Revisiting my Favorite Project: Turning Advanced Automotive Materials into a Playable Musical Instrument

You’d think the best way to showcase advanced automotive materials would be through a lab

test or a technical display under bright lights. That’s the usual approach. But two years ago, we chose to take a different path when working with a Tier 1 supplier to show off their material advancements. We built a guitar.

Now, I can’t share the company’s name, but here’s what mattered. Their work lives deep inside vehicles, places drivers rarely notice. Lightweight honeycomb structures. Fire-resistant polymers that can withstand more heat than a steel forge. Fabrics designed to block electromagnetic interference before it scrambles advanced driver systems. Critical stuff, yet abstract, almost invisible to the public eye.

So we asked ourselves: how do you take something hidden and make it not just visible but memorable? As an avid guitar player (albeit not a very good one), I gravitated immediately towards instruments that suffer some of the same issues.

The guitar body was printed in one continuous 36-hour run, borrowing the same honeycomb design used in load floors - it also modeled chambered guitar bodies to keep weight down for easier playability. The shielding fabric, usually destined to guard electronics from Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI), kept the pickups quiet and clean. The cavity covers utilized a flame retardant that I jokingly mentioned made it the only guitar Jimi Hendrix couldn't light on fire. To finish it, we handed it to Joby Purucker, a Michigan-based luthier who shaped a custom neck by hand. The result was a playable, resonant, and worthy six-stringed instrument you could find on display at Jack White's Third Man Records.

When we revealed the guitar to our client's staff, there was a noticeable level of excitement. Engineers who spend their lives with spreadsheets and safety data were suddenly musicians, leaning in and strumming familiar riffs. They weren’t thinking about polymers or shielding. They were feeling the story. We took it a step further, bringing in actual musicians from all walks of life - from doom metal frontmen to Worship band leaders to play it and the consensus was it checked all the boxes as a pro guitarist's instrument.

This is exactly what Chris Terry means when he says: get out of the category and into the culture. The supplier could have stayed technical, talking about tensile strength and heat resistance. Instead, they stepped into a cultural conversation that Detroit owns. The guitar told their story in a way numbers never could.

And that’s the point. The best stories don’t just explain, but connect. Sometimes the most technical innovation needs a little music to be heard.