A new Peoples' Car?
 

What the world needs is a new People's Car,one with 'lasting design',engineered for the 21st-Century,which will look 'modern' a million years from now.
My candidate ( with modifications ) is the Koenigsegg CCXR.

Lose the wide wheels/tires,taper the body and narrow the track as was done with the 1st-gen Insight,raise the trailing edge of the roofline even with the back of the cars body,and morph the sides into the roofline for a proper Kamm aft-body.
Make it out of stamped-steel,nothing exotic.
Pre-wire it for accessories but offer it 'naked',with 'options' added at the dealer or by owner themselves.
TDI,8-speed trans.
Each year the car gets cheaper,just like the Model-T Ford.Twenty years from now,it's selling at 1/3 the price.
Weight's not an issue when the engineers synchronize the traffic lights and abolish the left turn which makes synchronization impossible.

If we can't change the way people drive we can offer efficiency through what they drive.
Like they say," When you're driving alone,you're driving with bin Laden.":eek:

Trouble is, "the people" seem to want ever more weight, ever more hp, no end user serviceability, high replacement parts costs, and tons upon tons of gadgets and gimmicks glommed on. :mad:

...a fiber-carbon battery-hybrid version of the original Ferdinand Porsche "Volkswagen"?

Yeah, the wealthiest 25% of us get to choose the cars that the rest of us will be driving three to five years down the road. If new car buyers would stop flooding the market with low-priced cars in such good condition, then the sensible people of the world would make a larger portion of the buying decisions.

There are places in the world where you can buy simple cars with the same engines and sheet metal as they had 20 years ago. The second-gen Chevy S10 has been available in Brazil since 1994, and Ford sells pickups based on the '98 Fiesta all over the developing world.



If you can't change how people drive, then people will need highly aerodynamic cars with regenerative braking powerful enough to provide most of their ordinary braking needs, panic stops excluded.


The only shape that will look "modern" in thirty years is the streamlined body. It can be truncated within reason, if you need more interior space.

I'm currently looking at one of the three vans-with-windows from Peugeot/Ciitroen/Fiat - the Bipper/Nemo/Qubo.

On the basis of a people's car these seem perfect - cheap, big inside, practical, reasonably tough (courier companies take the van versions to Mars and back in terms of mileage) and economical.

Slow, but may be thats not a bad thing.

If you can't turn left, then won't you have to drive a block past your intended street, make a right, go down a block, make a right, go down a block, and make another right? This will take you back to your intended turn (had you been allowed to turn left), but you have now driven 4 extra blocks and made 3 extra turns, some of which you may have had to slow down or stop for. Also, you might have to stop and wait now at the original intersection if you happen to hit the light wrong. Is there some study that shows this is more efficient than allowing left turns? Seems like a lot of extra mileage, and I'm not sure people will put up with it. :confused:

I think there should be more round abouts. There's one in Branson, and it's a cool idea for a low traffic intersection. You turn right, circle around till you get where you need to go, then turn right again. Absolutely brilliant.

the people
 

Frank,yeah,I got a plan for that too,but I won't dare mention it at EcoModder for fear of getting booted off.
Very un-PC !

carbon-fiber
 

The exotics are just way too expensive.Steel is cheap,easy to form and bond and design for crumple.Tool and die-making is in the bag.
With the exception of the windshield,there is no reason why this car would cost any more than a Kia Rio or entry level Hyundai.
If the traffic engineers will time the traffic lights ( which is their duty to do ) and lose the left turns ( which can be legislated by any Chief of Police ),all cars will get double their City MPG with no change to the car whatsoever and the streamlining will take care of the Hwy.
My other recommendations cannot be mentioned here.

regen braking
 

If you can envision a driving environment where you don't apply your brakes 'til you arrive at your destination,the regenerative braking becomes superfluous and an unnecessary expense.

80-mph
 

Do have a sense of what kind of fuel economy they would deliver at 80-mph ?

left turn
 

You pass the street that you would otherwise turn left on and enter to the right,into a cloverleaf collector lane which sweeps in a circle to deliver you to the 'slow' lane of the cross street.
As you emerge from the cloverleaf,the light has changed for the cross-traffic and you proceed without stopping, going 'left' as far as you want to go,hitting nothing but green lights.
Hackensack,N.J. used to have such a system.This is where the U.S.Highway system began.

round abouts
 

It has been reported that round-abouts require alot of momentum death,exactly what the world needs less of.
A cloverleaf system could be synchronized,and offer no appreciable loss of momentum during the transition.
There are no technological barriers to developing a traffic system in which a motorist can essentially maintain a constant velocity between departure and arrival at a destination.

A cloverleaf at every intersection would require a lot more land and pavement, upping the expense a lot. It wouldn't be practical in an urban setting like Manhattan, where land values are sky high.

Why can't they time a left turn light?

We have four roundabouts in my town. You have to slow to about 20 mph to make it around the curve, but that's a lot better than coming to a full stop at a 4-way stop sign or light. Yes, sometimes you have to stop because of traffic coming around in front of you, but I'd estimate that about 50% of the time I've been able to just cruise right into the curve and out on my chosen street. It does take up quite a bit more land than a regular intersection, though (but not nearly as much as a cloverleaf would).

We think of saving gas as a priority, but we may not be thinking of the unintended consequences. Cloverleafs and traffic circles (rotaries, roundabouts) do increase the amount of miles driven. (Every little bit of additional distance traveled adds up.) It may keep traffic moving, but it won't necessarily save fuel.

Also, if you are making mostly right turns, but virtually never making left turns, your steering and suspension will wear unevenly over time. This tends to be the case already with having the "right turn on red" option (which is better than not having it). I find myself favoring routes that encourage making more right turns.

It usually requires a separate lane. Here in suburban NY left turn arrow signals are timed, but some people dawdle and poke, and often only half the line of cars waiting to go through the intersection actually get to proceed due to inattentiveness. Even the best timed traffic signals won't arouse drivers who are habitually asleep at the light.

What about all the diesel fuel burned to build new cloverleafs, roundabouts, etc. New intersections dont just pop up! I drive a 45,000 lb truck for work, it gets about 3 mpg. We have two for every crew, and this is just to repair electric utility lines!

Road construction must use incredible amounts of fuel to build a road for us to get 1mpg better!

Just shut it off and coast if you can, turn it off at red lights, thats how to save fuel!

I have two original peoples cars, a 62 beetle and a 65 type 3, they are cool but I'm thinking something based on the Yaris would go far.

To be fair, some people aren't asleep at the wheel, they just have to wait for green, reach for the starter switch, then crank for a second or two and let out the clutch. Not me, though. :D

If the incorporation of regenerative braking only requires a single component with relatively little added weight then most regenerative braking can be very helpful to overall efficiency.

I would prefer that option to waiting for the driving population to be reeducated and the road system redesigned. Around here it takes the traffic engineers 6 months to figure out the new light is totally out of sequence with the other 12 in a 3 mile stretch :mad:.

Lightweight vehicle with no exotic materials. Individual in wheel regenerating IVTs, with a small capacity accumulator and a .6 to 1 liter engine with electric supercharging.

Practically speaking, I don't see any significant improvement in the abilities of the driving population to become as situationally aware as those of us who drive for mileage. It would be nice to know what stage in the cycle the upcoming traffic lights are approaching, but around here that would not stop the blast and brake stupidity I see daily.

Maybe at some point we may actually change driving habits, but I doubt it in my lifetime. In the interim we should try to change the way the machine approaches the optimization of the fuel used for the distance travelled. In essence to incorporate hypermiling techniques into the vehicle itself instead of relying on the drivers actions to accomplish the same.

regards
Mech

But of course that means you have to live in the flatlands. Try driving in the mountains without brakes :-)

Same applies to the "no left turn" plan. Works, sort of, if you only live & drive in an urban area. Not so swell if the 3 right turns you'd need to make would take you 20 miles or so.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

Update this and voila!

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r...5012010013.jpg

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r...5012010010.jpg

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

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

Light timing with more than a few intersections, cross streets, two-way streets and other variables becomes an exercise in compromise, not perfection. However, it would not be hard to add a string of LEDs beside the road to show the correct pace to make the next light, or encourage gentle stops.

I saw a very inexpensive system for light timing in Texas a few years back on a long straight road close to a city. It was a sign informing you to average 40 mph to go through all the lights without stopping. And it worked quite well.

why
 

The time required to process the left turn signal traffic creates the bottleneck for all other lanes,essentially making synchronization impossible.
You may have observed dozens of vehicles idling at a stop while only a few vehicles make the left turn.
It's pure entropy.We can't afford the convenience of the few to overshadow the larger issue.
As to extreme urban environments,it would be better for the few to sacrifice a portion of their time by rounding the block clockwise to orient themselves in their desired direction,rather than ask the majority of traffic to consume their fuel at a stop.
Flowing traffic is real wealth,whereas property values are an arbitrary and artificial construct.

roundabouts
 

Patrick,I agree that the roundabout is 'way out ahead of nothing',but I'm trying to envision an infrastructure which can maintain momentum ( all of it ).
Mixing arteries and veins is a delicate matter.
We have a century of mediocre road design to remedy.
All traffic engineering manuals clearly spell out the relationship between conservation of momentum and efficiency.The physics is simple.
I'd like to see the experiment played out as we see in electronics,and other fields of technology.

distance
 

Thymeclock,I hear what you're saying about the extra distance,but I what strikes me,is that you're traveling the extra portion at twice the mpg which more than offsets the additional travel.
That's the whole point of the synchronization.All vehicles obtain the urban mpg of a hybrid,with no change to the vehicle.
The American 'fleet' is returning only 17-mpg even though the cars can get around 28-mpg.
The difference is in the congestion,much of which can be ameliorated by abandoning the left turn.
During World-War, II Americans were obliged to drive no more than 35-mph in order to strengthen the war effort.
It's my opinion that motorists can be made to feel patriotic about a little inconvenience.

fuel
 

Daring,you might consider the cloverleaf as the Light-Emitting-Diode of intersections,where a dedicated left-turn lane intersection is a whale-oil lamp.
The efficiency in lumen output and energy consumption between the two would be symbolic of the difference between the cloverleaf and the traffic congestion created at the traffic light.
The U.S. is in an ambitious plan to lose the incandescent lamp,moving on to the compact flourescent and LED.The payoff comes after the investment.
If Earth is at its half-life,then the Sun won't red-dwarf for another 4.5-billion years.That's a lot of time to save fuel with more efficient intersections,or end things as you know them.
In a capitalist nation as the US,we all need to act like capitalists,doing a complete life-cycle-cost-analysis when planning on new or remodeled construction.
Cloverleafs will pay dividends for billions of years.
Conventional intersections will remain a cash liability for billions of years.
Students buy debt to finance future higher earnings a college degree can bring.
Taxpayers can buy short term debt to finance future low-cost driving only efficient infrastructure can bring.

prefer
 

In spirit,I agree with everything you mention.
What disturbs me,is that the infrastructure is like the elephant in the living room.
It has the potential to bankrupt.In a sense it already has.
Since the physics is well understood as well as construction technology,along with requiring automakers to increase CAFE standards to 35-mpg,we could begin to undo the mess we've made of our road system,which is robbing 10-mpg from every vehicle in urban traffic,something I'm not sure that automakers can compensate for.
My T-100 will do 39 mpg in the city with synchronization.Without it,we're looking at a little better than half of that.
That is highway robbery.

of course
 

The scenario is an urban environment.The cloverleaf is of proper radius that you blend onto it at constant velocity,as you emerge from it your heading 'left',at a constant velocity,getting twice the mpg your getting today in the city.No stops.No idling.No need for brakes until at your destination.

It's sad to see us discuss changing traffic patterns to fix what is wrong with cars.

The original topic was a "peoples car" along the lines of the Model T, the original VW, and many other examples such as the mid 70's Honda Civic with the cvcc engine.

By now most here know my preference for a hydraulic IVT drive located in the area normally reserved for friction brakes.

Massive reductions in power train components, the ability to change the load to maximise BSFC, or eliminate the necessity to modulate electric power delivery to a drive motor, as well as superb regenerative energy recovery percentages, compared to more complex designs.

Maybe one day people will look at the totality of the situation and see a simple solution. That's where I am today.

How much energy do you really need to be able to recover, and how much energy to you really need to apply to eliminate the small percentage of very wasteful periods in daily operation of your car.

Sure it would be great to redesign the roads to match the hypermilers skills perfectly. Sharp upgrades to pulse at max BSFC, with downgrades perfectly matched for engine off coasting.

Ever driven US 1 down the Florida keys? Try making a left hand turn on that road when traffic is heavy, and there are no lights to interrupt the bumper to bumper traffic at 50 MPH. I have watched people sit there for 15 minutes trying to make a left turn, when they could have turned right, made a U turn, and another right turn, in less than 1 minute.

How do you get great mileage in severe mountainous terrain. The lighter car has lower sectional density and would coast downhill at a lower terminal velocity. It would also require much less fuel to climb the same grade. Carrying around hundreds or pounds of batteries in steep terrain means much of your energy capacity is dedicated to increasing the elevation of the battery pack itself.

Having driven my Insight for over 20k miles now, I can see the logic Honda applied to the design of that unique car. I would just change the power train to a hydraulic IVT and the storage to a flywheel or accumulator. Either one would have about the same range capability as the original battery-electric motor combination, which was not very much. I would also reduce the engine size to 600 CC and add an electric supercharger.

I think what is not well understood, by some, is you really don't need much.

How many times do you have to accelerate rapidly to 60 MPH, or stop rapidly from the same speed. That's where your energy losses are the greatest and the storage really only needs to be capacitive to cover the normal stop and accelerate to speed cycle you hate when you get nailed by a poorly timed light.

I have seen objections to high density capacitive type recovery and application because it will not allow recovery of the available energy in severe elevation situations.

To me the best solution to driving in extreme grades is to minimize the vehicle weight, since this directly reduces the total power necessary to climb the grade, but it also means you have less weight behind the same drag forces, which reduces the top speed of the vehicle in a downhill coast.

Now, I know that may not be the best solution, and I would certainly like to hear from those who may have alternatives.

regards
Mech

Aerohead:

I agree 100% with your criticism of road design.

I just believe that you can also eliminate the effects of bad road design, by incorporating high efficiency, simple, lightweight, virtually unlimited life expectancy, power train components to vehicles without extensive redesign.

In doing so you would make them less expensive, more reliable, and a lot more efficient.

Consider the most accomplished hypermiler on the planet. Their actions follow a totally predictable, and understandable pattern. The results are very predictable and repeatable.

Incorporate those techniques into the design of the vehicle itself, and you will have the "peoples car" of this century, instead of a tribute to the poor designs of the last century.

regards
Mech