Design your own Caterham

Caterham Cars will soon be creating its next new vehicle, but it won't be designed by its design team. The new car will instead have the design conceived online by the public.

The manufacturer of the Seven is offering every car enthusiast, irrespective of engineering skill, design experience or mechanical ability, a dream opportunity to design an all-new sports car in collaboration with Project Splitwheel.

Members of the public are invited to join Project Splitwheel from a dedicated website. From there, people from all over the globe will be able to submit ideas and concepts for every aspect of the new Caterham and discuss and debate them with other users, before ultimately voting on what makes it to production.

Initial registration for this revolutionary venture is now open with the Project set to start in earnest early in the New Year.

The Splitwheel.com website will use a combination of articles, blogs, forum discussion, a Wikipedia-style user-edited knowledge base and a comprehensive voting system to turn user input into a workable vehicle design. Along with acting as a liaison with Caterham's engineering team, Project Splitwheel will also provide guidance and input from automotive industry experts.

Splitwheel will also factor increased environmental pressures by exploring alternative methods of propulsion, such as electric and hybrid, and crucially their desirability to drivers. Once the specification is agreed, Caterham Cars will seek to produce a prototype vehicle which could become an addition to its model range as early as 2011.

Starting from a blank sheet of paper and with very few restrictions in place, the result should be an exciting and truly unique performance vehicle.

As an added incentive to participants, Splitwheel and Caterham will offer plenty of opportunities to get 'hands-on', with prospective designers test driving and possibly even racing the development car.

Membership of Project Splitwheel is free and open to anybody passionate about performance cars. Visit www.splitwheel.com for more information.

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