Wood is our only naturally renewable building material; it takes an extraordinarily small amount of energy to produce and is totally biodegradable.  With a better strength-to-weight ratio than steel and aluminum, it can be made into a lot more things than people tend to give it credit for.  We wanted to push the line on what was considered wood's limitation as a building material while fulfilling a lifelong dream of designing and building a car from scratch.  

 

The inspiration behind the Splinter was a WWII airplane called the de Havilland Mosquito.  Equipped with two Rolls-Royce V12 engines, it was the fastest piston-driven plane of its era, and was made almost entirely out of wood.  

 

The Splinter began as a graduate school project at North Carolina State University and has continued since.