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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!"
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
if they tried designing electric cars without abandoning all automobile design conventions.
Not more than you need, just more than you want
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
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
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 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
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...
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.