The Aerocivic gets a web site - Aerocivic.com
 

Darin (MetroMPG) was gracious enough to make up a web page about my car explaining its history, performance, and features. I put the lettering "AEROCIVIC.COM" on my car's boattail, so those interested could satisfy their curiousity.

Very nice work Darin. Glad to see the Aerocivic getting more attention!

Not nearly as much work as went into the car!

I'm more than happy to help raise its profile. It's well deserved for both the inspiration to other modders & educational value to those who will see the URL and look it up.

FYI, the Aerocivic website was already picked up & featured on TreeHugger today:

Mike Turner's Awesome 95 MPG AeroCivic : TreeHugger

FYI, the original poster on this french language forum gets it: fuel economy and improved "performance" (of the enthusiast rag definition). You can tell by the thread title:

AeroCivic (EG) 2.5 L/100 km - 140mph - Club Civic Quebec :: Forum

ABG has picked it up as well. I love their description:

"the Aerocivic site is truly an enthusiasts' source for people who want to know what it's like to live in the aerodynamic future."

Haha.

Aerocivic gets a website, deer should now be safer - AutoblogGreen

Very nice!

I am so jealous.

I gotta get me a real web page sometime.

Saweeet

Still getting lots of love from other sites. I like this comment from Green Daily:

Someone submitted it to Digg, so I stuck a Digg button on the top of the page.

Go Digg it! Aerocivic - aerodynamic mods for maximum fuel economy - aerocivic.com

Dugg! :)

I got emails from friends who read ABG and thought of me this morning. I said back - yeah, Basjoos is very popular with the EM crowd. (even to the point where basjoos-ing has become an understood verb)

"Another fringe benefit is protection from damage when encountering deer on the road, the low sloped front of the car scoops them up and over the top of the car with minimal damage to both deer and car."

Ah, yes, I have visions of deer floating gracefully over the roof, along with the snowflakes, feeling like Rudolph Nureyev. Seriously, has this been tested even once for deer impact? They run rather large around here, and tend to come through the windshield after you knock their legs out from under them. I'm thinking of a nice brace just on the inside of the glass to help them over.

I have a feeling if a deer is caught in the headlights, it will skip off the windshield and fly over but not before leaving a giant spider-web glassy souvenir behind. Of course, that really depends on the mass of the deer and the speed of the deer remover.

Come on guys, you haven't seen this video yet?

(Warning, it is terrible, yet hard not to laugh...)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGJ0fJN10YY

So far as I know, he hit one deer and suffered no damage.
There are links to the three posts where he describes the accident in this post.
A little later in the same thread, he says the deer was full sized.

My deer scoop has been road tested one time so far on a mature doe at 45mph with only a cracked headlight lens and some minor denting on the nose and hood to show for it. The rounded nose and sloped hood redirected the impact energies upward so the last I saw of the deer, it was going straight up and it passed over the top of my car and returned to earth behind me.

The deer I hit was much larger and I was going a lot slower than that race car, so my deer was only ejected upwards to twice the height of my vehicle. Otherwise, what happened to me was identical to that video.

Thanks, folks. The local 300 lb deer certainly are hard on larger vehicles around here. I wonder if the deer sometimes do most of the jumping to get over a car.

I contend with lots of deer on my nightly, 150 mile, delivery route. Consequently I've thought about this - A LOT!

In both the video clip above and in baasjoos' description the deer runs across the road at a 90* angle. The sharp wedge of the car hits the deer at or about the ankles. The main (more or less barrel shaped) mass of the deer begins falling, while the car acts on the legs as a lever rotating the main mass of the deer. By the time the main mass of the dear makes contact with the even slope of the hood, the portion of the mass that makes the contact is rotating at about the same speed that the car is moving forward (helping to minimize impact forces on the hood of the vehicle. The motion of the car and slope of the hood impart an upward force and shoot the deer into the air and over the car.

In the same sort of situation with a more conventional vehicle nose, the deer's legs are hit at the knees. The legs still act as lever, but some goodly portion of main mass of the deer makes contact with a nearly verticle surface at a speed approximately equal to the speed the vehicle is traveling. (Instant deer burger & a trip to the body shop.)

If baasjoos or the race car in the clip had hit the same deer with the deer facing directly toward or away from the front of the vehicle, the damage to the vehicle would be far more sever.

But, unless you were inattentive to what was coming up ahead of you on the road, you would never hit a deer that was facing directly towards or away from the vehicle. Most car-deer collisions occur at short notice when deer shoot out from the side of the road and so are oriented at or close to a right angle to your car.

The deer I hit wasn't jumping to get over the car because in the process of the impact, it rolled 180 degrees, so it was upside-down as it passed out of the line of sight of my windshield. And it presumably kept on rotating as it passed over my car and hopefully came close to landing on its feet (it happened at night so I couldn't see the landing out my rear view). At least it wasn't there and there was no blood on the road after I got turned around and back to the collision site.

Different question:

basjoos, what is the road clearance of the AeroCivic? Did You lower it(How?) or are that just the panels that sit low?

That's tempting but perhaps unwarranted conclusion.

They don't all cross the road at 90* and some small percentage of those racing across the road notice your headlights and make sharp adjustment to their line of travel.

Also, one may be highly attentive to the road ahead and yet simply traveling faster (45 mph) than is safe for conditions (a herd of 15-20 deer wandering aimlessly across the roadway just at the far side of the sharp crest of a small hill). I've never hit a deer under those circumstances, but the opportunity has presented itself.

I haven't lowered it, the panels that make up the catamaran flow control system around the wheels extend down below the frame of the car. The underside of the car is at the stock 8" of ground clearance.

Around here, I've never seen deer run along the road, either on the pavement or the shoulder. They are always either crossing it or having a social interaction with other deer or or next to the road. As soon as they see the car they head straight towards the nearest woods. One fall I came across two bucks getting ready to fight over a doe. The doe and one buck were on one side of the road, while the other buck was on his way across the road to pick a fight. All three scattered when I drove up. The problem comes when they are in a field with the woods on the other side of the road and your car surprises them. They then make a bee line for the woods, crossing the road at full gallop. I've never seen a deer make a sharp change in direction while on pavement, as their hooves just don't have the traction to do this. I've seen numbers of startled deer skittering their hooves on the asphalt (sort of like running in place) while trying to accelerate from a standstill or a slow walk when your car appears on the scene.

Of course if you are traveling and going around corners faster than is safe for conditions, then you are asking for an accident, be it from deer or from that windfall tree that laying across the road just past the blind curve. The same goes for overrunning your headlight coverage at night.

I've never come up on deer running parallel to the road either, but they don't always cross it at a 90* angle either - 45* is just about as common.
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If the buck's line of travel (running to the doe it has scented across the road) is as indicated above and it reaches the shoulder of the road a little a head of your car (traveling 35-45 mph), more than 90% of the time it will change it's direction of travel and go back down into the ditch. Some percentage of the time it will not change it's line of travel. A smaller percentage of the time it will marginally change its direction - as if it thinks it's going to be able to out run you.

That you have not seen this behavior probably has a lot to do with the differences in terrain. Here on the prairie, there are no trees unless someone planted them. You'll find a windrowed copse of trees about every 1-3 miles or so along the road. During the day the deer like to bed down in them. At night you general find them quite far from these little groupings of trees.

The roads generally run along straight grid lines and any curves in the road are few and very far between. Given that and the lack of trees you might think that it would be easy to spot the deer. But the deer don't like to be seen and hang out in low spots (like the ditches along side the road). The road's although paved and laid out along nice straight lines tend to follow the up and down lay of the land rather closely. Ditches are deepest in the troughs between hill tops and shallowest at the top of hills. Naturally, that is where farmer's like to put their field access gates, so there is often a pull-out for the deer in the ditch to hide behind as you top the hill. Unless you're prepared to take some risk, you'd have to drive at about 20 mph for most of the 150 mile route. The people that publish the paper don't get it to me in time to allow that and still meet the delivery times promised in my contract.

You're living in the area where the native range of white tails and mule deer overlap. These two deer species have different behavior patterns, so I wonder if some of the behavior differences we are noting are mule deer vs. white tailed deer, as well as the deer's behaviors in response to a different terrain and degree of forestation. Around here it is hilly and mostly forested, so the deer go into the fields to graze and hightail it into the nearest woods when startled.

How did a thread about an aero car turned into as deer behavioral discussion is beyond me.

You could argue all day about how that nose cone is affecting deer impact, but it'll always be anecdotal evidence, which isn't worth much.

The vast majority I see are white tails. The "try to out run you" behavior is pretty uncommon, but it does happen. Haven't really paid attention to why. Maybe something to do with how shallow the ditches are or the age of the deer. Probably also has something to do with the very low density of human population. At least 40 miles of my route normally doesn't see even a single vehicle (besides mine) from about 1:00 AM until 6:00 AM.

Is anyone else thinking about Monty Python right now?

It could be carried by an African swallow!
Oh yea, an African swallow maybe, but not a European swallow, that's my point!

Unlike swallows, deer have the ability to total your car and possibly kill you when they collide with your car, so it makes sense to study and have a knowledge of their likely behavior patterns. If this allows you to predict what a deer is likely to do next, then you might be able to avoid a collision with them and save your car and your life. Sort of along the lines of "know your enemy".

Not to be rude but
 

Not to be rude but I could care less about the how the car performs during a deer collision or deer behavior.
I do try to be careful when I see deer on the road and slow down some but if it happens it happens and I will deal with it. I try to avoid all collisions deer, cars or what ever. I just do not design and build a car for deer collisions.

The important thing about this thread is Basjoos web site and I like it. The web site makes a very compelling arguement for better aerodynamics from the factories. It proves what can be done and that it works. Now the major manufacturors need to take this information and run with it to produce a vehicle that is more aerodynamic and performs better.

The Aptera is further proof and I think (hope) these two cars have a strong effect on future designs.

I would also like to know if the car has been lowered and if it would help or hurt its performance. On one hand it makes the frontal area smaller but it also gives less room for the air to flow under the vehicle smoothly. So I would be curious to know if it helps or hurts this car to lower it.

Many people think that the manufacturors build the car to perform best and it is best not to make modifications. I dissagree, I think the manufacturors design the cars to fit as many uses as possible. Have a good general all around vehicle with few drawbacks. Basjoos has proven that if you design it more for a single purpose that you can definatly improve it over stock.

I also think that manufacturors and customers tend to be more conservative in what they like as far as looks. The manufacturors do not want to build a car that does not sell well. With that said the time is right for a few completly different more radical designs.
If the manufacturors design and build a car similar to Basjoos car many may not like the look but the proven performance would definatly help sales. I think it would start making a change in what we think is a beautiful car.
I would consider a new well built car with a similar design to Basjoos car and I think many here would as well.

As for the performance of a deer hit well that just is not an important selling point or issue to me.

Thought I was done posting about deer, but I came up on a herd of about 20 last night and may have learned something new. This was on the most heavily traveled section of my route - 2 lane black top but with nice wide lanes, broad paved shoulders and shallow ditches. I probably see an average of 6 or 7 semis and a couple-three cars/pickups on my nightly run on this 25 mile stretch. But hardly ever see deer. It was all does (perhaps a few last years male fawns?) with a single buck leading the harem. They were strung out for about 50 yards along the road - just off the paved shoulder but not actually down in the ditch. The buck was at the front of the line. They were headed the same direction I was traveling - away from corn fields and a copse of trees - toward a ranch with un-iced over watering tanks???

I slowed down to about 12-15 mph and tapped my horn once to be sure they knew I was there. I was surprised when they didn't scatter. A few scuttled a little further off the road, but most of the full grown does just craned their necks and looked ahead (to see what the buck was going to do?). When I first reached the point where I could see as far ahead as the buck, it was still walking forward, but looking back toward me. When I got to within about 30' of the buck. It turned and trotted out on to the highway - challenging me. At this point my car was already in the middle of the on-coming traffic lane. I steered even further to the left on to the paved shoulder, passed the buck and resumed speed ~45 mph.

It's been two or three weeks since I first noticed deer herding up. My guess is that the buck had very recently contested with another buck for control of the herd and hormones were rife. The does were all directly down wind of the buck. The breeze was about 5-8 mph.

I wish I could buy a new car with a shape like mine, but the car manufacturers refuse to build one, even though they know all of the info I used in designing mine. Even though my car has a few rough edges due to its low skill, low cost, homebuilt construction, I consider its overall shape to be beautiful example of form follows function, much more so than those rounded boxes you see out on the highway plowing the air out of the way, pulling a vacuum behind them, and scattering water and salt spray everywhere to the detriment of everybody's visibility.

Oh deer.

Thanks Frank.

Re: mfg's... The new "FE" cars on the market are a growing stretch from the norm. The insight, the prius, etc are a whole new shape, or at least the beginnings of one. Maybe 10 years from now boat tail will be the new hatch back.

Curly1, I started composing my last post sometime prior to your's and eventually hit the submit button without having seen your post.

"Could we please get back on topic" might have been more diplomatic, but point taken. I apologize; I should have started different thread in "The Lounge."

Speeking of dear, I had one hit ME last summer in the reer doar of my '59 Bel Air, stupid thing. Luckily I had the stabilizing effect of those grate fins to aid my evasive maneuvers, witch lessoned the impact.

Here's another great comment about the site Mike:

A More Perfect Market: Hacking Transportation

Chaero-kee?

Haha.

Update: the site, or other sites' articles about it, has been submitted to Digg four times :D since it was put up (ironically, none by me or anyone I know).

It just popped, and traffic is pouring in to look @ the car. If you're interested, read the Digg comments here: Digg - Hyper-Modified AeroCivic Gets 95 MPG

They cover the usual range, from ridicule to incredulity to praise.

Aerocivic.com: Inspiring others:

http://www.ebacherville.com/AreoCRX/...r%20tailed.jpg

(pic of smart fortwo from The Ultimate DIY Aero Mod - Smart Car of America Forums )