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The Return of the Sparrow Electric Vehicle?
H0NGK0NGPH00EY writes "I have been keeping my eye on the Sparrow electric vehicle, following last year's bankruptcy of its creator, and recently noticed that the brightly-colored three-wheeled electric commuter car has been reborn. Myers Motors will begin selling an upgraded version this summer, after having acquired the rights and tooling from Phoenix Environmental Motors, who mention this on their official homepage."
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Too many "alternative" ideas don't understand that "different" and "popular" are very rarely correlated.
If I didn't already have a solid-performing, small Civic, I'd seriously think about one of these.
Except that I drive too much.
Commuter market is hard to handle. One has to worry about safety in city driving, and how close to work one has to be for it to be practical. If you work in any sort of fabrication facility, chances are you live a good distance from work. Wouldn't want to run out of juice on the side of the road in a vehicle that's difficult to refuel w/o a large time investment.
"A group of words expressing something other than their literal intention. Now that... is... irony!" - Bender
This is a great example of a staggeringly well-designed technology. Efficient, clean, useful, and damn cool looking, if you ask me. I want one.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Strike 1: it's electric. After listening to the Big 3 say for years and years no one wants electric cars, the public doesn't want electric cars. Baaaa.
Strike 2: single seater. After listening to the Big 3 say for years and years that SUV's and trucks can do more for you, the public won't care about a car with a single seat. Baaaa.
Strike 3: limited range. After listening to the Big 3 say for years and years that a car should be able to drive across the US or Canada on a moment's notice... eh, you get the idea.
Sparrow concept = neat
Sparrow sales will = bleh
Personally, I like the Tango more than the Sparrow.
My main question is: how practical is this car? You have to pay over 13,000 for something that only seat one. What if you have to fit wife, kids, and dogs into your car?
I personally would only consider an electric car if it comes in a wagon.
Yah, I definately agree with you. The speed is there, but definately not the distance. If this thing could get me at least 100 miles i'd buy one in a second. Also, they could have probably come up with a much better looking design for the car, it looks like the car melted while it was recharging! Speaking of recharge, does anyone know how long it takes?
I don't think you should see it as a replacement for a car; rather it is an all-weather, electric alternative to a scooter, commuter bike or delivery vehicle. In Sweden, similar small, enclosed gasoline-engine moped-classed vehicles have become popular for just those roles. This could probably be a good higher speed alternative.
I guess that in a way, having USA as their home marked is not a good thing. You would probably see a lot more acceptance for this in Europe.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The people responsible for this business plan need to understand that, if an invention turns out to be ugly, the chances than it can be spinned into something fashionable are quite slim.
They should be working to mitigate that, not enhance it by painting it purple!
www.enterweb.pt
At around $14,000 and only a 20-40 mile range I really can't see this as a real option for anyone. You can buy a hybrid car at that price. And get a range closer to 400 miles....
If the price were around $3,000 I'd consider it. Heck, even if the top speed were around 45 MPH I'd be happy enough.
As Nietsche famously said, "If you stare too long into the Abyss, 1d4 Tanar'ri of random type will attack you."
Unless your a bird, insect or pollinating plant. Then wind farms are a very bad thing indeed.
Why? Because they produce energy without physically burning anything? Or is it because they change the skyline? (Not that I mind, I'd rather have the graceful spinning of blades than the cancerous cloud of a coal/oil based plant)
What really has me curious is why they included power ports for laptops in the thing. With the battery life it has (or hasn't), who would dare add on anything that would use more electricity?
For that matter, why have power windows? The only reason I like power windows is so I can raise/lower passenger and rear windows. In this car, there isn't a window that is even the slightest bit difficult to reach by the driver.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Unless as a personal intra-city transport device, and even then:
1) Bad weather places that are congested
2) In a city like London, a small vehicle is good
3) If this vehicle was exempt from the 5/day congestion fee
If you drive daily in London, then this vehicle could save you up to 1500 in congestion charges **IF** this vehicle was exempt because it was small and non-polluting. In 5 years that would be around the cost of the vehicle itself.
It has enough power to get you to and from work in a small area. It is ugly and geeky, so it won't get stolen. You can rent a garage for your main car somewhere cheap for when you need to do a long journey somewhere.
Somehow I don't see the government wanting to give up precious congestion charge fees, even to forward small economical (? how much does the electricity for a full charge cost in this vehicle anyway ?) vehicles over large uneconomical ones.
i don't like that it has 600 lbs of batteries and such a short range. i something like this but with a 500 or 1000 cc turbodiesel would be a lot faster and have much better range, depending on the tank size (600 lbs is almost 100 gallons).
it would probably get close to 100 mpg.
two seats would be nice, but for 100 mpg i'll only complain a few times a week.
hybrid turbodiesel 2 or 3 seater would be very cool.
comments? discuss among yourselves.
Where's Robin Hood? We could kinda really use him now.
Most electricity in the US is coming from coal fired plants which are pretty nasty in terms of burning fossil fuels. Maybe we should be like the French and more reliant on nuke plants? I dunno.
And then there are those batteries. Where do they go for disposal? How often are they replaced?
I don't think there is really any need for the vast majority of SUVs owned in the US, (or the aforementioned France which has recently found that SUVs are very popular there too) but until we get our electricty from some cleaner methods, I don't think electric cars are doing much good either.
this sig deleted by another sig
It's a sparrow, not a swallow! The airspeed velocity of the unladen swallow can be found here!
--- root@127.0.0.1
According to the web site, the battery pack is led acid, weighs just shy of 600lb, and lasts only 1 - 4 years.
If you are considering this vehicle as an eco-friendly alternative to gasoline cars, this is a huge factor. Lead acid batteries pose enormous environmental challenges, from mining, to worker lead exposure, to disposal. The only way I would even remotely consider a vehicle that could chew through a quarter ton of lead every year would be if the battery packs were recycled. What they should do is lease the battery packs, take the returns and recondition them.
IIRC, the Honda and Toyota hybrids use NiMH batteries. Nickel is not very toxic, especially compared to lead, and in fact were it not for their sheer size the battery packs could be disposed of in municipal landfills under federal regs. In principle the nickel could and should be recycled, but unfortunately neither Honda or Toyota have made a commitment to do so.
In my mind this lack of a clear recycling closes the environmental gap between hybrids and small, efficient conventional vehicles such as the Civic and Volkswagen diesels. Many people wouldn't see a dramatic mileage difference between a Toyota Prius and a Toyota Echo; but the gasoline car's proven technology might well translate to a longer service life, an a larger fraction of its components are likely to be recycled as scrap. Estimates are that 95% of the steel in scrapped autos is recovered and recycled.
In any case, this vehicle would be much cooler with NiMH batteries. The gravimetric energy density of NiMH are betwen 60-120 Wh/kg, as opposed to 30-50 for Pb-acid. So you could pack more than twice the energy in the same weight, and be talking about a 50-100 mile range instead of 20-40 miles. A NiMH battery would cost twice as much, but probably last at least twice as long, so the lifetime costs would be comparable, and the environmental costs would be much smaller.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
we've already had the future of personal transport over here for years... the Sinclair C5
they went down as well as Windows ME at a Linux Conference.
we've also done brightly coloured three-wheelers too... that design classic the Reliant Robin
However just when you think all european design sucks, take a look at the sexy Carver from the netherlands.
This is the way manufacturers will get people to buy smaller more efficient vehicles, in my opinion, by making them desirable and functional. Beautiful design wins customers, look at the success of the iPod.
It's a little more straightforward to regulate a dozen powerplants than it is to regulate ten thousand cars.
In dense cities. In particular in cities like San Francisco (assuming it can hill climb) where parking is at a premium. A vehicle this size, like a motorcycle, can park perpendicular on the street, in those tiny little slots between driveways that can't fit any regular car and which are fairly plentiful. Or perhaps in designated motorcycle parking.
That makes a big difference in quick city trips, which are actually a lot of trips for urban dwellers. They are far under 20 miles, and the biggest hassle is getting through traffic and parking.
In addition, many people have a single car garage and could fit a small vehicle on the street in those spare short spaces where a full sized vehicle would not make sense.
Of course a motorcycle can also fit these applications though they don't have a cargo area and don't fit the style of many.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Its amazing what can be accomplished when investor money is used for R&D instead of paying for Tom Corbin's company-leased Bentley.
I drove one of these once. Zippy and small, but not very practical - one-seater designs have never been successful. Yes, it's economical, but I've also driven the Smart (here in North America), and it's a much better car, even if it does consume gas/diesel.
Okay, 30 years ago they predicted 40 years left of oil. why is it that time marches on but there's always still 40 years of oil left?
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
The reason was that 30 years ago they didn't take into account new technological practices and new fields of oil. The practices and supplies they knew about 30 years ago HAVE been exhausted, for the most part. Drive through texas some time and look at all the dead rigs from the 1970s, or at the abandoned offshore rigs along the west coast. As far as I know, futurable situations for the exhaustion of oil at current rates of consumption increase, also taking into account usage drop-off trends as prices increase, place the death of oil in the 2040s or 2050s, where it's stayed since the 1990s.
Anyway, it's all well and good to scoff at the DATEs offered by seemingly paranoid environmentalists, but that doesn't mean we aren't in danger of running out of oil. The simple fact of oil is that it is a resource that takes millions of years to renew, and we are using it at a much faster pace than time and pressure can create it. We will eventually run out and have to move on to a new fuel source, and unless we're proactive, the switchover period could be very tense. Right now, 38% of the power for American industry comes from oil -- and it's increasing. The majority of American consumer goods are imported using trucks, trains and boats that run on oil. Thus, a high price of oil leads to overall inflation and could -- COULD, mind you, I don't think it will -- lead to a failure of our logistic infrastructure.
This is why people are worried about it. This is why we have wars for oil. It is a resource essential to the survival of the US as a superpower, and yet we don't have enough to be self sufficient. Reducing the dependence on foreign oil is one solid step towards the cessation of our meddling in the middle east, but it's expensive -- and most American companies would rather stick with the status quo than "waste" money on new solutions for a problem that isn't even here yet.
I'm not one of these "OMG destroy all cars" environmentalists -- I think science will find a way. But the way isn't oil. The petroleum age will pass on in our lifetimes, so you may as well put in your time with speedboats, ATVs and convertibles now.
Hey freaks: now you're ju