Slashdot Mirror
Keep Your Eye on the Electric Sparrow
WC as Kato writes "Corbin Motors, the company that made the cute electric Sparrow car driven by Austin Powers in Goldmember, has gone into bankruptcy. SJ Mercury News has details of the dead bird..er Sparrow. Another electric car bites the dust!"
maybe my sparrow would of gotten more use if it had a plug-in to recharge my electric jacket.
Mike
was it an african or european spa- oh, wait. nevermind.
What a Groovy Bird baby... Yeah baby... yea
TripInvite.com: Group Travel Made Simple Evit
...It's how you use it!!
Or in this case, how you use a potential market and profit margins...
Sorry, it's tiny, the original site seems to be gone now.
if they tried designing electric cars without abandoning all automobile design conventions.
Not more than you need, just more than you want
There was one always parked in Old Town Pasadena. I loved seeing that thing sitting there. Always wanted to have one as well.
Oh well, time for another dream.
Ted
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Don't have a throm-bo...
are a waste of my energy.
:D
No, seriously, until the method of storing the "fuel" more efficiently and so on, I don't think that electric cars will be any good. Maybe in a huge disclosed areas where you can deposit load-post frequently enough
But then again, nobody calls me an engineer, and for a reason.
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
So who *REALLY* killed the Sparrow?
Was it
A) An evil conspiracy of evil Oil Companies seeking to cover the planet in waste and polution in a plot to take over the world.
B) An evil conspiracy of evil Car Companies seeking to cover the planet in waste and polution in a plot to take over the world.
C) An evil conspiracy of evil Oil Companies working with evil Car Companies seeking to cover the planet in waste and polution in a plot to take over the world.
D) The oil lovin' election stealin' George W Bush and evil Oil Company exCEO Dick Chaney
E) SUVs
F) George W Bush and Dick Chaney driving an SUV filled with evil Oil Company CEOs and evil Car Company CEOs.
Brian Ellenberger
Surprise, surprise, it was an ugly looking thing, I used to see them in a shop window in San Francisco.
So it's followed the C5, remember Sinclair's triumph?
Kevin
"It's not the cough that carries you off, it's the coffin they carry you off in" O. Nash
I spent many hours reviewing the corbin motor website. They had some awesome vehicles besides the sparrow, and plans for even better ones in the near future. I had always planned on getting one, especially now that I'm moving to the boonies where fuel costs will be an even bigger concern.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
Not so tiny.
Killed by its own ugliness. I'd rather sport the VW 1-litre than the Sparrow.
the sparrow was pretty cool, that's a shame. from what i understand one of the partners wanted lots of $$ so they tanked after his demands could not be met.
there was a past story here on slashdot about electric cars in washington state (you can now use them) so electric cars are finally getting a chance in some areas. here's the gem car, this looks a little too "golf-carty" for me, but when other models come out i might consider one.
http://www.gemcar.com/
on a side note, fuel cells are interesting, but you're still tied to infrastructure that requires you to "fuel" up somewhere. with electric vehicles you plug in. sure, this isn't good for people who move, store and sell gas or hydrogen, but it's better for consumers (that's opinion so far). i'm kinda concerned about fuel cell laptops and other fuel cell powered devices, right now i just plug in, i'd rather not be tied to getting cartridges like a printer, or razors for razor blades-- although, companies who make laptops would certainly love to sell more things to me than just a laptop. right now, i buy one and the sales cycle is pretty much over. we'll see i'm sure others here have other thoughts (and opposite ones at that). currently, i use a segway ht to get around, it costs less than a few dollars worth of electricity per month and i'm pretty pleased with it so far. this week i reached 850 miles. hopefully, this weekend i'm installing my solar array, so i'll be totally off the grid.
cheers,
pt
Who cares?
Electric cars aren't the environmental dream they appear to be; the electricity needs to be produced somewhere, donnit? And the main reason they seem like such a lovely alternative (financially, noise and air pollution, size, etc) is because they are heavily subsidized.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love the things for aesthetics alone, and I sure won't complain that I didn't get a ticket for not feeding the meter (L.A.), but until electricity production is moved away from petroleum and its ilk, the demise of one only-recently-given-a-crap-about company that produced a few models shouldn't be something to lose sleep over.
Did anyone ever see the sparrow with a Harley engine? The thing only got 35 miles to the gallon, less then a Toyota Echo. Rather then putting an 'engeneered to be loud' harley engine in their frame they could have worked on a real hybrid car. Talk about a lost opportunity.
:P
This company was lame, and their products were ugly. They should have just made simple electric bikes, rather then putting a cheap shell around a trike
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Wasn't it Goldmember himself who drove the Sparrow in the movie? Austin Powers was chasing him in a Mini! :)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
This.. is an EX-Sparrow!
Reality is indistinguishable from any sufficiently advanced fantasy.
OK, just so I don't get accused of recycling material, I left a post the other day with the same subject line...
.
But the biatch about 'lectric cars is RECHARGING them. Who wants to go 150 miles, only to wait 8 hours to recharge it?
It seems to me that the best alternative energy car is the air car
It runs on compressed air, and actually cleans the air as you drive it! Range of around 200 miles, and you can refuel in under one minute.
If no external compressor is available, there's an internal one that takes a few hours - so at its worst, it's pretty comparable to an electric car.
To refuel takes about $2 worth of electricity!
If I had the $$, I'd very seriously consider getting one...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
... considering the article didn't have any.
Try:
www.firstmoto.ch/F6/design/Sparrow.html
G) Cowboy Neal can't fit in a Sparrow
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Every time this argument is made "that electricity has to be made somewhere!", someone has to reply "Yes, but it can be done more efficiently if its all in one place."
Just like when you're coding, if you have one function in once place, you can tune its performance, if you have your power generation in one place, you can tune its efficiency and polution.
Even if we stay with our current very dirty approach to making power, electric vehicles would still greatly reduce pollution. Small gas-burning engines pollute much more than large plants, which can have scrubbers, specialized parts, etc.
And when you're ready to swap out your file-reader for a SQL database, there's only one place to fix. Same goes with energy production. When we finally run out of oil and are ready to move onto something else (whatever it is), we only have to upgrade the plants, rather than 10 hojillion individual cars on the road.
Lastly, the subsidy comment. From what I've read, Corbin's books didn't have large government grants. There are a few tax breaks and other, pretty minor, incentives out there. However, given the above statements about reductions in pollution and the easing of the future transition to cleaner energy, I'd say that more subsidies is what we need.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
First thing I asked them was how prone was the Sparrow to tipping over. There was a lengthy silence so I moved on to other questions.
Once at the wheel, I was super cautious. Never got over 30. Motor made a high pitched whine even at 5 MPH and just kept winding that pitch up beyond dental drill range. There was a drainage channel angling across the exit (they were at the end of a turn-around circle). I had visions of the Sparrow flipping over if I took that exit with any speed at all-- left wheel down as that side hit the dip, then left wheel up and right wheel down, perfect conditions for tipping over. So I didn't try it.
Aside from being a 3 wheeler, the big problem was the electric part. 60 mile range (at best) before needing hours to recharge was bad enough. Then to learn that the batteries would only last 2 to 4 years before I'd have to replace the lot for several hundred dollars convinced me it wasn't even a little bit practical. You're not doing the environment any favors when you're going thru lots of batteries. Far friendlier to use a conventional car.
Corbin was hard at work on a gas powered 3 wheeler called Merlin at the time. Wonder what became of that effort?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I was not aware it was Groovy until now. Thank you!
I saw a bunch of their car/motorcycle things here in Silicon Valley, but I'd never drive one when I could ride a real motorcycle. (And yes, that's a Corbin seat there as well).
For those of you wondering what they look like, here's a pic:
http://www.photowords.com/Earth7408.jpg
Courtesy Google Image Search
Reading some of the history between Corbin Motors and MCM (Google cache here), Corbin seems to have bet the farm on the Merlin roadster. Specifically, they decided to build their own engine (for what possible reason, I dunno.) Here's a link to the MCM engine being developed for the Merlin. It's a cute engine, but it's development seems to have caused a rift between Corbin and MCM, resulting in litigation that eventually led to Corbin's demise. They should have just purchased an engine from Honda or Suzuki or anyone else who's willing to OEM one to them. It was a very bad decision to roll-their-own.
There's a lesson here for most engineers. Building something from scratch, while cool, may not be the best decision. It's hard to stay in business if you make decisions that bankrupt the company.
Ha ha, who cares. Only stupid hippies drive electric cars, anyway.
Their FAQ said they had pickups, vans, etc being designed as well as the commuter model pictured. Yes, seems quite practical compared to similar sized concept electric vehicles, certainly a lot cheaper at only 8 to 10 grand brand new. And the single charge range is sufficient for most commuting, plus additional stops here and there on the way home. and it has heat for the winter, what they need is some way to have AC now. I'm not sure exactly how much HP you need to run a normal car sized compressor, 10HP maybe? Not sure what they would do to the range and speed, but big areas of the world, AC is really kinda nice and makes a difference especially in stop and go commuter traffic on hot highways. But still, all in all, a very interesting concept and I wish them well. Perhaps at least maybe two on board storage batteries, put solar panels on the roof, and run a fan or two inside, sort of an interim step as they develop it more. Should be enough room on the roof for (this is a rough WAG) around 8 amps at 400 watts maybe for panels, something to start with anyway. So you would have a hybrid air/electric then. And the filter the air at the gas/air station is a nice point, every little bit helps!
Look, please understand that I agree with the concerns you guys are bringing up. But don't you think it's a little Utopian (to put it nicely) to blithely make comparisons between gasoline and electric cars as if the choice really was renewable vs nonrenewable energy? If you are as big of an environmental buff as you claim then you are aware that renewable energy currently comprises a small percentage of US production.
I agree that electric cars are a good idea, but by themselves, they are a waste of time. They must be accompanied by a change in energy production policy.
And the suggestion that subsidies aren't important cannot be taken seriously. If you are under the impression that Mr. I-love-my-Mustang will just drop trou' at the sight of an EV, you are mistaken. For certain segments of the public, energy awareness is a priority which easily overrides their gearhead desires (if any). This, however does not apply to most people. The public wants it fast, easy, cheap, sexy and powerful, and all at once. EVs currently fail on at least one of those categories and the main thing bringing Joe Average to the dealer is the smell o' green (and I ain't talkin' about the forest). Don't fool yourself into thinking the public cares about the ozone. They want easy fixes. (Which is also a good explanation for why Linux hasn't caught on with the mass public yet and in present form never will.)
Here are the reasons for their bankruptcy:
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/592
"All I ask is for a chance to prove that money can't make me happy."
I've actually driven a couple of Sparrows, on two different occasions. The Atlanta dealer allowed me to test drive them, once just in a parking lot, and a few months later my wife and I drove another one on the road (separately, of course. It's strictly a one-person vehicle).
I must say that I was impressed with the ease of maneuvering it and the get-up-and-go that it had, it was a ball to drive. Tearing through light traffic on Briarcliff Road and freaking out the locals... it was a lot of fun. We thought about buying one, maybe even two of them, had they improved it and actually gone into full production of the planned "Sparrow II". The short range didn't bother me (I live less than a mile from work), and I really like the quirky styling.
My take on it is that the company was just so poorly managed that it would never have made any difference how much money it made, it would never have been profitable. If you take the number of Sparrows and Merlin Roadsters actually produced and divide it into the money they burned through, you find that they sold them for about a tenth of what they spent to build them. Full production-line efficiency and better design would have brought that cost down eventually, but it would take more than price and cool factor to make them profitable.
The huge salaries drawn by the top execs and the leases on their company Bentleys couldn't have much to do with it, could they? :)
By the way... why is this news now, two months after the bankruptcy announcement (March 27), and it wasn't news when I submitted it? Sure, I submitted it to Slashdot on April 1st, but it wasn't a joke.
Hell, their website is long gone, now. We could have taken it down for them and cost Tom a fortune in bandwidth charges!
You can't take the sky from me!
this is true! I just watched AP:Goldmember last night and austin drives the mini while Goldmemeber and Mr. Roboto's henchmen drive sparrows...More Irresponsible reporting on slashdot!
A Corbin Motors official, on the condition of anonymity, stated that the company will be selling the rest of its inventory to monster truck shows around the nation. There children in their parent's YUKON, NAVIGATOR, EXPEDITION, and SUBURBAN sport utility monsters will be able to experience the feeling of running over a vehicle, all for only $69.95 per run.
Honestly, who would want to own an overpriced, slow vehicle in the land of the monster gas hogs? All the lack of safety of a motorcycle, with NONE of the fun. Must electric cars always look like a deformed chicken egg?
Why can't /.ers seem to understand how powerful this could be? E-85 is 85% biomass distilled alcohol that has 15% gasoline mixed in. There are already about 50 or so vehicles on the market that are e-85 ready, aka FFV. Combine this RENEWABLE fuel source with Hybrid Electric and you have a reasonable vehicle that WORKS! No needed changes to infrastructure. Your car doesn't have to be ugly and you feel good about yourself. Ethanol is used in many applications and it provides a positive return on the expenditure of energy it takes to create in comparison to the amount of energy it outputs.
Meanwhile fuel cells and electric cars with plugs require a power plant somewhere or oil to charge them.
Oh well....
I was sick and tired of scraping them off the windshield and out of the grill of my semi-tractor.
Seriously, whenever I saw the sparrow I couldn't help but be reminded of the driver's ed film they showed us where they crashed small imports into American 4-door sedans. The intended message was "your father's crappy old car isn't cool, but it's a lot safer". Of course, we were teenage boys so the received message was "Oh boy! We get to sit in class and watch car crashes!".
I for one, would be willing to chip in 50 bucks to see a Sparrow go mano-a-bird with a Chevy Caprice. OK... 5 bucks... as part of the gate fee at the stock car races. Very doable. Hey... this could save the company.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Is there any reason why alcohol, so clean and so renewable, seems to always be overlooked as an alternative fuel?
The coolest voice ever.
::cough::fraud::cough::
Hydrogen powered / battery hybrid -- But the battery replacement cost would still be the uneconomical point. We are way overdue for H power. Another oil embargo like in the '70s might do wonders toward ending imported oil usage that costs $$$ and causes major eco-damage. ---
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
IMO:Cars are wrong to begin with, at least in their current designs. How many deaths result from car crashes each year? (you can argue that it's not the car but the person behind it that causes the car crashes to begin with or any other reason but that's beside the point) How costly is it for every car owning individual in the nation combined to pay each respective cost for their car(s)? This money could be better spent and the lives that were taken from car accidents would've been better lived if it were not for these steel beasts! We don't suffer alone from these machines of death, the Earth suffers from the exhaust and suffocates from the jungles of concrete and other substances we entomb the earth's crust in to provide streets for our machines of death. If you express concern about our environment you're declared a hippy or environmentalist wacko. OTOH if you point out that car crashes case many deaths, perhaps even more deaths than any war ever waged people quickly point out other examples only to veer away from this fact.
So are electronic cars a solution? Perhaps to curb pollution and other harmful things, yes, but priority one should be creating the safest car over anything else. Give the public something that is made to be impossible to hurt another being by way of impact. Of course this will likely never happen because of greed and the fact that making a safer car would more than likely not be accepted by the general public for reason X, Y, or Z.
Greed and stupidity in great numbers rule. Because of that, the earth will continue to be sealed up to make more roads for polluting machines of death, and one day we will wonder where all our good and bad insects have gone and the animals who used to roam over the dusty or green earth. All of this and more just to make our lives easier? Give me a break.
I'm glad life is short.
As long as it doesn't shoot me after dinner, sparrows are okay. Papa bear says so. Out on bail?
Alcohol is promoted as a "renewable fuel", but only by people with an economic interest in its increased consumption. Describing it this way conceals the fact that producing alcohol itself has a heavy ecological impact. Most of this is because farming is very energy and chemical intensive. But there's also the cost of taking the resulting biomass, fermenting it, distilling it, and disposing of the resulting waste. I don't have decent figures, but this does not strike me as an efficient process. Probably more eco-friendly that burning our finite supply of fossil fuels, but not exceedingly so.
I'm all for electric and energy efficient vehicles. But the Corbin just didn't make sense to me: it was too expensive, too small, felt unsafe, and didn't have much range.
I'm much more sorry to see something like the Ford Think car go--while it had problems similar to the Corbin, it seemed much closer to being practical (all it needed was a little more range--probably doable with current battery technologies).
Unfortunately, there is a whole host of issues to be overcome with compressed air cars. I think that there is currently one "manufacturer" that is trying to push them. On closer inspection, that company looks like a patent-holding company looking to liscense their technology to others rather than take any risks themselves. The main problem with compressed air vehicles is that they will loose power as the compressed air charge runs out. I for one want a vehicle that will always behave the same.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
You are creating more mis-information by modding the parent post up. Batteries contain materials that pollute just as much as fossil fuels, and the FACT that all these batteries still require a source to be charged. It's a pipe dream to think that the sources are all going to be wind, hydro, or solar powered. It's going to be Nukes, coal, gas, and oil.
...there are starting to be a fair number of E85 outlets, mostly in the Midwest (where the crops from which ethanol is made are grown), and the changes needed to enable a gasoline station to handle E85 are even smaller than those necessary for M85. Elsewhere in the nation, E85 stations are rarer than M85 stations; in particular, I don't think there's a single one in California.
I quote:
Fuel Source
Ethanol, or grain alcohol, is produced by fermenting biomass, commonly corn (though other, lower-value feedstocks have been tested in an effort to reduce costs, like brewery waste and cheese-factory effluent--blecch!). It is thus inherently a renewable resource, and contributes nothing in itself to greenhouse-gas loading of the atmosphere (and with efficient modern farming techniques, there's still an improvement even when you add in the petroleum-based fuel burned to plow the fields, make the fertilizer, etc.). As an alternative motor vehicle fuel, it is usually blended in a mixture of 85% ethanol, 15% unleaded gasoline, whence E85. (It is also used in up to 10% blends with gasoline (gasohol) to oxygenate the gasoline, and this mixture can be used by most modern gasoline vehicles.)
Wholesale Availability
E85 is, in many ways, like M85, the other alcohol fuel made with methanol instead of ethanol blended with 15% gasoline. There is no national distribution network on the scale of those for gasoline, diesel, and natural gas; however...
Retail Availability
Advantages
Ethanol, as noted above, is a renewable resource that contributes nothing in itself to global warming concerns. Like methanol, it can be blended with any amount of gasoline in the tank of a flex-fuel vehicle, which is what automakers are selling these days. In fact, starting with the 1999 model year, some automakers are making every one of certain vehicle models capable of using E85 in any mixture with gasoline, at no extra charge. Thus buyers will not have to do anything extra at all to have a vehicle capable of using an alternative fuel, though they will still have to find an E85 fueling station to take advantage of that capability.
Disadvantages
The main disadvantage of E85 is the price of the fuel, even with the available subsidies. However, research is under way to enable the fermentation of lower-grade feedstocks (think of using not only the corn squeezin's but also the cob to make alcohol!), which should help a lot. Ethanol is somewhat corrosive, though less so than methanol, and concerns about vapor lock, cold starts, and flame visibility like those for methanol have led to the same standard blend of 85% alcohol with 15% gasoline.
These minor problems are so trivial that once there is money behind it they can be solved by using Titanium parts.
Oh well.. of my soapbox.
I think Alicia Silverstone drives one of these too. She'll be pissed. That breaks my heart.
A beowulf cluster of natalie portmans pouring hot grits all over themselves saying "all your base are belong to us" while trying to stuff libraries of congress into volkswagen beetles which run Linux.
Boom!
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
I don't understand why some companies do this. I think they must be caught up in their own fantasy, completely blind to the reality.
Is the title a reference to some 70's cop drama starring a currently indited former child actor from the "Little Rascals"? Go figure....
A big nose on wheels. Wot? my first post!
A sound mind, a healthy body. . . pick one
Electric Sparrow keeps it's eye on YOU.
and sensible hippies drive...VW minibuses?
I saw one of them at the Stanford Electric Car Show a couple of years ago, and they were for sale a couple of blocks from my office in San Francisco. Unless they really improved it, it was really a turkey. First of all, it was $12000, which is more than enough to buy a real car, or a good used car and an overpriced Segway :-) Second, it didn't have enough trunk-like space for a bag of groceries or an overstuffed laptop briefcase. That means it's not really useful for driving to work or the shopping, so it's just a toy (hence the afore-flamed Segway :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks