[Big Dave]

A few thoughts on a new people’s car.

1. There are two niches such a car can fill. One is the pure city car. Short range. Low speed. Easy to park. Lots of interior volume. To me this is where a series hybrid makes sense. A pure electric with a 5 kw Briggs & Stratton generator to extend range as long as you don’t want to drive over 25 MPH/ The second niche is for the guy who has a long commute from way out in the burbs. Maybe a tandem two seater. TDI with a dual-clutch 8 speed. Forget hybrid or electric. It has to have 200 mile range. The shape approximates a light-plane fuselage – long (to get a really good boat-tail), fairly tall (comfortable upright seating and easy egress/digress) and narrow. What worries me is the cross-wind performance of these vehicles. I drive in the wind a lot and my 7,000 lb, 80 inch wide pickup sometimes gets blown all over the place. A long, tall, skinny car would be a nightmare. Anybody who has tried to taxi a lightplane in Wyoming knows the white-knuckle feeling. In both cases the car has to be inexpensive because they are limited-utility vehicles.
2. The cars I described need two bits of relief from government. Crash safety regs. To meet US crash safety regs, car must be either heavy or very expensive. Heavy means kiss your MPG goodbye, particularly in hilly terrain. A carbon-fiber car will mean only Warren buffet can afford it. What does Warren Buffet need a “people’s car” for? Stamped steel is well-developed tech but a few years back Chrysler experimented with fiberglass cars with very few parts in the bodywork – hence low labor cost. They did this OK in South America but could not make them in the US because of emissions regs (fiberglass layup emits lots of styrene). Also the US EPA is gonna have to let its hatred of the diesel go. I am starting to hear from guys with 6.4 liter Ford and 6.7 liter Cummins-dodge trucks who have run the warranty off their trucks and are dumping their EGR and DPF and are seeing big jumps in MPG. 16 MPG trucks are now 22 MPG trucks, simply by dumping the EPA junk. We’re talking a 38% improvement by simply dumping the junk. (Truth in posting: Indiana does not and won’t have a Inspection and Maintenance program for emissions controls stuff. They had one and it nearly caused a riot.) A 38% improvement obtained that easily isn’t chopped liver. I wonder what kind of mileage you can get with a VW TDI Jetta if you shirtcan the emissions junk.
3. To an extent, we are seeing some development of cars that are gadget-friendly but come Spartan from the showroom. Think X-Box. Still the minority but the flexibility of an X-Box to customer wishes is tough to beat.
4. To justify building a cost efficient factory for such cars, you’ll have to sell at least 200,000 units a year. Right now, I don’t see that kind of demand, unless the cars can be sold under $8,000/unit.
On traffic synchronization:
Synchronization can be done. I used to live, back in the 70s in a town that is constrained by a narrow river valley to be a long stringbean of a town. It had two main streets through town, each one-way in opposing directions. They timed the lights so that if you drove 22 MPH you could drive all the way through town and never stop. That was important because a US highway passed through the town. The one-way streets were the key because they made left turns a snap.

Ohio often has pre-warning lights for stop lights on rural roads out about a quarter mile. This is quite conducive to coasting. I wish Indiana had them.