A new Peoples' Car?

[Big Dave]

A few thoughts on a new people’s car.

1. There are two niches such a car can fill. One is the pure city car. Short range. Low speed. Easy to park. Lots of interior volume. To me this is where a series hybrid makes sense. A pure electric with a 5 kw Briggs & Stratton generator to extend range as long as you don’t want to drive over 25 MPH/ The second niche is for the guy who has a long commute from way out in the burbs. Maybe a tandem two seater. TDI with a dual-clutch 8 speed. Forget hybrid or electric. It has to have 200 mile range. The shape approximates a light-plane fuselage – long (to get a really good boat-tail), fairly tall (comfortable upright seating and easy egress/digress) and narrow. What worries me is the cross-wind performance of these vehicles. I drive in the wind a lot and my 7,000 lb, 80 inch wide pickup sometimes gets blown all over the place. A long, tall, skinny car would be a nightmare. Anybody who has tried to taxi a lightplane in Wyoming knows the white-knuckle feeling. In both cases the car has to be inexpensive because they are limited-utility vehicles.
2. The cars I described need two bits of relief from government. Crash safety regs. To meet US crash safety regs, car must be either heavy or very expensive. Heavy means kiss your MPG goodbye, particularly in hilly terrain. A carbon-fiber car will mean only Warren buffet can afford it. What does Warren Buffet need a “people’s car” for? Stamped steel is well-developed tech but a few years back Chrysler experimented with fiberglass cars with very few parts in the bodywork – hence low labor cost. They did this OK in South America but could not make them in the US because of emissions regs (fiberglass layup emits lots of styrene). Also the US EPA is gonna have to let its hatred of the diesel go. I am starting to hear from guys with 6.4 liter Ford and 6.7 liter Cummins-dodge trucks who have run the warranty off their trucks and are dumping their EGR and DPF and are seeing big jumps in MPG. 16 MPG trucks are now 22 MPG trucks, simply by dumping the EPA junk. We’re talking a 38% improvement by simply dumping the junk. (Truth in posting: Indiana does not and won’t have a Inspection and Maintenance program for emissions controls stuff. They had one and it nearly caused a riot.) A 38% improvement obtained that easily isn’t chopped liver. I wonder what kind of mileage you can get with a VW TDI Jetta if you shirtcan the emissions junk.
3. To an extent, we are seeing some development of cars that are gadget-friendly but come Spartan from the showroom. Think X-Box. Still the minority but the flexibility of an X-Box to customer wishes is tough to beat.
4. To justify building a cost efficient factory for such cars, you’ll have to sell at least 200,000 units a year. Right now, I don’t see that kind of demand, unless the cars can be sold under $8,000/unit.
On traffic synchronization:
Synchronization can be done. I used to live, back in the 70s in a town that is constrained by a narrow river valley to be a long stringbean of a town. It had two main streets through town, each one-way in opposing directions. They timed the lights so that if you drove 22 MPH you could drive all the way through town and never stop. That was important because a US highway passed through the town. The one-way streets were the key because they made left turns a snap.

Ohio often has pre-warning lights for stop lights on rural roads out about a quarter mile. This is quite conducive to coasting. I wish Indiana had them.

[puddleglum]

I think that in general, light timing is just dreaming. I would love to see it, but I don't think that it is possible. It does work on one ways but that is about it. On a two way road, if the lights are timed for one direction, they won't be for the opposite one. It just can't work unless the whole city was laid out in a perfect grid. Never going to happen.
As for producing a "peoples car", I think it's a great idea that would be welcomed by way too few. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the public wouldn't be interested.

[user removed]

Light timing is practical and works nicely when it is done properly. Of course the best would be no lights or at least a lot fewer lights.

I drive through a 3 mile stretch with 12 lights, and you can time them either way, within an hour of the same time before 1:00 PM.

Think of timing as groups travelling in opposite directions. All they have to do to stay in timing is pass the same point in both directions at the same time. As long as they maintain the timed speed the groups will always be changing relative to each other, but they can pass each other without stopping, as long as the traffic on the road does not reach a saturation point where the percentage of green light "on time" is not sufficient for the volume of traffic flow.

regards
Mech

[artificer]

Originally Posted by Old Mechanic

...
as long as the traffic on the road does not reach a saturation point where the percentage of green light "on time" is not sufficient for the volume of traffic flow.

regards
Mech

And thats where it breaks down. When I drive to and from work it is the rush hour. Stop and go traffic, especially now with road construction. If I happen to have to drive the same route during the middle of the day or at night, the lights are timed. I almost never see it on my commute, however. So how do you solve the problems? More roads? cloverleaf in the city? Make everyone start/end work at different times? What makes the most sense is a car with regenerative braking that doesn't cost a fortune.

Michael

[ShadeTreeMech]

Why don't people put solar panels on the roofs of their cars to capture free elcetric? That would seem to be a great thing in an electric or hybrid car, yet no one hardly does it. The only thing i can think of is the low amount of power available from solar panels.

Making a car able to survive a crash can be a bit of a catch 22. If the car is lighter, it can move with the crash or bounce out of the way instead of crushing itself, as a heavier car has to do. So it is a bit of a dilemma until carbon fiber gets cheaper.

As far as that goes, what's so wrong with using ABS for body panels? Saturn did it and the cars looked great; the panels apparently were easy to replace. GM used plastic a bit for body panels on their vans for a slight weight savings. But why did people stop using it and go for steel?

[Patrick]

Originally Posted by ShadeTreeMech

Why don't people put solar panels on the roofs of their cars to capture free elcetric? That would seem to be a great thing in an electric or hybrid car, yet no one hardly does it. The only thing i can think of is the low amount of power available from solar panels.

Because with the efficiency of currently available panels and the amount of space available on a car rooftop, a whole day's sunlight will only provide a few miles (single digits) worth of electricity. That's why Toyota decided to use their rooftop solar panel to power a cabin ventilator instead of recharging the traction pack (IIRC, they calculated they would only get 2 additional miles) on the 3rd gen Prius. The panels are also very expensive (way more costly than other ways to get electricity). If the efficiency comes up and/or the price comes down, this may be a viable alternative in the future.

[Frank Lee]

Update this and voila!

[puddleglum]

Originally Posted by Old Mechanic

Light timing is practical and works nicely when it is done properly. Of course the best would be no lights or at least a lot fewer lights.

I drive through a 3 mile stretch with 12 lights, and you can time them either way, within an hour of the same time before 1:00 PM.

Think of timing as groups travelling in opposite directions. All they have to do to stay in timing is pass the same point in both directions at the same time. As long as they maintain the timed speed the groups will always be changing relative to each other, but they can pass each other without stopping, as long as the traffic on the road does not reach a saturation point where the percentage of green light "on time" is not sufficient for the volume of traffic flow.

regards
Mech

I agree that this will work in certain situations, but it is the exceptions that mess it up. The streets still have to be evenly spaced in a grid and all lights working the same way. If you have stupid city planners that place cross roads at random intervals and you throw in some left turn signals (As Aerohead said) and some heavy traffic into the into the mix, there is no way to time the lights both ways. Even on timed roads, if you have a lot of turns on your route, your hooped. I think more efficient cars that minimize the hit at stop lights is still the real answer.

[artificer]

Originally Posted by puddleglum

I agree that this will work in certain situations, but it is the exceptions that mess it up. The streets still have to be evenly spaced in a grid and all lights working the same way. If you have stupid city planners that place cross roads at random intervals and you throw in some left turn signals (As Aerohead said) and some heavy traffic into the into the mix, there is no way to time the lights both ways. Even on timed roads, if you have a lot of turns on your route, your hooped. I think more efficient cars that minimize the hit at stop lights is still the real answer.

And then you get the city planners that are lazy and just don't want to straighten out the rivers/lake shores, level the hills/mountains, or totally redo a city thats had roads years before cars were even invented.

I'd say that well timed lights are the exception, and shouldn't be depended on. They're nice to dream about, but in most cases I bet they just don't work. About the only way I can see them working is if there is a traffic control system, and cars pilot themselves. Whenever you add people to the mix, it gets messed up.

Michael

[artificer]

Originally Posted by ShadeTreeMech

Why don't people put solar panels on the roofs of their cars to capture free elcetric? That would seem to be a great thing in an electric or hybrid car, yet no one hardly does it. The only thing i can think of is the low amount of power available from solar panels.

I crunched the numbers a while ago for a friend that has a prius. All told, the solar system would take 100k miles to pay for itself, but I think that was with $4+/gal gas. This was for a daily driver, so maximum useage of solar power was used.

Michael