Sub-Cd 0.09 paradigm
 

Here is Subaru's 1986 (6-model)(G) wind tunnel development model for the XT.
It measured Cd 0.088.
With the features drag of the 1999 GM Precept PNGV car,it would come in around Cd 0.095 on the street.
http://i1271.photobucket.com/albums/...titled17_2.jpg
With synthetic vision,it would be a glimpse of the possible future,when autonomous driving is routine,'drivers' napping,being amorous,gaming,eating................. while they drive.(like they do now but minus the fatal accidents);)

What kind of mpg would a shape like this be capable of, with say a 1.0L metro drivetrain?

It looks like your truck, Aerohead. Boy, I can't wait for the future! I figure autonomous driving will be commonplace in 20 years, but perhaps they were thinking the same thing back in '86.

Hell, we were all gonna have flying cars by 1965.

Got more views of that shape and car?

x2

Is that the front or back? Are those tufts with shadows or is the whole thing louvered?

mikeyjd -- It would depend on the frontal area and a myriad of details about the drivetrain and tires.

I did a Google image search, but most of the images were unrelated.

Not dissimilar to an upturned fast boat hull in some respects

Sort of reminds me of something else.

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mpg @ Cd 0.095
 

It' raining today and I walked here without my briefcase,so no calculator.Sorry.
Here's a graph for a car of 22-sq-ft frontal area and 3,400-lbs curb weight.
Looking at the right hand side you'll find a line for Cd0.10 which is close,and you can compare the road load to that of another Cd.
If the BSFC is maintained through gear-matching,then the new fuel consumption will mirror the reduction in road load.
http://i1271.photobucket.com/albums/...ntitled2-4.jpg
Here is a road load curve for HONDA's Dream-2 solar racer,of Cd 0.10,a lightweight tandem,maybe 9-sq-ft frontal area (I'd have to look).
You can see that at 100-mph,it requires less than 6-kW to move it.That's a 300-mpg car!
http://i1271.photobucket.com/albums/...ntitled2-5.jpg

I love the idea of driverless cars. Also you could train them together at higher speeds and get even better mpg. I also love the idea of leaving here at bedtime and waking up in Seattle 8-9 hours later and have used 3 gallons of gas. I have a feeling the airlines may not like such things.

more views
 

Sorry Frank,they just tease us with the single image.
I keep waiting for a look at Ford's 'UFO', of Cd 0.055 or so.Pat Nixon,at Texas Tech told me about it back in 1990.He didn't offer an image.'keep waiting I suppose.:p

front or back
 

We're looking at the front and the whole thing is festooned with tufts.
In 1980,VW did the same thing for their VW 2000,starting with a low drag body (The Klemperer body,Cd 0.16) and after a cooling system and features,it came in around Cd 0.23 for a production vehicle.
http://i1271.photobucket.com/albums/...ntitled8-2.jpg
It was the cover photo for Hucho's 1st English version text.

Google
 

I've only seen it in Subaru's SAE Paper which they presented at the annual congress.

boat
 

Very much so!
Teitgens and Ripley used something very much like an inverted hull at Westinghouse to produce this self-powered passenger rail car of Cd 0.08 in 1932.
http://i1271.photobucket.com/albums/...ad2/06-247.jpg

When every intersection is like a circle-8 race, you'll be glad you don't have a windshield. :eek:

It does make me wonder why they don't make trains more aerodynamic. People won't choose to ride on it because it looks 'ugly' and would save a grip of money.

http://ecomodder.com/forum/member-fr...78-talgo-1.jpg

Can't sleep! Train will eat me!

OTOH Newer Talgo trains
http://www.hispanidad.com/imagenes/talgo.jpg

I understand to long nose is for ...uh... penetrating tunnels.

This touches on something that I've been wondering about for a while.

In an effort to reduce fuel consumption to meet CAFE standards, manufacturers have been trying to reduce drag by chipping away at Cd. But equally important is A (frontal area) and that has typically been increasing, year over year. The XL1, for example, has a great Cd, but the small frontal area plays every bit as much of a role in it's fuel efficiency.

I suspect this may be a trend that we will start seeing too, especially as the mpg targets get harder to meet.

:eek:

Doubtful; look at the difference in size between an older Metro and a new Mirage. Car companies keep making taller and wider cars to add comfort and safety. Many people complain about how hard it is to get in and out of low cars, my older (in their 40s) friends used to complain constantly about getting in and out of my Saturn and now say "this car is so much easier to get in/out of than your old Saturn" about my Focus. Consumers want easy in/out and shoulder/head room so I only see cars getting bigger and bigger...

frontal area
 

The Litestar didn't go over.Aptera is dead on arrival.Loremo.The Corbin Sparrow,under different ownership is still kicking a little,but essentially a dead man walking.The upcoming little trike has been in the pipeline too long now and may be stillborn.
The VW may determine whether anybody is willing to do reduced frontal area.
A past head of GM Styling remarked something to the effect of "we make cars to sit in,not piss over."
Lee Iacocca had open hostility towards econoboxes which he affectionately referred to as "****boxes."
And Madison Avenue,at the behest of large auto makers,has succeeded in planting fear in the mind of the buying public (formerly citizens),with respect to safety,as a function of car size,which went all the way up to the White House.
All the small concepts I've seen have bombed at the international car shows.
There seem to be a deep-rooted psychology embedded within modern culture.
Small means,cheapness,retardation,low performance,inconvenience,individual failure,danger,impotence,austere self-inflicted deprivation.
While billionaire's will willingly crouch into a low frontal area business jets, minimum wage earners recoil in horror at the proposition of driving something sensible and actually within their means.
It's gonna be a tough nut to crack.

Corbin is building a Sparrow II according to Craig Vetter to compete in the Vetter Challenge event. There are cars you get into and there are cars you put on.

I would love to see a 3 cyl diesel in an aluminum honeycomb semi-monocoque dressed in the body of a C-111 MkIII boattail. Too often Detroit has sold cars just to make money rather than making cars people need. There is a reason more Corollas have been sold than any other make. It comes close to being the ideal automobile.

I prefer my subaru 360, too bad the brakes and sheetmetal have to rust out.

Seats 2 comfortably (I'm 6'3") and 4 uncomfortably and all in a 4'x10' package.

I'm glad to see Corbin back in the mix. It never really struck me that Myers was doing much with the Sparrow when they bought the production rights to it. I am glad to see that Myers hasn't totally punted their commitment to electric mobility, either, but I don't see anything tangible from them. At least Corbin have the real world experience of having developed a car from scratch and brought it to limited production. That's more than many other players can say.

It would be interesting to ask the question, since Musk has committed to making open source the design of the Tesla products, what advantage could Corbin take away from that? Obviously they could afford to install much, much greater battery capacity and with it, sufficient power to twist the motor to more highway-capable speeds and medium-long commute-friendly ranges.

And with all of that said, the Corbin Sparrow is still not sufficient for me. The new design looks like it might be a bit sleeker than the old Sparrow - it closely resembles the early Merlin sketches - but I need two seats. This is the same problem in the new Myers concept. I carpool and that isn't about to change. It's the single most effective thing I do to maximize the utility of my fuel purchase.

Mind my possible oversimplification here but, if we're talking about completely autonomous driving, why not simply have all passengers recline (to the point of alomst completely riding lying down)? The entire car could be only a couple of feet high, making the height and likely frontal area some half of even the most aggressively low-slung sports cars. You could also make the whole thing shaped like a triangle, putting one passenger between a moderately behind the left-right passengers and one slightly in front (you could even have them all facing each other). If I have it right, this would hopefully allow for a very easily elongated and inward/tapered tail, an outward "tapered front" (shaped not unlike a flattened/shortened front-top and rear-top of a jet airliner) and insanely low Cda.

Madison Avenue
 

Agreed!
Personally, I'm attempting to home-build an electric car (really a trike shaped like an enclosed car) with a sub-0.2 Cd that sits 4 and weighs at least under 1500 pounds (and I'm constantly trying to think of ways to make it lighter). In fact, the thing isn't even small (basically Corvette-like in proportions)...but that doesn't stop flaming messages about it being an "econobox" or that it would "never pass crash tests" or "who would want to be in a 1500 pound death trap hitting a 4000 pound SUV?"

In fact, it seems like a self-perpetuating problem...people buying large and heavy cars to "defend" themselves from other large and heavy cars.

This also makes it a royal pain for anyone trying to break the mold and build a light and/or efficient car, such as small companies like Aptera. Not only do you have to challenge the stigmas, but you have to have enough money to crash test the thing (and, even then, many won't trust the safety).

IMO, the Edison2/VLC project (I don't have enough posts to be allowed to give a/the link) nailed it with an under 0.16 Cd car that seats four, has a short enough length to be dead-easy to park, and actually incurred HALF the impact on passengers during a crash test as an average modern car. Not to mention they won the X-prize with that car. But even when I showed that to people on the EV list I'm a member of, they gawked "looks like a death trap...come on...it's a 1300 pound car!". And now, the man running the project, Oliver Kuttner, has apparently moved the project to (edit: the Ukraine) because public stigma is so bad in the US that no major auto manufacturer was willing to license/build his car in mass production.

If anyone has a hack to get past this stigma...I'd love to hear it.

Just have to face the fact that there are lots of pansies out there. They go on about smashing into trucks as if that's something they do frequently. Just consider them background noise.

I'm having trouble picturing this. You have five posts now, do you have an example?

I like the Edison2 VLC a lot. Especially the in-hub steering. Do you have a link to the story about Oliver Kuttner going to Russia?

The closest thing I can think in any sort of development form is Neil Blanchard's "Car Ben" design here.

What I'm describing is based on a similar seating arrangement, only with all the passengers reclined and the back two seats replaced with on reclined seat that's in the very middle (not on/toward the right side of the car).





Some info can be found here.

He even says
It seems this man will stop at nothing to change the world...admirable.

And (correction): yes, it's the Ukraine, not Russia.

Well, Ukraine is not Russia, currently, and that post is 1 year old.

Here's a story from 12 March of this year:
http://169lpf2pywq9to97r2eb0xqgo4.wp...10-660x335.jpg
He’s back! Oliver Kuttner returns to local development with a new project and big ideas

Oddly enough, I couldn't find anything about the Edison2 project moving back stateside and only his Charlottesville real-estate project doing so.

Edison VLC2
 

Automotive journalist David Zenlea used the term "dorky" to describe the Edison car.I'm sure that investors were quite appreciative of his comment.
Perhaps Mr. Zenlea and his kin will be happy to reimburse the trillions of Dollars lost to the US economy by not having 'dorky' cars on the road.

Mike,

I have not heard anywhere that Oliver Kuttner moved the VLC project to Ukraine. I have met him, and I was keeping up with his project, after being a guest member of the Edison2 team at the Knockout Round of the Automotive X-Prize.

Public acceptance of "different" car designs is difficult and frustrating. And it is an important consideration when designing and building a car. I hope that once people see how well a car works, that they change their opinion of the aesthetics of the car.

Beauty is as beauty does.

Found the link to the paper that the picture is from:

Aerodynamic Characteristics of Subaru XT

It's behind a pay wall, but you can click on the blue View tab, Preview Technical Paper, and look at 5 pages (that may be the whole thing, I'm not sure) that includes that picture plus another few views of designs that were based off of that one, I think.

Mass equals comfort but not necessarily protection. Race cars weigh about 1300 lbs and take horrendous crashes in style. The Smart Two is a beast in crash testing, better than some larger vehicles. SUVs take too long to stop and don't swerve as well as a sedan. A long, narrow streamlined car has plenty of crash zone room.

The best we can do is support styling changes that are efficient in the face of criticism.

When people post on boards saying X new car is uglier than the old one because they raised the rear deck and made the car more aerodynamic, I feel the duty to chime in and say "I think it looks great!". There's a lot of people stuck in the stone age who want their brick like 50s designs.