Great topic! Funny reading the comments about taking something inherently inefficient and trying to make it efficient, or taking something inherently efficient and turn it into a tank with wheels
I've got the aluminum frame and Lexan body from the electric car I built in high school, and I can't bring myself to recycle it, and yet it needs so much work to get it going again. I built it after hours, and when I was skipping class my senior year. A year later, a class was formed that taught the design, construction, and competition that we had learned in an unstructured way. Each year new cars were built, and the components from the first car were stripped and reused. That's how I came to own a 3/4" round aluminum frame.
The design is a reverse trike with a very reclined seating position, and about half an inch of ground clearance. It feels like the wildest sports car you've been in even though it only had a 2hp motor never went much above 40 mph. The steering wasn't precise enough to handle those speeds very gracefully, so the twitchiness made for white-knuckle driving.
To get the thing driving again, I would need:
Motor
Controller
Battery
3 bicycle wheels with extra thick rims and thicker gauge spokes
Brake system (original never worked well, shouldn't have passed inspection, and was responsible for some spectacular accidents)
Chain
Sprockets
I'll dig up pictures later of what I've got, but my main hangup on working on this is the time and money necessary to get it going, and the lack of practical purpose of the vehicle. It's illegal and unsafe to drive on the road, and probably illegal and unsafe to have on other pathways shared by pedestrians or bicycles. On the other hand, just talking about the car reminds me of the thrill of driving something light as a feather with a motor that likes to lay down torque.
