Thread: Morelli Shape
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Old 09-17-2010, 12:18 AM   #101 (permalink)
RobertSmalls
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VLC has frontal area of 18.3 ft², the Dolphin's 17.3ft², and the Insight, Aptera 2e, and EV1 at 20ft². Accordingly, these cars (except the draggy Insight) all have very similar CdA, despite the radically different designs. I'm coming to suspect it may not be possible to do better than these cars without a dramatic step like going tandem, packaging humans prone or supine instead of upright, or going to two wheels and a body that leans.

We don't actually know the Cd of the Dolphin, but posts #63-65 shed some light on it: http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...tml#post174013

But then it appears that we don't actually know the CdA of the VLC. Two different wind tunnels, two different results? I'd go with the real-world coastdown test, whose results are published here: Edison2: The Very Light Car (X PRIZE Contender) - Edison2 - Very Light Blog - About CoastdownTesting

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