and pick it up later that week? The electric powertrain of the Strati is from a Renault Twizy, and various other parts such as the suspension, battery and wiring are sourced from a number of outside suppliers. But assembling these parts in the car’s body could conceivably be achieved in a matter of days.

Local Motors created the Strati for the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago, but it won’t be a one-off display project. The company plans to manufacture the car for sale, but they have yet to announce a price or release date.

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If you do 3D printing, chances are you’re used to a machine being pretty autonomous. They do all the building, after all. Magnify that idea about a hundred times and you get something completely self-sufficient…and bigger.

Nir Seigel, a Royal College of Art graduate, developed what could be the most advanced concept car ever. Fittingly named Genesis, the Pilkington Design Award-winning car is 3D printed and assembles itself. The idea breathes new life into the spotty auto manufacturing industry not only by its self-sufficiency but by offering the consumer a high amount of customizability.

“The printer would print out a car all around itself to match the buyer’s specifications,” a press release from the Royal College of Art states. It says the primary objective of the car is to “evolve products and services, based on customer needs, avoiding obsolescence.” It’s a broad declaration, and the entire idea smacks of pessimism. But with related advances like the almost-in-production 3D-printed Urbee 2, it’s a feasible one.

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The ancient art of origami was the inspiration behind Harvard University’s new generation of flying micro-drones. The artificial bees – or “mobees,” or “robobees” – were originally created in 2009 to study Colony Collapse Disorder. The team believed that if they could create a colony of robotic bees they might be able to figure out what was causing millions of bee hives and colonies to disappear.

What the team ended up creating in the process, however, was a fascinating new way to make teeny-tiny robots. In the past, the team might have built each bee individually. But for this project, they are “printing” the small bodies onto sheets of ceramic, carbon fiber and plastic. The electronics are built into the body instead of stuffed into it after it has been built, giving the bee bodies their necessary lightness.

After the bodies are “printed,” parts pop up and lock into place – kind of like a children’s pop-up book. This makes the tiny robot’s body three-dimensional without increasing its size, weight or complexity. The only drawback to the current model is that the bees have to be tethered to a battery via a wire since attaching a battery to each bee would make the tiny ‘bots too heavy to fly. If anyone can figure out this dilemma, though, it’s the smarties at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

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Other than the materials being used, shoe manufacturing methods haven’t changed very much since the first person learned how to sew pieces of leather together in the shape of feet. Japanese sneaker company Shoes Like Pottery is revolutionizing the age-old manufacturing methods by baking on, rather than sewing or gluing on, shoe soles.

The canvas shoes keep their conventional sewn-together uppers, but the soles are – as the name suggests – baked on in a kiln, just like pottery. The rubber that composes the soles is vulcanized and permanently adhered to the uppers in an industrial kiln that reaches a temperature of 248 degrees Fahrenheit.

The shoes come out supple, flexible and extremely durable. Since each pair is created by hand in a painstaking process, they cost a fair bit more than the typical pair of canvas sneakers: $145-$195 per pair. But the great care taken in their making also ensures that you won’t have to replace them anytime soon.

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When new technology is being created, the needed parts often don’t exist yet. How do scientists, engineers and researchers invent the bits and pieces that go into brand new gadgets? With a massive gadget-growing machine, of course. The above monstrosity is an MBE, or molecular beam epitaxy machine. Working in a super-cooled low-atmospheric pressure environment with building blocks the size of atoms, this machine constructs the components of tomorrow’s electronics.

This particular MBE resides in the laboratories of Sharp just outside of Oxford, England. It, like other MBE machines, uses a process that is somewhat similar to 3D printing – but on a much, much tinier level. Microscopic pieces of materials are manipulated and put into place to build newly-invented high-tech gadgets. The components being created are far too intricate and tiny to be built by human hands, making it essential to use space-age technology like MBEs to keep technology moving forward.

Sharp’s MBE is a much smaller version of those used to manufacture gadgets for commercial production. As intimidating and complex as it looks, this baby MBE is only used for experimental and developmental purposes. It works in an artificial environment similar to the conditions found in space, piecing together bits of material too small to see in order to invent the next generations of cell phones, computers and other techy goodness.

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