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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!"
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?
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.
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.
...if they tried designing electric cars without abandoning all automobile design conventions.
Funny you should mention that. I'm planning on buying a kit from these guys that will convert a Porsche 914 into an electric powered one.
The specs on this 120-volt kit are pretty impressive: A top speed of 85 mph and a ideal range of up to 100 miles. The only thing it lacks is regenerative braking, but hopefully I can come up with something.
Amazingly, the design conventions for the Porsche 914 make it the ideal electric conversion: Low weight, low drag coefficient, ample battery space, etc.
Bah weep granah, weep ninny bong!
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!
Actually EV's (even working almost entirely on home brew old technologies and sealed lead acid batteries) can already hit the price-point, speed, looks, and power that you talk about.
In fact a vehicle converted from electric to gas is frequently _more_ fun to drive (and still looks the same from the outside) as your full torque is typically available through the entire power curve. Think EV's have to be wimpy golf carts or suppository shaped? Checkout the amateur monsters that race in the National Electric Drag Racing Association or the high performance electric supercar, the T-Zero.
Now there are two points that will most likely keep Joe Shmoe from buying one.
1) Limited range - the best EV's still get only slightly over 100 miles to the charge. Despite the fact that most Americans drive less than 40 miles a day 95% of the year, people feel more comfortable knowing that they can drive for 200-400 miles on a tank of gas. Most people are also used to gas vehicles that give little or no warning (save for the questionable accuracy of a fuel low, float gauge operated, warning light) before running out of fuel. When an electric hits the end of its pack charge performance begins to lessen giving the driver ample (and definitive) warning that they need to find a place to recharge. Oh and there is no need for fancy schmancy thousand dollar connectors to be installed to recharge, that's all about the auto manufacturer's wanting to reduce liability concerns. Most of the EVers I know running custom conversions use their standard 110v or 220v connectors to charge. Also charging does not have to be an 8 hour fiasco. Even on a 15-amp 220-volt circuit you can recharge most packs in less than half that time. Happen to have access to a 50-amp circuit? The time to charge improves greatly. Plus as you plug the car in every night your fully charged every morning ready for a full day of driving. You never have leave your normal route to use a gas station again. Run out of power somewhere? Generally you can find someone with an outlet willing to let you charge up for a little while so that you can make it home. There are more places with electrical outlets than there are with cans of gasoline lying around.
2) Noise - Now this is one that I think most people adjust to (and grow to appreciate), but electrics make little or no noise beyond the sound of tires on pavement. To a lot of gear heads this is a deal breaker. They (understandably) like the roar of a V-8. The turbine like whine of a high revved electric just doesn't quite do it for them. As a fan of all high performance vehicles I know where they are coming from and know that it is futile to argue a matter of taste so I won't spend too long on this. Basically I think most people will find the quiet of an electric appealing after they give it a chance. There is something addictive about being forced back into your seat as you rocket off the line to little more than the sound of the wind rushing bye.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
Don't misunderstand me. I want better batteries but you can recycle a battery. You can't do much to recycle gasoline. It isn't a pipe dream if you make it happen.
Also it can be very enviromentally friendly to charge a battery - as well as economical. Even if your local power doesn't come from a renewable resource you, or a charging facility, can set up your own renewable source. It does take some special effort to charge this kind of batteries (over say powering a light bulb) but it can be done if you know how to set the system up. You always have the option with an EV to choose the more enviromental solutions.
Ethanol is a good start on the problem, and one I think should be used more. Unfortunately many engines have trouble dealing with it and for various reasons it isn't distributed as much as I wish it were. You still face something of a centralization issue with any type of fuel but probably no more than you would to finding a supplier of say batteries for an EV. (If needed it's possible to make either ethanol or a battery yourself.. something you can't do with gasoline).
For a long-term solution I think nanotechnology will make all these solutions moot. However, I don't think we should wait 50 years to start cleaning up the mess we've made of the enviroment.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.