Futurelight camper is truly unreal

What do you get when you put the design boffins from one of the world’s best car manufacturers, together in the same room with the creative minds from one of the world’s biggest outdoor clothing companies?

In the case of BMW and The North Face, you end up with the futuristic Futurelight camper, a space-age concept unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this month.

While the Futurelight’s radical design looks pretty cool, from its chunky tyres to swoopy sideboards and geodesic dome tent structure, it’s the new “nanospun” fabric used for the tent that’s the proposed game changer.

North Face says independent testing has proven that the Futurelight material combines light weight, breathability and water resistance unlike any other outdoor fabric on the market, and it will be used in a range of North Face shell jackets.

North Face said stretching the Futurelight fabric over the camper’s exoskeleton was one way to demonstrate its application beyond just apparel.

BMW Designworks LA studio director, Laura Robin, also said it was a way to think  “about extreme performance in new and unexpected ways from our experience of working across multiple industries helped us provide consumers with a unique and never-before-seen insight into the very heart of the material and its key attributes”.

Scott Melin, The North Face global GM of mountain sports, said: “The North Face has actually had a longstanding relationship with Designworks, and this was a chance to showcase what is possible with this new technology.

“We started from ground zero with the goal of completely disrupting what is possible in waterproof-breathable fabrics and sustainable production, building our own factories in three different countries.”

The futuristic camper was shown at the CES show as part of a virtual reality experience, with the possibility that a real-life example will actually be built at some point in the future and possibly sold in production form to the public.