Lina - City EV Made from Plants
 

This is a very interesting new project, that is an EV designed for city driving (up to 80kph), that is extremely lightweight (310kg / <700 pounds) and has 4 seats. Range is up to 80km on just 5.7kWh pack - three 1.9kWh units that can be swapped out in a few minutes.

Cleantron Lina, lightweight, bio-based, City Car for Car Sharing, powered by Cleantron - Cleantron

Would you drive a car made from plants? - BBC News

http://cleantron.nl/wp-content/uploa...ic-Vehicle.png

There is a real car - see the BBC link for a video.

A wooden-wonder "MOSQUITO" for the city?

Would you drive a car made from plants: I already live in a house made from plants, so why not?

Besides, Morgan still uses wood in significant proportion to build their line of cars, there's such things as bamboo bed linens and bicycles, wood-framed furniture galore. I don't think it's a problem for people to get their heads around it.

Considering that some plastics can be made out of vegetable oils, and eventually use some non-edible crops cultivated at brownfields instead of putting more pressure over the arable land availability for food production, it doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. Using wood-based components in the structure also doesn't seem so bad at all.

Neat, but I have some reservations...
 

Neat concept. I like the car-sharing concept in general, but without autonomous vehicles it is less useful than a good bus system or taxi system - how do you get to/from the shared car? If you can just park it anywhere, who gets them back to the starting points? The bike shares here have a truck that goes around every once in a while re-balancing the inventory levels at all the racks.

In general I've no issue with the car itself, except for how well it integrates with the existing vehicles on the road here in the USA. 80kph is roughly 50mph, so it can do the "minimum speed limit" on most freeways, and is too fast to be Federally classified as a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle. I'd not take one unless it could be proven to rate at least a MY2000 era 4*/4* crash rating if it can go that fast, but that's my limit - yours may vary. (I'll probably be selling my motorcycle that I've barely ridden - even though it is fun, I just don't trust the other drivers and my reaction times when I can only really use it half the year to keep my skills up.)

Everything I can find about NHTSA laws suggests that a complete kit with power source is a "motor vehicle" and is subject to the NHTSA laws in effect at the time the parts are made. If they want to sell complete kits with motors and not be crash tested, they are limited to 5,000 total vehicles per year manufactured worldwide and the vehicles must resemble a classic car. (2015 law that allows classic replicas. US based manufacturers are limited to 325 per year each.) If there's no power source - read motor here, laws were written when it was engines - it's not a motor vehicle and it is up to the individual states as to how it gets registered/regulated.

Here in MN it would be a "Specially Constructed Vehicle" and I'm having a heck of a time parsing the statutes in terms of safety equipment beyond the usual lighting, brakes, seatbelts, etc. (all of which must meet currently applicable NHTSA/VMSS/DOT regs) plus bumpers. The statute has this: "The commissioner of public safety, pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act, may adopt and enforce rules in substantial conformity with federal motor vehicle safety standards established by the United States Secretary of Transportation pursuant to the national Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 (Public Law 89-563) with respect to any new motor vehicle or new item of motor vehicle equipment applicable to the same aspect of performance of such new vehicle or new equipment."

That "may" carries a lot of weight, and could easily change while a vehicle is being built.

This design is an amazing achievement: the car weighs less than the Edison2 VLC and a lot less than the electric version of the VLC.

But in the video, its apparent top speed is 15mph. Or at least that's as fast they were willing to drive it.

My guess is, that to make the car a "real car", its weight will go up... a lot.

Sam

cool if you could make a car out of plant-based materials. Easy recycling, if you can keep everything easy to separate from

I have quite stupid question. Steel frame you can cut to parts and melt with other scrap metal to make steel again. How do you recycle wooden/plywood/wood composite frame, that is probably infused with ton of epoxy resin to add protection against elements?
So is the wooden frame just a pose, or does it have benefits I do not see?

Wood grows, and cutting it up is easy; while steel takes a lot of energy to make.

I am aware of that. Yet still, does anybody know about direct comparision? One steel frame against one wooden frame with complete life cycle?

Imagine how many trees you would need to supply one year worth of Ford and GMC production. It somehow does not feel too green anymore.

Just silly thoughts, never mind.

I asked Mr Google:

How much energy does it take (on average) to produce 1 kilogram of the following materials? - LOW-TECH MAGAZINE

Energy per kilogram:

How about fiberglass or carbon fiber. I'm going to email Nick at basalt.guru — over the phone all he had was "That's a good question". The composite matrix will be the same as fiberglass or carbon fiber, but the fiber itself practically falls out of the rock.

Oh really, I'll be darned. :) The Tesla has a 100kWh pack and the Leaf has 60kWh.

Those lunchbox sized batteries as so cute.

Yea Morgan car company like to use birtch which is rot prone, so they dip it in preservative resin.

For a 5.7kw pack to move a vehicle any where 80km there hast to be almost 0 wind resistance. So it's moving along at mountain bike speed.

I have never found anything about the recyclability of wood-based composites, but there might be some way to either repurpose frame components made out of those materials or to just chop it and blend it with resin for other applications that would not require so much structural strenght.

That was what I thought too, because to burn it does not seem like a good idea. But it all ends with the treatment used. If it is vax, oil based, epoxy resin or urethane. Bee wax would be probably really eco friendly, but who will treat his car every spring with new coat.

Any Morgan owners here? How do you treat your frame?

Eh, Thermal Depolymerization will eat anything.

I think the Lina may use super efficient hub motors. And weighing less than 700 pounds makes it much lower consumption. Doing the rough math, 5.7kWh for ~50 miles is 114Wh/mile, which is quite plausible. This is similar to the Edison2 VLC Electric which was under 100Wh/mile, if my memory serves me. The electric VLC was a relatively porky 1140 pounds. It had much better aero than the Lins, but it used a DC motor; which are far less efficient than a hub drive AC unit.

The Electrathon vehicle that C. Michael Lewis set the record run of 55MPH for an hour was using just 2 Optima RedTop batteries - I did the math when I was talking to him at the meet up in Watkins Glen a few years ago - and it was under 16Wh/mile.

The lower the watts per mile go the slower you travel and the less car like the vehicle becomes.

But I'd bet that a lot of that car isn't made from plant-based materials. Like the electric wiring, bearings, the glass in the windows...

I think Lotus perhaps has a better approach to incorporating plant-based materials in their cars: http://www.lotuscars.com/engineering/eco-elise And I bet the Eco-Elise is a lot more fun to drive :-)

Mercedes-Benz have been using hemp particle board in their door panels for years.

Bamboo chassis:
http://i.imgur.com/OsfSE.jpg

Howard Hughes:
http://i.imgur.com/RpZNo.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9oO6EiBt40

Printing metal parts as a skin over an internal egg-crate reduces the materials, material cost, weight and the cost of shaping the material. They can print multi-materials, titanium and tool steel.

If the car is more efficient, then you can travel as fast as you need to, and still use less energy.

The vehicle C. Michael Lewis used to go at over 55MPH only consumed ~15.3Wh/mile. And the Edison2 Very Light Car Electric can carry 4 people at ~55MPH and still be under 100Wh/mile. With a DC motor - so with an AC motor and good control electronics, it is quite conceivable to go faster, and still get excellent efficiency.

The Lina is achieving about 295MPGe and it can drive up to 50MPH. With higher voltage batteries, it could go faster, and I am sure the battery capacity could be increased, so longer range and/or higher speeds are quite doable.

But, of course, that's a rendering and it never really existed.

How about this:

http://images.hgmsites.net/med/toti-...00308638_m.jpg

You know, I was so focused on that front wheel, I never noticed the lack of steering. At least they got the lighting correct.

http://bamboomwagens.com/wp-content/.../2015/10/2.jpg
Bamboom Wagens – BAMBOO INTERIORS FOR VINTAGE VW

Nice door panel. I would have loved some of those on my old 66... although I don't know how long it'd last here.

So what's it like on the edge of nowhere? Would carbonized bamboo be any help?

But, getting back to Permalink #9; a plausible [to me] scenario would be vertical-grain balsa wood slabs skinned with .007" aluminum, similar to Polymetal. I'm sure such material exists. Monocoque boxes. For low-volume production, steel tube 'roll cage' for the roof structure like this Porsche:

http://ecomodder.com/forum/member-fr...11-w07fie3.jpg

Wood as an auto body material is hardly something new, for instance this: 1939 Lagonda V12 Rapide Tulipwood Tourer | Monterey Sports & Classic Car Auction 2007 | RM Sotheby's

I have read they used flax fibres reinforced with PLA plastic, so I assume its composite with characteristics similar to duroplast, but biodegradable.
One has to take his words back sometimes.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...n_Car_1941.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean_car

Henry Ford's 1941 'hemp' car was designed to run on hemp oil and had body panels made of hemp and soy composite.

2500lb down to 1900lb, a 25% improvement.

Some plastic resins can be made out of basically any vegetable oil, including both soy and hemp. BTW China has never outlawed hemp, and much of its reinforced concrete relies on hemp fiber, so who would doubt that Chinese-made cars would start coming with plastic parts reinforced with hemp fiber too?


IIRC it ran on coconut oil.

That's familiar. I think that's in my neck of the woods.

Waste Veggie Oil was briefly discussed here during the 08-09 oil crisis, but many of the WVO startups have shrivelled up with the return of (relatively) cheap diesel.

-

Bamboo bikes are starting to become a thing here... local makers use bamboo struts connected by composite joints made using bamboo fiber in resin... but the joints are very clunky.

I shared the post with a friend who's designing e-tuktuks, and he found it pretty interesting.

I think bamboo bodies would work from an eco-tourism perspective... the problem is with raw bamboo and abaca weave, it's a labor intensive process. Hemp/bamboo/etcetera composites would probably scale up better.

Odd 13" Daihatsu rims

Veg oils, either waste or fresh, have never really been taken seriously as a long-term alternative, even though sometimes it's way more cost-effective than both biodiesel and ethanol. The only problem is that it would not be compatible with some modern emissions control systems.


I've already seen some bamboo bikes too.


Bamboo composites would be a great alternative to fiberglass in applications less sensitive to extreme temperatures, it does surprise me that it's not used so widely.

Bamboo? What, you want to use-up all the Panda bear food (wink,wink)?

Bamboo became quite endemic in tropical and subtropical areas in Latin America, where there are no Panda bears around.

3D print (hemp/bamboo composite) internal lugs, machine the bamboo to a consistent inside diameter, crochet a hemp fiber sleeve for the join and clear resin that.