[elhigh]

I'm sure aerohead will be along to weigh in on this in short order; this is right up his street.

For my own part, I want to comment on the human factors.

The wing profile would mean you could cover the car, as time and money permit, with solar panels. It would become a de facto perpetual motion machine. You wouldn't need to plug it in very often. If your daily commute is fairly short, you might never plug it in except under unusual circumstances.

The wing profile places several demands on the user however. Seating would necessarily be cramped and likely relatively unadjustable. Getting in and out would be radically different from a conventional car and possibly a lot more time consuming. That may not sound like a big deal but just try spending an extra ten seconds - it doesn't sound like much, does it - struggling with a canopy in a pouring rain and a ten-year-old Falcon starts to look pretty good.

The wing profile doesn't rise into the viewing plane of most drivers. For lots of drivers if you aren't tall, you aren't there. Similarly if you aren't wide you also aren't there, to which many motorcyclists can painfully attest. People are creatures of habit, and are in the habit of looking for things that are more or less car shaped while driving. Things shaped like cars are to be avoided while driving, things that are shaped like pedestrians are to be avoided. Things outside of those two very basic silhouettes take just a tad more time to process, and in that time accidents happen. You might build a perfectly lovely wing shaped car based on completely conventional VW underpinnings, how could anyone ever fail to recognize that it's a car, of course it's a car I can see that standing here looking at it, but can you expect every Tom Dick and Sheila affixing her lashes on her morning coffee run to understand that in the quarter-second's attention she lavishes upon you and your not-conventional ride? Maybe not.

The teardrop is already more or less car shaped. Cars have been evolving toward the teardrop ideal for the last 20 years, some more quickly than others but it's definitely happening. The Prius is probably the purest representation of this form and has been on the roads now for a decade, no driver looks at Prius and fails to see a car. They might fail to notice it, but if they notice it they don't see something that isn't a car.

The teardrop gives you more height. If you're as tall as the Falcon in the next lane over, the inattentive Bruce in the gigantic GMC trying to change lanes will see you there and probably not merge all over you. Probably. Your roofline is just visible beyond the top of his fender, so maybe he has an inkling not to try the change just yet.

The teardrop gives you radically more volume within its shape. Volume = seats, space for heads not encased within nacelle canopies, more seats in the back, and doors shaped more or less like all the other doors on the road. That right there is great, it means you have a wide world of door hardware to choose from, hardware that's already been engineered to be sturdy and reliable and all you have to do is find the right stuff whose geometry is close to what you're building, and you're good to go.