Swords into Ploughshares

From Armoured Vehicles to Light-Weighting

“they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” - Isaiah 2:4

When I was studying Transport Design in the 1990s I was following a childhood dream to design cars. It is all I’d ever wanted to do since I first picked up a pencil and drew what I wished my Lego chassis could have looked like without the limitations of those little plastic blocks. It had been my focus throughout school, more than just the clichéd drawings of cars in the margins of my school books, but forgoing lunch breaks to do a Design GCSE in my spare time, visiting the Lotus design studio at Hethel, and neglecting my A-levels to put the effort into preparing a portfolio that would get me onto the distinguished Coventry University Transport Design course. Once there I had to work hard to bring myself even close to the standard of my talented classmates.

At the same time I was coming to the realisation that after my studies I wanted to return to Israel, the country that I was born in even though I grew up in Britain. The 90s was a different time. Post-Cold War and pre-9/11, with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, although far from smooth, feeling like it was leading to an inevitable and imminent resolution of the conflict, it seemed like a good time to go there and be a part of building up the promised new Middle East. Perhaps na?ve in retrospect, but this was very much my attitude and the prevailing sentiment at the time.

But how to reconcile a childhood dream of designing cars with living in a country that has no automotive industry? Even within the context of the optimistic zeitgeist of the mid-90s, and the ambitious energy of us gen-Xers, this was going to be a daunting task. But having fought hard to get my degree in Transport Design, I wasn’t going to let the small matter of there being no car company within 3000km of where I live get in my way.

How to reconcile a childhood dream of designing cars with living in a country that has no automotive industry?

The plan was founded on the combination of analytical logic and ideological vision that is fairly typical for me. For historically obvious reasons, Israel had an advanced military industry, including aerospace and composite materials, and, not entirely unconnected to that, had an emerging and thriving hi-tech industry by the late-90s. As I saw it back in 1997, these were the building blocks of what the future car would need. My final project at Coventry for a hyper-efficient, ultralight, sporty saloon with hybrid drive and low aerodynamic drag was ostensibly branded as a Seat, but it had an unstated subtext. This was an Israeli car, a ploughshare beaten from the swords of an Israeli military industry that I truly believed at the time would have underused resources and capabilities as the 2000s progressed.

The Seat Jerez, as I called it, was a vision for the car of 2015, then far enough into the future to still be a good few model generations away. It had a carbon-fibre structure and polymer body panels. It had 4 electric hub motors powered from a battery that was charged by what today we would call a range-extender but back then it was known as a series-hybrid, to differentiate it from the parallel-hybrid of the first generation Toyota Prius that only started production while I was designing the Jerez. The GPS satellite navigation would coordinate the power management, only firing up the ICE engine when it was necessary and efficient to do so. Tesla was still 5 years away from being established, their first car, the Lotus Elise-based Roadster was 10 years away. Electric cars, “green” cars generally, were categorically not seen as potentially desirable or fun back in 1998. Naming the Jerez after a race track, pitching it as a dynamic and sporty saloon that just happened to be hyper-efficient was quite a conceptual leap back then. It would take the Tesla S and the really quite similarly architectured BMW i3 and i8 nearly 15 years later to vindicate this vision of what the car could become by 2015, and now in 2024 we still have a way to go with the average EV weighing 2t or more. The project at the time won the industry IBCAM Award for its insight, and armed with this recognition, and the iMac that I bought with the prize money, I moved back to Israel straight after graduating in 1998.

When I joined the company then known as Plasan Sasa Composite Materials in 2001, my idealistic young vision was still largely in place. I was joining a small company that applied composite materials to vehicles to armour them, and I was going to show them how to design vehicles and build them from these materials. But my first day was the 2nd of September 2001 and within a week and a half everything changed, the already damaged 90s view that the planet was heading towards global peace took its final gut punch and the world would not be the same again. I have already told the story of my two decades at Plasan and the career that I forged designing armoured vehicles, and you can read that here, so I will pick up the narrative where we are today in 2024.

Perhaps more than ever, that prophetic Biblical vision of turning swords into ploughshares is necessary now. For many years now I have been involved in developing technologies, concepts, and infrastructure to help save weight cost-effectively from regular vehicles, cars, trucks, and buses, and to make them more efficient, safer, and less polluting. I wanted to dedicate myself to this aspect of my work as a vehicle designer. For this reason, and together with others who worked together on these solutions, we have established Dynamic Blue Composites, a company that is taking these ideas and technologies to the automotive industry to help them to implement it. We are helping car companies and vehicle producers to design their vehicles for efficient application of our light-weighting solutions and to bring them to mass production.

We have established Dynamic Blue Composites, a company that is taking these ideas and technologies to the automotive industry

For me this is a very natural next step for a career that although it’s taken an unpredictable path, has never actually strayed too far from the plan I set out in Coventry 30 years ago. It is a continuation of work that I had been doing for well over ten years at Plasan, arguably work that started with my final degree project in 1998, but now it is the focus of what I do and I look forward to working with vehicle manufacturers and my fellow designers on bringing these ideas to market.

I am still undertaking vehicle design projects independently as Namiir Design, including for armoured and military vehicles, while my role as Head of Design at DB Composites has me working closely with vehicle designers and engineers to bring cost-effective lightweighting into the mainstream and mass production of cars, trucks, and buses.

Nir Kahn led vehicle design at Plasan for 22 years where he was responsible for the design of numerous successful composite-based armoured vehicles for leading manufacturers, and is now an independent vehicle design consultant as Namiir Design, as well as being the Head of Design at DB Composites, helping vehicle manufacturers around the world reduce the weight and improve the safety and efficiency of their vehicles