A Very Light Car

That's because you imagined it including a Volt drivetrain, quack. The C isn't a plug in at all, and the 500 pound heavier plugin version only has a third the range of the Volt. But weightwise, it, or anything that can do the Volt's job and compete with its price will end up being in the same weight range. Saying you want a Volt drivetrain, and then putting up a vehicle that doesn't have it, is stupid. Which you're apparently satisfied to continue rather than admit the obvious.

I put it there so that you or anyone could click on it and see that reality bites and there's no free lunch no matter how much you rant.

The Volt is a better car, and its longer range makes it more capable of matching more drivers' needs. 35 miles on battery vs 13 for the Prius plugin. The difference can have a huge effect on the owner's ability to keep his EV percentage up, which I thought is what you wanted. Now it seems all you really want is a hybrid, not an EV at all. So what's the problem? THOSE have been on the market for a decade already!

I only assumed they use the same criteria for each vehicle. The mileage part is barely relevant anyway because exactly how each would come out is highly variable depending on the driver's use. One guy could be 100% EV with the Prius plugin, while another could be 99% ICE. If you're one of the latter, then you don't really need a hybrid at all. Buy a goddamned Beetle and quit whining about how everybody is too stupid to build what you want.

LOL All the promises about numbers and yet you're reduced to endless bafflegab.

What I got is that all you can do is offer your imaginary vehicles against the reality of physics and the market. You're happy to pretend that apples are oranges, and so low on rhetorical ammo that you need little Bonkers to back you up with his usual brand of non sequiturs. You might as well cut to the chase and tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about because I don't have a Linkedin group! I KNEW that your promised manifesto would either never appear or be a sack of dumb rants that you've already drizzled out. Your excuse about not having time to produce all those "debate ending" numbers is a joke given that you have time to keep piling the shit higher.

I did say "if" I got a moneypit car. I suppose the Miata is fairly similar in something NOT 40 years old, but it would lack the cachet of being a car I thought was really cool when I was a kid. Also it would be following embarassing members of the family in car choice.

May be I ought to build something instead...perhaps even a wood framed job ala Morgan. Haven't really looked into how hard homebuilts are to register in Massachusetts (probably hard - they have 3 laws for everything and at least 2 of them contradict) or Vermont (might be easier.)

I spent a few years driving around an aircooled flat 6, but it wanted a lot more garage time than I could give it to be happy, and it was only

25 or so at the time (Corvair - 6 cylinders, 4 carbs, don't leave home without 300 lbs of tools in the trunk.) The standard Chevy parts were easy and cheap at NAPA, the specialized stuff all came from Clark's.

My 1968 ford is a pain the ass with its age and decrepitude, but since its parts now come from the New Holland dealer, it's not as hard as you might think to find many of them (though it can get awfully expensive.) Top speed of 18 mph, but it digs a mean hole. Not very lightweight.

In the cachet department, consider that the 914 was never really accepted as a Porsche. It was built by VW, and the 4-cyl. is a VW engine.

However, parts are available; it handles better than a Porsche 356 and maybe an early 911; and it's not particularly hard to work on. I'm not a fan, but each to his own.

Caution: The "wood frame" on a Morgan is the body frame. First you build a boat frame (the wooden body frame) and then you bend sheet metal over it. The chassis frame is steel, and conventional.

Kits are a whole lot easier. If you really want to build from scratch, consider the Locost by Ron Champion, or one of its clones.

My first car (a '63, bought new). If you had four carbs, you must have had a '65 or '66, or else you had a John Fitch GT conversion. The '65s and '66s actually were very nice cars, with excellent suspension. Not so the '64s and earlier. But it was the first car I drove at SCCA driver's school, and with the Fitch suspension, it was Ok.

A lot of the engine parts were from a Chevy 348 or 409. Hydraulic lifters were the big one, because they were always getting sticky.

I guess not. If you want an old sports car to play with, be prepared to pay 'way more than they're worth, by any sensible measure.

Nope. Cannot even build a 3 wheeler with 2 at the front and one at the back - the only one licenseable is the CanAm Spyder, or one build before something like 1960.

No 4 wheel motorcycles in Ontario. Think it is Canada wide.

Fantastic little machine - it would have to be registered as a Quad

- which is restricted to where it can be driven.

I think these rules need to be changed.

Yup, '65 "post-Nader revision." Convertible, from which the turbo motor had been removed and replaced with the 4-carb 140 long before I got it. Worst breakdown was when the fan bearing mount broke (the top of the motor.) Made a horrible noise, figured it was toast - after a long cold wait for the tow truck, a look at what had happened at home, and a $25 refurb part from Clark's, back in business.

Another time the ignition gave out, but I had actually already gotten an electronic replacement, just hadn't installed it yet - so I did it beside the road where it expired (with some of the 300 lbs of tools...)

It's not the exact car that I want, but the esthetics of the car, the body design, really please me. There is a Ferrari from the early fifties that I like even more but I can't remember the model. But it's not the exact car I want either. I have an idea, a couple actually, of what I want for a custom made sports car. To get that car I would need to build it myself. But there is no reason to start completely from scratch, I can use cosmetic and mechanical design elements from other cars. The English and Italian design esthetics greatly appeal to me. Eric

Possibly an original 166 MM Barchetta. If you can find a photo of a

1948 Cisitalia, you'll see where that whole school of body design came from. Its culmination was the 427 Cobra roadster. The AC Ace, which was the basis of the Cobras, was an admitted copy of the Barchetta -- without the 1.5 liter V12. Pistons like thimbles but it went like hell.

Interesting. A friend in Ontario told me he's seeing lots of those training wheels which are massively popular in the US. Could be a nasty surprise for owners if cops decide to crack down. One I saw up close had enough bodywork that you couldn't see that the original rear wheel was still there unless you were looking hard.

One thing it tells me is that vehicles like the Aptera trying to duck crash test certification by pretending to be motorcycles, will be non starters in many jurisdictions. Insurance costs might be prohibitive anyway.

Side note: I saw a Spyder wheel into a 711 lot the other day by cutting across an adjoining parking lot. He was doing about 50 when he left the roadway. Sloped and humped asphalt, I thought he might go airborne. Definitely reckless and I'm no prude about such things. I immediately thought Kenny Powers! :)

The problems I see with the Volt, Leaf and other electric autos is that they don't fit my life style. I drive, on any given day, somewhere around 50-100 miles. Most places I stop don't have a facility to charge the battery and if they did, I'm sure in time they'll charge you to use their charging station (nobody does anything for free). With that, and the $40K price tag to purchase, the unknown battery life and replacement costs and the costs to charge the battery at home, I don't feel like I can afford anything like a battery only automobile. A hybrid maybe but even they have a lot of the same problems for me, costs. I know YOU say that they have the same or cheaper 5 year cost but it has NOT been proven to my satisfaction because of the battery replacement costs. I'm still driving the same automobile after 12 years and it's cost the same now and it did when I bought it. It's got about 90K miles on it. Nothing major has gone wrong or needed replacement. Who, which an electric, can say the same? I don't see GM or Nissan replacing the batteries for free and I haven't heard a real life expectancy or cost. I just don't think the electrics are ready for prime time. They may be aimed at the middle of the buying public but the whole electric automobile business is the same now as it was in the '20's only now the government is pressing the issue for political reasons. There will always be some who want to be on the bleeding edge and then there are the rest of us that look at the real world costs in terms of real return on our dollar. R. Wink

most importantly, you'll see

I had an interest in the Locost a while back. i do not remember which web site , but someone has analysed the original Locost frame and published the design of a modified frame that is much stiffer than the original frame.

Dan

Yeah, I think there are at least a couple of them. I haven't checked into them carefully.

It had some obvious room for improvement but the torsional stiffness issue is a chronic one with space-frame chassis that are narrow or that have thin sides. That's most of them. There's just no room to get a torsion-resisting structure in there, and if it's an open car, you have no bracing across the top to compensate. A top, with triangulated tubes, solves everything. A roll bar tricked with diagonals to the chassis is a big help but a lot of racing class rules don't allow structure that's obviously intended to stiffen the car and improve performance.

One of the two original space-frame roadsters, the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR race car from 1952, (the other was the Lotus 6 we've been discussing) solved it as well as any car since. It consisted of a pair of bridge-like tube-frame "boxes" in each sill. The result was a wide and high sill that was hard to step over. When they applied the design to their road-going coupe, the M-B 300 SL Gullwing, they had to open the doors upward to make it practical to get in and out. You had to hoist yourself by the door handle. That was the entire reason for the gull-wing configuration.

Another solution is a tubular box down the middle of the car, known as a central torsion box. The British TVR used that approach and it had pretty good stiffness. (Lotus did it in sheet metal in the original Lotus Elan, 1961). It makes the car a little wider but today's car shapes handle it with no trouble.

As I said, it's been a chronic problem from the beginning. It's led to a lot of hybrid designs, starting with stressing the body skin on the sides of the passnger compartment, as in the Lotus 7 and the Locost, which helps a little bit; to the monocoque central bay on the racing Jaguar D-Type (1954), made of magnesium alloy sheet (Elektron). Today, with carbon fiber and tub-like monocoques, the problem is largely solved. But not completely. It's still the weak link in an open car.

The Volt, in very simple terms, gives your first gallon of "fuel" for the price of a dozen kwhs. Call it a $3 saving each charge. After that it gets about 40mpg.

Compared to a 30mpg ICE sedan, $4 per gallon, and 10 cent per kwh: at

50 miles a day you'd be at about 70% EV, and saving about $3.50. That would pay reasonably although you could do as well with a regular econobox if you're OK comparing apples to oranges.

At 100 miles a day, 35% EV, and the saving is $5 per day.

Once you figure that part out then you take fuel and electric price increases into account for as long as you intend to own the car, and insurance as well especially if you're comparing to other new cars. Plus all the usual stuff like depreciation and interest cost or whatever. And of course you'd do similar calculations with other EVs and hybrids.

"Feelings" like yours don't hold much sway with me.

There is no need to take my word for anything, because _I_ only referenced what independent sources have calculated. Those calculations can be highly variable but anybody with grade school math skills, with or without a calculator, can work out their own projected costs.

It will NEVER be proven to the satisfaction of people who feel their way around issues. The rest can go by the details of the manufacturer's warranty.

Probably somebody with an EV with 90k on it. Considering that the hybrids have been around for 10 years, and the Volt for 3, what do think the odds are that somebody has driven 90k and reported their experience on the intertubes?

Then you simply haven't read the warranty, which would have taken less time than you spent writing up an ill informed rationalization. Putting opinion before research is illogical, therefore I doubt that anything I or anyone could say will make you objective.

No, you said it correctly at the beginning. You're not thinking, you're feeling.

I live in the real world and I have a proven history of making good financial decisions. Feel free to pretend that I'm just some bleeding edge fanatic if it helps you feel better about your feelings.

Ok. Maybe you have a point or two but what is the replacement cost of a set of batteries and how often do then need to be replace? Cite hard facts, your or someone else's replacement cost experience, when and where so they can be verified. Your feeling on the subject as unimportant as you say mine are. Cite facts from real life, not government or auto company propaganda. I haven't been able to find anyone that has the data except for government or auto company propaganda. R. Wink

You already mentioned some kind of government propaganda which I consider crazy talk. Can you give me any reason I should do research for someone who's irrational? Clearly you still haven't read the warranty replacement details which are readily available and would give you an excellent idea of what to expect in terms of lifetime and degradation.

I had a conversation a few days ago with a guy who's thinking about doing an EV conversion. Assuming he was talking lead acid, I mentioned the cost of frequently replacing those. No he said, he wants to use lithium which he said are something like $5k IIRC. So not only are battery prices surely in your dealer's parts book (and bound to be similar to the price of a complete engine, which dealers are known to replace when necessary), but they're apparently available aftermarket, which means they're not any kind of boogeyman.

You actually can have as many wheels on the vehicle as you want, as long as no more than 3 can contact the road at any time..

Also, a motorcycle in Canada must have HANDLEBARS, not a steering wheel, and the driver must sit ASTRIDE the seat - no bench or bucket.

Well, the lead acids in my Fiat conversion lasted 2 years - froze over the winter when someone stole the cord to the trickle charger.

A friend put 400,000km on a first gen Prius with no measurable loss of battery capacity. I believe he sold it a few months ago.

You rant like a hysterical woman.

Dude, you spent $45 grand on a 3,800# car that gets negligibly better gas mileage (and in only certain driving patterns) than an $18K 2500# hybrid. I dgaf whether the comparison is hybrid to hybrid, plug-in to hybrid, whatever.

Your breakeven ROI on that dumb deal will occur in, what, 350,000 miles???? Yeah, dat was a wise use of capital....

Yeah, the Volt is a great car.... mebbe.... but a dopey use of capital, if the goal is economy.

Oh, yeah, the prius c has a D-size battery of 1 kWhr.... so what?? In most driving scenarios it's more economical than your volt, and in the cases where it's not, well, you'll have to wait about 18 years to get yer money back.

Good one, Kidding.... Hey, why don't you manage MY portfolio, while yer pissing yours away??

On Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:22:09 -0400, Ed Huntress wrote as underneath my scribble :

Ed, you stopped looking a couple of years early in Colin Chapman design evolution, take a look at the Lotus 11 Club racer (the LeMans version also but more expensive rear suspension) really slippery, really light spaceframe and Al. bodywork, Coventry Climax, went like the clappers, can be used on the road! C+

Yes, the 11 and 15 were very slick. I don't think they'd be called club racers by my generation, though. Chapman raced them in international competition.

As for "can be used on the road," I suppose someone could. For that matter, Lotus made (almost as a joke, but you could buy one) a "road" version of one of their smaller formula cars. Headlights and cycle fenders did no add to the car's panache.