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!"

Comments

Electric cars in general

[Soulfarmer]

are a waste of my energy.

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 :D

But then again, nobody calls me an engineer, and for a reason.

Re:Electric cars in general

[MikeFM]

Seriously, how much could it cost a gas station to add a single battery exchange point for EV's? I can't see it costing more than exchange points for kerosene tanks or being any more of a hassle. Have some sort of device for removing the old pack and putting a fresh pack in and some sort of recharge station for the old packs. Maybe a few thousand dollars to add at most. If there was a standard for such an exchange station, that was actually used, then EV's would start falling in line to be compatible. Somebody needs to create such a thing and push it through a well placed person in one of the big gasmart chains. I'd say Shell would be a good target because they are moving towards being a renewable resource company already. If only I had some funding.. *sighs*

electric cars...

[ptorrone]

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

Electric Cars Suck..

[mcrbids]

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...

Re:Maybe they wouldn't fail

[KillboyPHD]

...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.

Alas...

[wahmuk]

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!