Update: The Splinter, a wooden car designed by a group of college students, has made the rounds to the International Woodworking Fair, where it met with acclaim. While the car is still under construction, photos on the cars website detail just how far along the Splinter has come from its initial design stages. Many internal features, such as the headrests, have been painstakingly carved, cut and sanded into place, while the body is definitely an eye-catcher with its smooth wooden finish and supercar proportions.

The car uses a number of innovations, including a unique seating position and a wooden suspension system constructed out of the same wood used for traditional longbows. The team is also planning on using wooden wheels, although the structural integrity of the wheels during high-speed maneuvers has been a source of worry for the group.

What initially seemed to be somewhat of a design novelty is shaping up into an interesting project to watch as the students tackle the problems of building a wooden supercar.

Original: Designers usually look to advanced composites or light weight aluminum when it comes to finding materials other than steel to build their cars with. One option a group of grad students from North Carolina State University are looking into is using wood to construct cars from. The students have gone so far as to design a one-off supercar built mostly from wood as a way to explore its potential in the automotive world of the future.

Called the Splinter, the concept car isn’t just some wooden model to be displayed in the classroom. The full scale prototype features a Cadillac Northstar V8 engine with a pair of Roots-type superchargers bolted on to lift output to around 600hp.

One of the inherent problems of mounting an internal combustion engine in a wooden car is the effects of the heat emanating from the engine. To overcome this problem, the students reversed the direction of the cylinder heads, placed the exhaust pipes at the top of the engine and funneled the hot gasses through the rear wing.