Quote:
Originally Posted by freebeard
The reason I ask is that I like the idea of making it wheel-chair accessible.
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When I broke my ankle this spring, I started paying a WHOLE LOT MORE attention to handycapped access.
Nearly all EVs are "Fly by Wire", using electric components to send signals. That gives more design flexibility. No reason why a car couldn't be designed with a foot pedal, but moving just one potentiometer and a pair of wires to the dashboard makes it a hand-control.
In residential construction, there's a concept known as "aging in place". A house is designed with some small changes that you don't really notice, such as kitchen counters being slightly lower, and how and where staircases are or aren't used. As an able-bodied person, you barely notice the differences, but living there, if you have to use a wheel-chair or walker or have other physical/health problems, the house is already designed to accomodate you.
I like the concept of designing a car that isn't specifically for a wheel-chair user per se, but is already designed with that in mind so that just a very simple/cheap/quick modification would take care of it.
Designing a car from scratch, like this project, is the perfect opportunity to "build-in" clever little features like this.
I also like the idea of a separate pedal for regenerative brakes. On my hybrid truck project, I'm leaning towards separate accelerators for the engine and electric motor systems, as this maximizes the driver's control. Any sort of computer-controlled or automated system does not take into account all driving situations, whereas the driver can.