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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.
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
Not so tiny.
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
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!