The Morgan Lifecar, the Atlantic, the Opel EcoSpeedster = three cars I love--I love the Opel so much it makes me want to touch myself--BUT to quote from the first post on this topic,
Quote:
Originally Posted by JackMcCornack
What makes this project interesting is I have about a $2000 body budget. ]
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The Opel is my dream car. I would rather own and drive that Opel than a Veyron or Enzo or any other car on this planet. If I were Bill Gates I'd be driving one already (they say they're not for sale, but if you said, "I want one, here's a million dollars," they might let go of a demo model). They claim 112 mpg at 140 mph and as far as I've heard (and I've been looking into this car for 7 years) the only fudge is the traditional one of using imperial gallons. Okay, so it only gets 90 mpg at 140, I hardly ever go 140 anyway, I'm sure it's well over 100 mpg at half that speed.
So I'm trying to make something cheap and easy to build, in hopes other folks will build others like it. It's not going to be carbon fiber in structure nor body (the Opel is both) and it's going to be a two seater (the Opel is no more of a two seater than the FIA rules require for records in that class--Daytona Prototypes and Le Mans prototypes are the same way) and it's not going to be anywhere near as pretty. I get great pleasure from looking at aeroporn but I know my limitations.
From MetroMPG:
> Another advantage to this KISS/minimum compound curves design is
> models are relatively easy to make.
For me, models are ridiculously easy to make. The Foam Ranger (my car sized 3 axis CNC low density foam router) was ridiculously hard to make--took me a few years--but now that I've got it I can make an accurate scale model in styrofoam the day after I'm done concocting the Rhino files.
Which brings me to my next technical question: How large a scale model do I need for reasonable prediction of airflow on the full size version, using tuft testing on a moving platform (affixed to a boom on the front of a car)?