849 MPG Indiana HS Students

[bertb]

Saw this article at Indiana High School Students Make a Winning 849 MPG Car | MAKE

Looks like a great little design.

[cfd_guy]

That is great and proud being an Indiana resident!

[NeilBlanchard]

Here's more pictures of this little car on another thread here on EM:

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...tml#post392486

[kach22i]

I'm trying to get an idea of the dimensions of that car.

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...tml#post392486


If currently 4-feet wide a 1.5 multiplier would make it 6-feet wide but I doubt that would be enough for side by side seating.

4-Feet x 2 = 8-feet, road legal but quite a high frontal area.

It is beautiful as it is designed, as a one-seater. I just wish it's magic could be scaled up to a functional street worthy car.

The design below I did a while back would be 6-feet wide and is in the same spirit (in a way), but still only 3-seats.

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...-20793-10.html

Originally Posted by kach22i

UPDATE: 02/26/13
I'm still not working in clay or foam yet, still playing with sketches once in a while.

Industrial Design - Transportation Photos by kach22i | Photobucket


This design gets the feet back, and narrows the rear track quite a bit.

Better results all around, maybe not a "pure" as some of my other attempts, but more practical to be sure.

My current design studies are of a car with an upside down wing verses a neutral foil shaped body. I haven't got around to posting it in the forum yet though.

Like I said earlier in the thread Neil provided a link to, I really like this (Mater Dei High School in Evansville, Ind.) car.

[Xist]

Please excuse the vile and terrible things that I did to your illustration and overlook my amateurish abuse of Paint:

What if the back seat faced the rear?

[kach22i]

Originally Posted by Xist

What if the back seat faced the rear?

Actually, you are not the first to suggest this, it's not a bad idea. However I'm trying to get it to work both ways, and if it works facing forward, then it most certainly will work the other way.

In fact as currently planned, all the seats will be able to rotate 360 degrees. The major reason for this being the deep inset location of the seats and distance from the outside edge.

I'm just imaging trying to get a elderly passenger in there, and it's not easy. A seat rotated to 90 degrees to entry in lieu of parallel would do wonders for accessibility. In addition the measure of safety from side impacts created by the deep doors (foam filled) is not something I'm willing to give up.

A feature such as allowing the front passenger to rotate, greet and interact with the rear passenger while in transit brings up all sorts of possibilities. For instance the care of a child passenger (in the rear seat), polite conversation face to face, no more shouting or excluding the rear passenger in the conversation, and so forth. Heck, maybe even a board game for long trips, similar to as that of inside of an RV could be played.

In addition, I think one of the leading reasons we all like the Mater Dei/Evansville car is the lower body form being so clearly defined and expressed.

This is the same fascination I've had with my own 2-part foil shaped lower body studies, be they positive, neutral or inverted wing foil.