Here's pictures of the glorified tricycle with the body and safety removed. It is indeed a tricycle.
Now that the rear suspension is operational and works, it's time to re-design the body around it. That Milan SL velomobile in the background is being used as a template for the next body shell. I'm scaling the shape to fit my own parameters an vehicle requirements. It's getting a tubed roll cage of about 15-20 lbs to go with the next body shell.
I'm considering in the longer term my ideal pack for this vehicle. A 24S5P pack of Molicel P45B might be the ticket. Would give me 88.8Vnom, and if I set them to 30A peak per string, sustained max discharge for minutes would never harm them and I'd be able to dump 10 kW peak to my Leafbike 3T wind motor. The pack itself would provide about 2 kWh usable capacity and only weigh 8,016g(at least in cells alone). If the Leafbike motor can handle 10 kW peaks just fine, I may decide to try to crank things up to even 12 kW. That would be good for 0-60 mph in < 7 seconds with a top speed over 90 mph... The full charge voltage would also still be below the 103V limit of my Satiator charger, and unlike going to higher voltages than 24S, I can still find readily available and affordable BMS for that setup. Sure, it may not do triple digits like I originally dreamed about, but it would be close enough.
If I go to a higher voltage, say somewhere near 130V, the above stays the same with the exception of increasing top speed to somewhere near 120 mph. But I add considerable additional expense to do such, in the low 4-figures. Might be worth it, if I can make the vehicle stable enough at that speed, which will be a challenge without compromising too greatly the low drag given how little laden mass it will have at speed.
It will be a while before that dream pack is built, and by then, better batteries might be available, plus I need to a higher voltage controller suited to my application, given the 72V limitation of the ASI BAC4000 I'm using. I wouldn't dare try either of the above without a completed body shell and integrated roll cage, and the entire rest of the trike upgraded to handle this(wheels, tires, brakes, hubs, roll cage, ect). Even then it would be a death machine.
If it's going to be a death machine, I'll make sure that aesthetically it looks the part, like it came out of some Mad Max film. Silver Baphomet hood ornamet, rust colored paint job, sloppily-painted red anarchy sign on the left side, a real Fallout Shelter sign bolted onto the right side as a derailleur access hatch, pentagram wheel covers, maybe even orange LEDs in the front wheels to make them look like they are on fire when the vehicle is in motion, are all part of the plan... So are solar panels, about 150W worth is all I really need or can fit. I will adorn it well. The "Bike Life" crowd would approve. They already saw the iteration of what I posted here last year with the previous body.
For those who aren't familiar with "Bike Life":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypv940k9u-IWhenever I've encountered these groups, the participants thought my last design iteration was interesting. I don't know where I'd find footage of it, but I'm sure someone was recording me doing donuts with it because people had their phones out when I was doing them. Lots of people thought it was a hilarious vehicle, especially after learning it was technically legal(unlike most of theirs). Coming ahead of or even matching their vehicles at stoplight drag races up to about 20 mph garnered lots of amusement. So if I can up the ponies from 4 to 15, it will become faster than most of their vehicles outright!
Once it's finished, I would LOVE to take this thing to "Wasteland Weekend" out in California. I'd totally ride in on that thing and walk around wearing my cloak and plague doctor mask looking like I crawled out of some neo-Dark Age. I could carry a Geiger counter with my bucket of leeches and fit right in. Might even be able to get rich hipsters there to pay me money to build them one of these vehicles or something similar to it, the appeal being that it would truly be functional in the sort of energy and resource-scarce scenarios depicted in the post apocalyptic films that inspired this festival, AND would also be practical to use in the real world as it is today. Grid electricity, generator electricity, solar power, and pedal power could all run such a thing, either by themselves or as any combination thereof, and it would be extremely efficient no matter what is used to fuel it, besting a car in miles travelled per unit of energy input by 2 whole orders of magnitude, a motorcycle by at least one order of magnitude, and beating out a normal unmotorized bicycle by a massive but smaller margin as well when it comes to miles per food calorie. By choosing 16" moto rims, it would even be able to use 20" BMX tires/tubes in a pinch which are about the most common bicycle tire and tube size you can find in the U.S.(every child's bike has them), albeit it would be suicide to do more than 35 mph on BMX tires. In SHTF scenario, it's not like you'll be able to order new DOT rubber off Amazon, and 35 mph is still better than walking, so it's still a way to keep mobile if tire availability becomes a bottleneck for most vehicles! Can't go wrong there...
AdamB wrote:Missouri is an interesting tour along I-70 (I can name the fuel stops, hotels, rest areas, along most of that stretch from memory) and gives you the impression that for a Bible thumping state, they sure like porn.
I don't reckon' dims folk call it the "Show Me State" for nothin'!
Well, that I can agree with. I've found the people of Missouri basic, and down to earth, and quite reasonable to deal with, and I love the farm country in the north of the state, and the northern part of the Ozarks in the south. Quick check on my travel records indicates I've visited 87% of the county seats in Missouri. Like I said, it doesn't all look as bad as some of your photos, which is why I asked.
These are urban environments in my photos, not rural. It can get very dangerous at night. Some places, you can buy a house for a few hundred dollars, but you won't be allowed to move into it without six-figures worth of work and materials invested, and there's plenty of cops to enforce codes, but they're never there when you actually need or want them nor do they reduce violence in the streets(they actually increase it). There are rural areas that are every bit as decayed in the surrounding area. At least Constitutional Carry is a thing here, sort of. Missouri still has lots of arcane gun laws that run afoul of the concept, but the 2nd amendment has not been as eroded overall in this state when compared to most of the rest of the U.S.
I've been to many other urban areas in the U.S. that have looked the same for large sections. Maybe someday I'll get to see Detroit. That one has got to have a much larger blight section than all of the cities I've seen.
Where I'm at, the blight is a network of patches and corridors having the spatial dimensions of multiple city blocks, most of the time, but there are sections of blight that are square miles in size, and they crisscross around or patch the general region within a 30 mile radius, with islands of middle class interspersed about clustering around all the strip malls and chain stores, and the rich often in gated communities. By blight, I mean all of the ghettos, decaying areas, homeless encampments, superfund sites, abandoned areas, basically all places you generally wouldn't want to live in or adjacent to. Places that have little of anything desirable or needed. THOSE places are rapidly growing, all over the U.S., and where I live is no exception.
Many other large cities I've seen have a similar issue, especially in the rust belt, but also some in the midwest and deep south. Mississippi was a very interesting state.
Like I said before, get that A/C thing and add seating for another 4 and I'd be interested! Seating for only 1 more if you could make it as fun as any 2-wheeler larger than 250cc's.
Any off-the-shelf solution for air conditioning that would work adds an amount of mass that would make it noticeably and greatly more difficult to pedal the vehicle with the motor disabled. The amount of time and research it would take to develop an inexpensive and reliable system of such that keep the mass sufficiently low enough for use in this vehicle would be as much time and research as the rest of the vehicle. That's why it isn't a priority. I could make something "good enough" that isn't an AC system. It would be a small bottle of ice water in a refillable thermos, that periodically mists the cabin area, could provide hours of cooling while weighing well under 5 lbs. But that's only useful for a one-seater, and you have to fill it before each use. Simple, almost as effective, if mildly inconvenient to prepare before use.
Which brings us to a 2+ seater vehicle needed to justify an air conditioning unit specially designed for it. Two or more occupants as opposed to one occupant increases the loading that the chassis has to support. This requires more mass, sufficiently so that the vehicle becomes inoperable by one rider with the motor disabled. Making the bicycle drivetrain useless. So now you have a microcar. And an AC system is not as crippling of a mass penalty for the application, so off the shelf solutions might be viable.
I think a 4-seater monocoque that is safe in a crash with a much heavier vehicle could be made somewhere around 800 lbs, lugging around a 10 kWh battery. It's going to be much heavier and wider than a velomobile and have about twice the drag. It would still be slippery, and such a vehicle able to maintain 70 mph on flat ground with only 3 kW is within the realm of possibility. It would have passenger room comparable to a foreign sub-compact car from the 50s, so "good enough", even if not ideal. Think Fiat 500, Trabant, VW Beetle, ect. It could be designed to have at least that basic level of practicality, but as safe as a modern compact car. There's no reason it couldn't have air conditioning either, and a system designed specifically for that size/volume of vehicle can be done, but may not be critically necessary.
A two-seater sports car of about 600 lbs could also be done, and if done right, it would be lunacy. Imagine an enclosed cage with the weight and power of a high-end motorcycle, but with AWD, instant slip detection, vector control, and like the 4-seater proposed in the above paragraph, the aerodynamics could be so slippery that you could hold 160 mph on about 40 horsepower and 70 mph on 4 horsepower? I'd love to scale a model of a Milan SL velomobile to fit into this shape, having 4 wheels each with a hub motor, a rear track more narrow than the front, and more ground clearance. A sports car body styled after the Jaguar D-Type, Ferrari 250GTO Breadvan, and such, but much more slippery and svelte. Offset seating like a VW XL1, to keep frontal area down. Might end up with a CdA of around 0.1 m^2 or less.
THIS is where both versions would get their efficiency from, although the 4-seater might look a lot different.
Because either vehicle(2 or 4 seater) would be so light, standard off-the-shelf ebike parts would be good enough to give it a dangerous level of performance, for cheap and without much added mass over the glider. Once the vehicle is at speed, the drag would be so low that the e-bike parts could cool from being used well below their continuous ratings, and it would accelerate to speed so quickly that the parts wouldn't have a chance to become stressed. There'd be little wind resistance to slow it down when accelerating at highway speeds, and no transmission or differential to sap power so all the power would go directly to the wheels. You'd only need a 10 kWh pack to get some pretty acceptable range in such a vehicle if it did interstate travel(speeding at > 75 mph sometimes reaching 100 mph for passing) at 30-40 Wh/mile, which would also allow for that kind of lightness of the finished product since the vehicles entire traction battery would weigh about as much as a lead acid starter battery in an turbodiesel pickup truck! With off the shelf parts, the entire EV powertrain system including battery could weigh well under 200 lbs.
Then shove like 200 peak horsepower in either. And you don't have to lean it in corners and could drive it in the snow/ice, as it is AWD. I bet 0-60 mph acceleration of under 3 seconds would be doable in such thing for well under $8k in EV parts, high-end electric dragster batteries included.
There's a lot of appeal to that.
My one-seater is a proof of concept that may evolve into something like what is described above. But one occupant vs. 2 or more occupants require a different set of design parameters and opens/closes different vehicle possibilities. For a one-seater, designing it to be pedalable with a disabled motor makes a LOT of sense, especially as SHTF transportation, and the weight can be kept low enough for that to be possible. But the motor and rest of the EV drive system plus all of the mechanicals improved to handle the extra speed can still be there to allow it to out-accelerate most other vehicles and reach well above street-legal highway speeds, without too greatly compromising its pedalability to render that pedalability a mere novelty. Another reason I designed my prototype the way I did. The pedaling is actually functional, by itself, and the aerodynamics make it faster than normal bicycles in most circumstances in spite of the added mass, which allows this vehicle to legally pass as a bicycle in many areas. I wouldn't have that feature for anything with more than one seat, not just because of the lack of usability in such a system(at least by itself), but also expense and complexity.
The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the old growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder. ~Thomas Jefferson