[vaseline2008]

It's finally a reality Two wheeled transport that doesn't tip over.

Lit Motors C-1

[careinke]

It's finally a reality Two wheeled transport that doesn't tip over.

Lit Motors C-1

Awesome, I have to check out the specs.

[SeaGypsy]

Brilliant idea; I want 2!

[Tanada]

Looking through the website I finally found a price, $19,900 after the Federal electric vehicle tax credit. IOW they are about $28,400 on the showroom floor.

I predict they will not sell many for that price, sure it would be great to go all electric in a super aerodynamic design but there is not going to be consumer acceptance on par with a 4 wheel automobile, and that is where the price puts the competition.

[dissident]

Looking through the website I finally found a price, $19,900 after the Federal electric vehicle tax credit. IOW they are about $28,400 on the showroom floor.

I predict they will not sell many for that price, sure it would be great to go all electric in a super aerodynamic design but there is not going to be consumer acceptance on par with a 4 wheel automobile, and that is where the price puts the competition.

Those prices are ridiculous. There is no new technology in this vehicle. Gyroscopes have been used for stabilization for many decades. I would say a fair price for this glorified bike is about $6,000.

[Plantagenet]

As American's become poorer and poorer, most folks will be forced to downgrade from 4 wheel cars, SUVs, and Pickup trucks to motorcyles, scooters, tuktuks and jitneys.

The Lit cycle is cool, but like electric cars its too expensive for most folks, who will probably be forced to downgrade to cheap scooters and inexpensive motorcycles like those that already exist.

[SeaGypsy]

A really big chunk of the tag is in the initial R& D, payback. If someone in China figures these out they will become cheap very fast.

[The_Toecutter]

A really big chunk of the tag is in the initial R& D, payback. If someone in China figures these out they will become cheap very fast.

This is the case for virtually all EVs on the market. NRE costs for EVs are high, even though per unit cots would be lower than those of gasoline cars in volume. The biggest expense is the battery, and mass production of LiFePO4 in China has yielded $250/kWh if bought in bulk, and 2,000 cycles to 80% discharge. I last ran my car on 48V used sealed PbA pack of near-dead starter batteries when I was last able to work on it, a Soliton 1 is waiting at a relatives house for installation(it was tested with a ReVolt controller), and once road legal, I will be ordering the 300V 100AH CALB pack. My car will have cost less to build in parts than this motorcycle will cost to buy, and get 200+ miles range real world 70+ mph with performance to embarrass many $40,000 "sports cars".

It is a two seater, but the same principles of streamlining and other load reduction can be applied to a sedan just the same. Check out the "Solectria Sunrise". Imagine a 96V 100A, LiFePO4 version geared for 80 mph top speed, with an inexpensive dc motor setup(perhaps start mass producing Netgain 11" motors and use a controller of no more than 400A). It would get Nissan Leaf like range, and cost about 1/2 as much with regard to the size of the battery, while sacrificing none of the utility. A $12,000, 80-mile range and $25,000 200-mile range EV are perfectly possible. People have done better for cheaper with widely available off the shelf components and a donor chassis. Dave Cloud was able to get 200 miles range with a lead acid powered Geo Metro modified with a streamliner body shell.

Meanwhile, Iran is getting ahead of the U.S. when it comes to EV implementation among the national industry; they have 3-6 minute rapid chargers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh-wBkHpS8k

They also have a model of a Samand Soren sedan that is battery-only powered with a 150+ mile range and a 95 mph top speed. Can't get that one in the United States! This is especially ironic given that the battery technology that makes this possible was developed in the U.S. more than 10 years ago.

Our government is about to go to war with them on Isreals behalf against our will to help secure the access to oil by multinational corporations, oil that we should be trying to reduce our dependency upon, yet recklessly waste taxpayer funds to do the opposite with near endless subsidy financed by working and taxpaying Americans.

Peak oil makes all of that much worse.

EVs were needed last decade, and were possible 2 decades ago. This motorcycle is just another illustration of what small start-ups are capable of in the face of crushing regulation imposed upon them by the auto industry conglomerates that want to see them fail so that the conglomerates can continue the status quo.

[Plantagenet]

This motorcycle is just another illustration of what small start-ups are capable of in the face of crushing regulation imposed upon them by the auto industry conglomerates that want to see them fail so that the conglomerates can continue the status quo.

Three thoughts and a question.

(1) Crushing regulations aren't imposed by the auto industry. All government regulations are imposed by the government.

(2) Of course, since the Obama administration still owns a huge chunk of GM, there maybe some favoritism or cronyism involved in the way the government regulations are being written and applied to the auto industry---

(3) But if anything the Obama administration is tilted in FAVOR of EVs. The stimulus gave BILLIONS of tax payer dollars to small EV start ups and battery makers. Even US tax policy is weighted to give EVs a special break.

Given all this government support for EVs, how do you think government regulations hurt EVs?

[The_Toecutter]

This motorcycle is just another illustration of what small start-ups are capable of in the face of crushing regulation imposed upon them by the auto industry conglomerates that want to see them fail so that the conglomerates can continue the status quo.

Three thoughts and a question.

(1) Crushing regulations aren't imposed by the auto industry. All government regulations are imposed by the government.

Industry lobbyists of various types crafted the legislation that regulates the companies they work for, and have managed to do so in ways that favors the mainstream industry. It is done in a manner to make it impossible for small startup automobile manufacturers to legally sell vehicles for an affordable price due to the effects of economy of scale(initially manifested over fears from Japan's increasing share of the U.S. automobile market during the 1970s and 1980s, where subsequently those "voluntary" import restrictions imposed during the early Reagan years dramatically increased manufacturing cost under the guise of safety); small startups often have to resort to selling overpriced kit car conversions and the like to make ends meet. Tesla as it is cannot exist without government money due to the sheer economy of scale required to make an automobile. GM, on the otherhand, had one market-ready EV ready to go during the 1990s, and the technology to implement an affordable and marketable 60+ mile range highway-capable vehicle on a smaller scale since at least the 1970s(Look at the McKee Sundancer or CDA Towncar for a look at what was possible back then). The large OEM automakers not only get subsidies in exchange for compliance, they are large enough to afford to meet the requirements while their competition isn't. They are so large that they have expanded into the vary finance and energy industries that have caused so many problems within the U.S. and elsewhere, getting special privileges from the government at taxpayer expense(GMAC/GM bailouts, among others). Airbags are the perfect example of a technology forced into U.S. automobiles by a series of companies who sought to force the manufacture them. The Unions get their favors as well, with cars having to be designed to accommodate a specific but unnecessary procedure during the manufacture of a vehicle(The British have been far worse than the U.S. with this, but for different reasons), so that the procedure is done in a reclined manner or with an excessive sum of time, or to make busywork for employees.

The size of regulations covering the custom manufacture of an automobile within the U.S. is enough to fill a small bedroom with technical documents; the auto industry and its associated lobbyists were responsible for a significant minority of them.

When the small start-up companies run by America's best and brightest do succeed in creating a custom product that exceeds the regulations and standards posed by the likes of the NHTSA and others, the large automakers just ignore it, as they had done with Solectria's $20,000 midsize NiMH battery equipped sedan made in 1996; all it needed was production, and James Worden only needed the start up capital. This working project that our country could have used back then was ignored and ridiculed.

(2) Of course, since the Obama administration still owns a huge chunk of GM, there maybe some favoritism or cronyism involved in the way the government regulations are being written and applied to the auto industry---

You also left out more than half of Congress, comprising individuals from both parties.

(3) But if anything the Obama administration is tilted in FAVOR of EVs. The stimulus gave BILLIONS of tax payer dollars to small EV start ups and battery makers. Even US tax policy is weighted to give EVs a special break.

The distribution of favors has skewed to the likes of GM for their overpriced, unoptimized Volt, or to Nissan to entice the construction of a battery plant in Tennessee. Tesla has recieved large sums of money as well, but they're still in the "scale down to a luxury car" stage of trying to sell vehicles. Other nations, like Ethiopia, and Pakistan, unburdened by regulation, have been able to sell pure EVs at cheaper costs to comparable gasoline cars; at one point the Tara Tiny(not to be confused with the at the time more expensive Tata Nano) was the cheapest car on Earth, and it still did 35 mph for around town, costing under $2,000. Tesla would probably not exist without the government at this point.

I will certainly not argue that Obama hasn't been biased in favor of EVs, but what has been implemented is very misleading and misguided. We need an easing of government regulations and we needed to let the behemoths like GM and Chrysler fail, entities which Obama saved and didn't even require them to build EVs anyhow. Imagine if Tesla, a revived Solectria, CommuterCars, and the like were given that bail-out money on a massive Manhattan-Project style effort to get an affordable, practical EV and also 60+ mpg no-compromises gasoline/diesel automobiles to market? Alternatively, it could have been kept in taxpayer pockets too, as the Koreans were waiting to replace the U.S. auto industry outright in short order.

Instead, we get cronyism when that money expended could have done something valuable for our society, or at least been kept in our pockets instead.

Given all this government support for EVs, how do you think government regulations hurt EVs?

Government regulation hurts EV adoption by destroying the ability of small startups to gain a significant marketshare, whether they want to build EVs or not. The major manufacturers have been excessively reluctant with regard to manufacturing EVs, and then they don't make them as efficient as they can, which unnecessarily adds expense and battery weight for a given amount of range.

Then there's the favoritism. The Big Three have historically been favored by the Federal Government and politicians, and the treatment of Preston Tucker and the saga that ensued with his enterprise is a prime example of government favoritism being used to crush competition and stifle innovation.

What Solectria has demonstrated, and many hobbyists have demonstrated with only 5 figures to expend on their projects, is that small startups and individual hobbyists(including high school and undergraduate students) are more advanced with regard to pushing EV technology to its limits than the major automakers with billions of dollars at their disposal are. Dave Cloud made a Geo Metro go 200 miles on a charge with lead acid batteries at highway speeds for $3,000 in budget and a lot of sweat, blood, tears, and scrounging; it is called the Dolphin. The Nissan Leaf with batteries four times as dense can't even go half that distance under similar conditions, and doesn't even match the 100-120 mile real world range set by the Fiat X 1/9 "Solar Bolt" built by a bunch of high school students for a Tour De Sol competition of the late 1990s. Dick Finley had an electric truck design with a real-world 120 mile range in the 1990s using lead acid batteries named "Red Beastie". Dave Cloud's "Dolphin" is unnecessarily heavy by lugging around a 2,000 lb pack of golf cart batteries, and may not be a market-ready vehicle, as is also the case for "Solar Bolt" with 1400 lbs of lead on board or "Red Beastie" with 2,400 lbs of lead, but the principles and physics by which these vehicles operate remain unchanged when scaled to a yet lighter, more aerodynamic vehicle with all the bells and whistles and a NiMH or LiFePO4 battery pack that costs roughly the same per usable, installed kWh as AGM lead acid batteries do.

The GM EV1 would have been a sub $40,000 car in mass production, had a real world 150 mile range, and did 0-60 mph in under 8 seconds, competitive in performance with the $30,000+ Acura sport coupes of its time in 1998. GM had no real intent of selling the EV1 and actively ran misinformation campaigns and tactics designed to harass the consumer and to sow distrust in potential consumers, and they still ended up leasing every single one they had with people signing on to months long waiting lists just to get a chance to lease one.

You'd think Nissan could actually do better than the small startups and hobbyists with regard to range or even GM during 1998, especially with the massive 24 kWh pack within the Leaf. The Solectria Sunrise would be able to do at least 150 miles of range on that, 120+ miles range if it were 800 lbs heavier from all of the luxury features set as standard in today's cars. The greatest innovators and the greatest concepts within the realm of EVs are still in the primitive sorts of days that drag racing and performance vehicle tuning was during the 1950s, those days whee the very occasional specialty manufacturer like Devin was selling a precious few of their 160 mph capable Super Shillelagh or Apollo with their Buick V8 powered lightweight supercars, and the state of the art EV tech has in fact been in that kind of position since those days; AC Propulsion has managed to make just four TZeros as a comparison.

The small startups and certain exceptional hobbyists can't get anyone of importance to look at what they have. Crony Capitalism has increased the size of people's preconceived notions with regard to what constitutes rational decisions, leading them to make ill-informed decisions in order to stay ahead of the people they compete with. Money talks, and ruthlessness and poor ethics are an excellent way to accumulate money, especially within a crony capitalist society that encourages the behavior.

The "free market" is illusory. Nurturing neoconservative and neo-liberal notions as to its definition will destroy Capitalism itself, as it is inviting it from within the majority of people on a worldwide basis. Iran's auto industry is nationalized; without that, I highly doubt it would even be pursuing EVs at all.

Obama's Auto Czar, a position we really don't need in a supposedly "free market" country, would have been better served by Amory Lovins, than it would have Steve Rattner or Ron Bloom, both having heavy ties to the entrenched automakers and the unions within them. Amory Lovins' "hypercar" philosophy works very well, and facilitates simple, inexpensive, no-frills designs that many consumers today would like to buy but can't find it as a buying option, while offering a no-compromises 3-fold fuel efficiency increase over the baseline sold today. Dealerships and dealers are part and parcel to the crony capitalist model, with cars now designed to be excessively complicated and exclusively serviced by them, some of which is the product of excessive regulation itself, where local garage mechanics need $100,000 in tools just to stay viable with regard to servicing OBD-II and later automobiles. There is a reason Kia and Hyundai did well during the late 2000s, and may not do as well today now that all of their models come with everything fully loaded.

Less is more. This applies to both fuel thirsty performance sports cars, and family-oriented affordable EVs alike. The entirety of the OEM automobile manufacturers shun this approach. Ferrari, Audi, Porsche, Bentley, Bugatti, and Lamborghini build boutique, excessively heavy luxury cars that allow their owners to pose as race car drivers, while actual racecar drivers make due with re-engineering used Mazda Miatas to whip their quarter-million dollar plus asses within the canyons and backroads found in the U.S. an EV benefits from obvious efficiency improvements thanks to weight reduction and aerodynamic drag reduction. Less is more.

The most successful EV startups that don't need government money to survive are in Ethiopia, Pakistan, Brazil, China, India, and elsewhere. Even Iran's nationalized auto industry is getting ahead of us with regard to delivering affordable EVs, and also sells CNG hybrids and has been doing so for almost 10 years.

GM, Nissan, Honda, and the like aren't yet trying as hard as they can. They sell glorified conversions, the Versa and Fit being the chassis they use for their EVs, instead of the car being designed as an EV from the ground up with a strong attention to engineering the EV as a system, and not to using a chassis unoptimized for its needs. The Volt is an inefficient, costly, over-complicated nightmare that will work extremely well for the first 10 years of its life and become economically unviable to operate sometime soon afterward as parts reating to its ICE and powertrain and associated electricals start to wear out. 16 kWh is a huge pack; there are plenty of 4-seater EVs built as prototypes or conversions that can easily exceed 100 miles real-world range on that size of pack by paying attention to load reduction. The needlessly overweight, average-aerodynamics Volt with poorly designed passenger ergonomics can only use it for 40 miles. I would wage money that the average Nissan Leaf will remain road worthy for years longer than the average Chevy Volt. The electric Chevrolet Spark and Cruze concepts are a more honest effort on GM's part, although they fail to exceed what Nissan or Honda has done in any way. Ford's electric Focus effort is another glorified conversion with intentionally limited production volume and an embarrassingly high price tag.

Solectria was ready to do better than that, in 1996. GM could have done better, in 1998, than it is trying to do today. 3rd world shitholes are starting to out-do us on a technology whos time has come decades ago.

[ennui]

There is a mythmaking that surrounded EVs, starting with the EV-1 and Who Killed the Electric Car, which built the whole conspiracy around CHEVRON and NiMh batteries, etc... This mythmaking took a hit when lithium batteries supplanted NiMh, thus sidestepping the patent issue, and then the announcement of the Volt (and later the Leaf). (The Teslas and the like were always a vanity project of little relevance.) We now have other mass-produced EVs on the horizon like the Ford Focus. What instead was once seen by EV enthusiasts as a holy-grail "this will change the world!" event is fast becoming the more humdrum reality of cars that, when push comes to shove, don't make economic sense, especially in a recession. Hence these cars are not selling that well.

Where you save most of your money in car ownership is to not be making car payments. I paid off my 2004 Mazda-3 over 3 years ago. That amounts to $300 saved each month, which can pay for a lot of expensive gas. EVs save money, but like a record-player, every time you recharge, you wear the battery out, something that is rarely factored into the cost-per-mile to drive. So you are not likely to drive the car into the ground like a Volvo on a single battery pack. Unless the world devolves into Mad Max nearly overnight, gas prices will not reach levels that will heavily accelerate the payback time.

If you have the money, EVs are a good way to escape the carbon trap as long as your electrons don't come from dirty sources, but for most of us, they simply aren't a solution, and they won't be.

There really are a dwindling number of EV fanatics because the facts I've presented are now pretty well understood. It will take much much higher gas prices or something like an EESTOR to significantly change things, and we all know what happened there (nothing).

The constant reaching into the past (Solectria sunrise) and bashing of present-day EVs based on some perceived flaw ("unoptimized Volt", "anti-competitive regulations") is an attempt to keep this myth alive. The thought process--if only the planets magically aligned, then maybe we'd have our EV nirvana.

Well, we live on the world as it is. Most regulations for autos are there for a very good reason, not to keep small players out of the game. Considering that the majors ARE producing EVs, there's really no need for small fry like Aptera to attempt to compete. For better or worse, a car has been defined as 4 wheels on the floor and a steel body. That's what the global supply-chain is ramped up to support. That's what the public expects. And that's what an EV's battery pack needs to push around the road, not carbon-fiber or 2 or 3 wheels.

We may very well see a resurgence of flimsy micro-cars like what Europe had after WWII, but it took a war to produce conditions for that, and it will take a similar scale of crisis to do the same here or elsewhere in the developed world. We haven't seen it yet.

[dsula]

Looking through the website I finally found a price, $19,900 after the Federal electric vehicle tax credit. IOW they are about $28,400 on the showroom floor.

I predict they will not sell many for that price, sure it would be great to go all electric in a super aerodynamic design but there is not going to be consumer acceptance on par with a 4 wheel automobile, and that is where the price puts the competition.

Those prices are ridiculous. There is no new technology in this vehicle. Gyroscopes have been used for stabilization for many decades. I would say a fair price for this glorified bike is about $6,000.

You should move ahead and go into production if you think you can sell it for $6000.

[Plantagenet]

I will certainly not argue that Obama hasn't been biased in favor of EVs, but what has been implemented is very misleading and misguided..... we get cronyism when that money expended could have done something valuable for our society, or at least been kept in our pockets instead......3rd world shitholes are starting to out-do us on a technology whos time has come decades ago.

[The_Toecutter]

There is a mythmaking that surrounded EVs, starting with the EV-1 and Who Killed the Electric Car, which built the whole conspiracy around CHEVRON and NiMh batteries, etc...

It is not myth. The facts presented in that film are well documented. There really were efforts among automakers to sabotage their own products and to keep people ignorant about their capabilities. There really were efforts on part of the oil industry to stall adoption of it, and people within government were really complicit in fighting this threat to the status quo. This doesn't apply to only EVs, but to innovation in the auto industry in general. Read "Taken For a Ride" by Jack Doyle if you are unfamiliar with what I am talking about, and get back to me when we can have a real, fact-oriented conversation.

This mythmaking took a hit when lithium batteries supplanted NiMh, thus sidestepping the patent issue, and then the announcement of the Volt (and later the Leaf).

LiFePO4 batteries came around nearly 10 years later than NiMH, and have flourished largely because their patent is public domain and anyone is free to make their own variant. They are superior to NiMH in terms of specific capacity, but the fact that NiMH for EVs was kept off the market has without a doubt helped set early adoption back an entire decade. Toyota had to cancel the RAV4 EV because of what happened with the NiMH battery, as their supplier Panasonic was no longer able to make them as the result of a lawsuit.

The Volt and Leaf likely wouldn't even exist today if it wasn't for the public outcry and public relations blowback that "Who Killed the Electric Car" and a resurfacing of the facts that it contained entering the public consciousness created against the major automakers. More people started demanding a change in product offerings as a result of this film, and the information contained within it had even managed to influence some politicians with regard to energy policy.

(The Teslas and the like were always a vanity project of little relevance.)

While true, that was not the goal of either Martin Eberhardt or Elon Musk. As soon as they get the capacity to mass produce in the needed volume, they have every intent of bringing a sub $30,000, 150+ mile range EV to market. I have seen dozens of studies going through the number crunching and confirming that it is very possible, some of them from as far back as 1998(Such as "Evaluation of Electric Vehicle Production and Operating Costs" by Cuenca and Gaines). Many hobbyists ahve done it for even cheaper than these studies claim is possible, albeit they are using donor chassis and their own labor, plus non-OEM suitable parts.

We now have other mass-produced EVs on the horizon like the Ford Focus.

You mean an EV that was meant for the higher-end consumer that comes standard with expensive options such as a premium sound system and heated/leather seats, and not to be affordable, right? The base model Focus would have been a much lighter and less expensive basis to start with, were they actually serious about this, and not starting with a platform that has hundreds of pounds and $5,000+ worth of extras added to it before the electric drive is even added. The additional weight also harms range and further compromises consumer acceptance, as range is the main cause of anxiety among prospective EV buyers.

It doesn't help that Ford chose a vehicle designed to be run on gasoline for its platform. An electric drive lends itself to much different design possibilities than an ICE.

But at least it's a start.

What instead was once seen by EV enthusiasts as a holy-grail "this will change the world!" event is fast becoming the more humdrum reality of cars that, when push comes to shove, don't make economic sense, especially in a recession. Hence these cars are not selling that well.

These cars are selling as many as are being made. And only a few thousand at that. It doesn't help that we are in very bad economic times, when the technology was ready while times were prosperous. Now few have the money to even dream of buying a new car.

Where you save most of your money in car ownership is to not be making car payments. I paid off my 2004 Mazda-3 over 3 years ago. That amounts to $300 saved each month, which can pay for a lot of expensive gas.

All true. However, for those buying a new car, an EV at an affordable price would make much more economic sense than a gasoline burner at the same price.

My bicycle makes even more economic sense.

Being 1200 miles away from my conversion for the majority of each year has put a damper on progress, but being on vacation and back home these last 2 weeks, it is now drivable, albeit not yet road legal. My Soliton 1 controller is mounted, and I may finally test drive the car again tomorrow with my own purchased components, and not some custom controller that I borrowed last year to test it with.

A conversion, at least on paper, can make far more economic sense than purchasing any new car on the market. A $12,000 LiFePO4 pack is going to be the majority of my car's cost, and I'll have spent less than $20,000 in total, including restoration and fabrication. Most new cars retail for well above that, and have inferior performance. That, and if it is as efficient as calculated, I will sacrifice nothing with regard to range. 200+ miles will be plenty. Performance will be superior to cars costing twice as much; it has already effortlessly done a nice, smokey burnout.

EVs save money, but like a record-player, every time you recharge, you wear the battery out, something that is rarely factored into the cost-per-mile to drive.

Yes. However, making an EV save money is all about designing it to do so. Throwing components together in a haphazard manner will not be likely to yield results that are cheap to operate. I've seen both extremes among conversions; there are long range trucks with lead acid(such as "Red Beastie" or "Polar Bear") and hundreds of LiFePO4 conversions that break even at well under $2.00/gallon gasoline factoring in battery replacement. There are also plenty of short range AGM conversions that break even well north of $10/gallon gasoline.

So you are not likely to drive the car into the ground like a Volvo on a single battery pack.

The relatively cheap LiFePO4 from CALB and Thundersky actually mean you can drive the car into the ground like a Volvo on one pack. 2,000 cycles to 80% discharge on a vehicle with 125 miles range, with a shelf life of no less than 1 decade(some conversions on the road still use LiFePO4 packs from 2003 while delivering the original range and performance to this day), do the math... and even then the battery isn't really spent, just at 80% of nameplate rating after those 2,000 cycles. Someone willing to settle with reduced range and performance could still keep driving the pack into the ground.

Just make sure you have the right kind of charger and a controller with a battery current limit function first, and know how to set it up, or you will be sorry for your purchase of that pack.

Unless the world devolves into Mad Max nearly overnight, gas prices will not reach levels that will heavily accelerate the payback time.

That's the strange thing about living on planet Earth; entire nations can devolve into Mad Max virtually overnight. There is so much historical precedent for it that I would be pleasantly surprised if no black swan event were to ever surface in my lifetime, or even the next decade.

That being said, hurricane Sandy and the tsunami that his Japan semi-recently have really proven the value of EVs, being that they are not vulnerable to supply disruptions of gasoline.

If you have the money, EVs are a good way to escape the carbon trap as long as your electrons don't come from dirty sources, but for most of us, they simply aren't a solution, and they won't be.

Them not being a solution has more to do with their lack of availability at an affordable price. I'm certain that the auto industry, with all of their hundreds of billions of dollars at their disposal and technology that has advanced by leaps and bounds, could run circles around high school/college kids and hobbyists from 20 years ago, or even their own products from 20 years ago that they refused to sell, yet they aren't.

Why is that?

There really are a dwindling number of EV fanatics because the facts I've presented are now pretty well understood.

Have you seen the online EV communities as of late? The so-called "fanatics" have grown in number by orders of magnitude. Maybe it's because more people are seeing the merit of converting a car to an EV when they can't exactly go out and buy a superior product from the major automakers at a cheaper price. The availability of parts is well ahead of what it was when I first started planning my conversion at the age of 16, and this expanding market-base of EV "fanatics" has a lot to do with it.

It shouldn't be cheaper to engineer old cars into EVs with superior range and performance to the current offerings from industry, yet it is. Something is not right with this picture. Racecar enthusiasts feel the same way; the folks at Mulholland Raceway and other racing collectives constantly whine about the lack of lightweight, simple, overpowered vehicles and how they have to re-engineer old ones to meet their needs. Their market-share goes untapped, as catering to it might cannibalize the sale of more profitable, heavier, more complicated vehicles. It is a travesty that so-called "sports cars" like the Bugatti Veyron or Aston Marton V12 Vanquish weigh in at over 4,000 lbs, when they used much lighter materials than the steel-bodied cars of decades past.

Maybe one day you will understand that the auto industry sells what it wants people to buy, and not what people want to buy. Huge difference. Then when they start losing money, the government bails them out with tax dollars. Rinse and repeat. This pattern has been going on for decades.

It will take much much higher gas prices or something like an EESTOR to significantly change things, and we all know what happened there (nothing).

Not even. Things are starting to change, especially in DIY market.

The constant reaching into the past (Solectria sunrise) and bashing of present-day EVs based on some perceived flaw ("unoptimized Volt", "anti-competitive regulations") is an attempt to keep this myth alive.

The thought process--if only the planets magically aligned, then maybe we'd have our EV nirvana.

Well, the cars of the past ARE superior to today's offerings in terms of range and utility. The Volt really is unoptimized; it wasn't designed to be an affordable car but a luxury vehicle of sorts from the outset, and would have been much cheaper as a pure EV anyhow with the elimination of half of its powertrain and subsequent weight reduction. The technology is much better today. If you can't see what is absurd about this picture, then my point has escaped your grasp.

I'm not trying to keep some myth alive. I'm commenting on the absurdity of what is being offered today versus what is actually possible. As an engineer, this disparity irks me to no end.

Well, we live on the world as it is. Most regulations for autos are there for a very good reason, not to keep small players out of the game.

Honda and Toyota in the past would have heavily disagreed with that, as would NASCAR legends like Smokey Yunick. Small players are largely what drives technology forward, like it or not, and today they are more marginalized than ever. Before there was Volkswagen, Ferdinand Porsche had very humble beginnings. With today's regulatory climate, there are no Ferdinand Porsche's able to get their foot into the market. It's virtually impossible. Alan Cocconi, Dave Cloud, Jack Rickard, Lee Hart, John Wayland, and many, many others are the closest we have to that; their ideas actually work very well and put to shame anything the major industry does.

Considering that the majors ARE producing EVs, there's really no need for small fry like Aptera to attempt to compete. For better or worse, a car has been defined as 4 wheels on the floor and a steel body. That's what the global supply-chain is ramped up to support. That's what the public expects. And that's what an EV's battery pack needs to push around the road, not carbon-fiber or 2 or 3 wheels.

The examples of the past that I cite were real cars with 4 wheels and no carbon anything, and retain superior performance to today's offerings from the majors on inferior battery technology to what exists today.

It is funny that you mention Aptera and a 3-wheel vehicle in this conversation, as they designed it with 3 wheels precisely to avoid the regulations that would otherwise crush them. The market for a 3-wheel vehicle is limited, however, and it is most unfortunate that Aptera is also a victim of malfeasance.

Without competition to the major players, the industry has become mostly stagnant. There's no innovation, no big improvements, just more of the same and small, incremental changes that refuse to affect change in our consumption patterns. This is awfully convenient for those making money off of the whole thing, too...

We may very well see a resurgence of flimsy micro-cars like what Europe had after WWII, but it took a war to produce conditions for that, and it will take a similar scale of crisis to do the same here or elsewhere in the developed world. We haven't seen it yet.

I'm not advocating a resurgence of flimsy microcars. I'm talking about following the design philosophy that Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has suggested; that philosophy is one of dramatically increasing efficiency without the consumer having to compromise anything. There are countless ways to do that, and if you know what goes into designing a car, you really don't need a whole lot of imagination to figure it out. There are more than a few hobbyists and tinkerers with EVs that are road-legal, safe, fast, uncompromising on comforts or utility and need roughly one-third of the energy per mile as what Ford's Focus EV or Chevrolet's Volt needs. The automakers should feel ashamed.

Once again, we are failing to learn the mistakes of history, and the major players conveniently benefit from this for the time being. We need to improve efficiency before a crisis, otherwise that crisis is going to crush us.

[ennui2]

"Maybe one day you will understand that the auto industry sells what it wants people to buy, and not what people want to buy. Huge difference. Then when they start losing money, the government bails them out with tax dollars. Rinse and repeat. This pattern has been going on for decades."

We'll have to agree to disagree there. I think the way autos are built reflects the perfect distillation of commodity prices and economy of scale and safety--mated against consumer wants and needs. I am not convinced that we could see a wholescale change to how cars are built that would make them significantly lighter and more aero at the same pricepoint. You just can't have it all. I do not see the collusion that you do, and the failure of small-fry like Aptera that claimed they could build cars a whole new way back up my idea that we've reached a point of diminishing returns with auto design.

Once we start seeing big changes to car design, it will be because gas prices force consumers to accept compromises they currently aren't willing to accept. You may not see them as compromises, but the general public does. Until then, expect only marginal improvements like HCCI and increasing adoption of hybrids.

"That being said, hurricane Sandy and the tsunami that his Japan semi-recently have really proven the value of EVs, being that they are not vulnerable to supply disruptions of gasoline."

The reason gasoline supplies were limited was because electricity that is needed to power the pumps was knocked out. People impacted would not have been able to plug in their EVs unless they had a $50K+ solar array on their roof. Even in this rich suburban town some areas lost power for several days. Just the other day I saw a red Chevy Volt in the parking lot of the local drug store. If that person lived where the power was out, assuming the gas tank was empty, he would have been SOL, at least without a very long extension cord. It's one thing to be able to afford an EV, but it's another to be able to afford a PV array to charge it when the grid goes down.

[Beery1]

It's finally a reality Two wheeled transport that doesn't tip over.

Lit Motors C-1

My bicycle doesn't tip over either, as long as I put my foot down when I stop. Why is it that there are bozos throughout the world building over-complicated follies like this? I mean, building a car is complicated enough, what with all the extra junk today's motorist wants in them, and now they want to include gyroscopes just so they can have a motorbike that can balance without the rider putting a foot down.

And if it's battery-powered, this thing will weigh a couple of tons.

[vision-master]

Stokemonkey

[Beery1]

Adding a motor to a bicycle is like building a sewage treatment facility in the middle of Yosemite National Park - it undermines everything that makes the thing worthwhile. I mean the lady in the photo may as well buy a motorbike.

[Tanada]

Adding a motor to a bicycle is like building a sewage treatment facility in the middle of Yosemite National Park - it undermines everything that makes the thing worthwhile. I mean the lady in the photo may as well buy a motorbike.

Every step in the right direction is value added to our culture, even if you personally can't see it.