SkinzWraps, a company specializing in advertising wraps for cars, has created a subsidiary with a product that probably doesn’t work. FastSkinz is a patent pending “vehicle wrap system” (read “big piece of vinyl”) with dimples all over it. Then one will have dimples all over one’s car, which the company insists is a good thing. More after the jump.
Any object moving through air will leave a vacuum behind it, and a big part of aerodynamics is figuring out how to reduce this area of low pressure, thus reducing drag. Golf balls have dimples on them to disrupt the air around them, creating a boundary layer which reduces the vacuum behind the ball. Someone who has clearly had a high school physics class figured that this would also work for cars. Little did they know that real engineers had already thought of this
which both disrupts air flow enough to significantly reduce drag and doesn’t make your car look like it has a pox of some variety.
FastSkinz claims that their product will increase gas mileage by 18-20% and I say it will make you look goofy. Independent testing is yet to be performed on the product. When that does happen, we will get to find out whether or not this actually works.