Kevin Czinger on the future of design and manufacturing

The link between hypercars and aerospace engineering is long established, but nowhere is the connection more apparent than with the Czinger 21C. Founder Kevin Czinger is a fan of Lockheed Skunk Works, and, judging by the shots of the 21C alongside the legendary SR71 Blackbird spy plane, the feeling is mutual.

And there is undoubtedly a strong aeronautical feel when you look at the 21C. For starters, the 1+1 central cockpit is much like the pilot and co-pilot configuration in a jet while the exaggerated butterfly doors look a little wing-like.

Glinting in the summer sun, those dramatic doors were in full-effect on the Czinger stand at Goodwood Festival of Speed where Kevin and Lukas Czinger, the SVP of Czinger’s manufacturing arm Divergent and co-founder of Czinger, were clearly in their element among the throngs of high-performance enthusiasts.

First revealed in London in 2020 after a stall launch thanks to the cancellation of the Geneva motor show, the 21C is a pretty astonishing-looking thing, which owes its aesthetic to a marriage of AI and 3D printed technology. It is much wider now, 2050mm as opposed to the original 1850mm, thanks to an intensive period of track testing in 2020 that convinced the team that greater girth was needed for optimum performance.

Also new is the brand’s collaboration with premium supplier Alcantara, an adroit pairing which softens the interior aesthetic while riffing off the colour scheme of the IP display and the internal architecture.

“This company (Czinger) is unique, they match top technology with design. Technology and functionality must match, but a product cannot only be technological,” says Alcantara CEO Andrea Boragno. “Our solution is complex and sophisticated, but we love this type of challenge, to match performance with emotion.”

A long-tail 1+1 version will be unveiled at Pebble Beach in August 2022 with a 4-seater to follow. The 4-seater will look very Czinger we are told, but it will not share the same platform. By the end of the decade, the company wants 6-7 models in the luxury performance niche. However, for Czinger, the 21C project is a harbinger of a design and manufacturing revolution that is long overdue.

“If there is anything that needs to be rethought as a way of designing and manufacturing, it is a model that is a 100 years old. Everyone is taking that model as a given and trying to add 3D printing here, a little optimisation there. I say, look what we just did moving from analogue to digital content – the tools we created, the creativity we unleashed,” says Czinger.

“Let’s do that in the physical world by using high-performance computing to create perfectly optimised structures where the human engineer does not need to be constrained by how you manufacture and how you assemble. Within this design space I can ask a machine to perfectly construct what I want against my requirements.”

Of course, this type of technology is more easily applied to limited run hypercars, but the 21C is the branded expression of Divergent, the manifestation of Czinger’s ambition to shake up the wider market outside the rarified world the company currently operates in.

“Instead of tooling in the factory you are 3D printing that perfect structure. The costliest thing is the printer. The very first time you build that full system you start at the E- and F-segments, but there is a clear line of sight all the way to the C-segment from the F-segment. Then you are reaching 70 per cent of the market.”

“We have 6 major automotive groups working with us on production vehicles coming out in the next year,” says Czinger.