Lightweight Urban Vehicles and External Controls

I could hardly agree more.

Since the time when I first planned to enter the Progressive Automotive X Prize, my vehicle (which was first designed before the prize was announced) has changed from very small and on two wheels (yet fully enclosed) to somewhat larger, with room for two in tandem seating. It now rolls on three wheels. The X Prize metric of 100 MPGe is a pretty good one*, for this country, at least, as it allows for enough mass and size to incorporate crumple zones -- and in my case, the side crumple zones are several times as large as those in a typical small car. Running forward into a barrier, a small car can do just as well as (or better than) a large car, given enough front crumple space. However, a very small car needs several times as much side crumple space (as a typical car) to reduce accelerations to acceptable levels in a side impact (because the test sled mass is greater than that of a small car, as is the average car mass which might be causing the side impact), and tandem seating can enable such a situation.

In preparing for a test of HHO injection, I've been driving around with a Scan Gauge 2. All my driving has been local, with the longest trip being to a soccer game about 35 minutes (13.9 miles on suburban roads) away. Before the soccer trip, my average speed was 17 mph. It has now gone up to 20 mph. Obviously, I went faster than 20 mph many times (although the fastest was only 55 mph), but it is amazing how low speed ordinary suburban traffic can be. (The scan gauge averages the entire trip including stop lights, etc.) If I were on a bicycle, and if there were no stop lights (probably unnecessary if everyone were traveling on bicycles) I could travel at very close to the same average speed. (Actually, in heavier traffic, this is sometimes the case, even if the bicyclist observes stop signs, etc. I've been in city traffic where a bicyclist can end up ahead of cars over a distance of a few miles.)

(You can imagine a traffic control system for bicyclists, in which people ride in groups of 10 -- 5 wide by 2 deep. At intersections, the normal routine would be interleaving of groups one after another, with slight slowing of one or the other required only when there are conflicts. Lights well in advance of intersections would tell riders to speed up or slow down as required to permit constant interleaving without the need for stops.)

For electric vehicles with batteries being such a high cost smaller vehicle size will be a big advantage.

Again, I could hardly agree more. A small vehicle can use a smaller battery pack. Reduce range, and the battery pack can be made even smaller. Drastically reduce range (let's say to even 20 miles) and the battery pack can be affordable even in the context of a small economy car. Then, to compensate for the reduced range (which would otherwise inevitably leave people stranded far too often, i.e., when the driver decides to go out too lunch at a place a little further away than usual, or when he has to go to the doctor unexpectedly) add an onboard generator which will fire up automatically to keep the batteries charged. Almost insignificant amounts of gasoline would be used for a phenomenal increase in utility and a huge reduction in purchase price as compared to a full electric.

Sadly, we have routinely been putting in harms way and killing our own people (in addition to innocents in other countries) to secure our strategic energy interests in the Middle east. The profoundly un-American among us are happy with the status quo, and will continue to drive gas guzzlers without thought to the consequences. Fortunately, the number of people who give a hoot seems to be increasing.**

* Although I would have preferred a well-to-wheels metric which acknowledges that electricity is produced with both cost and environmental impacts. With the pump-(or plug)-to-wheels standard that will be used, my vehicle (and any plug in hybrid) is seen as about three times as efficient on electricity as it is on gasoline. This encourages gaming of the rules by entering plug-in hybrids with very long range on electricity, to keep them operating at 300 MPGe or so, instead of just over 100 mpg on gasoline. This means that the competition vehicles will have loads of expensive batteries, and be less representative of vehicle that can sell well.

** The cynical view would be, however, that the interest in using less petroleum will pass. In the early eighties, when we had made substantial gains in fuel efficiency (partly due to our experience in the gas crisis of the seventies) cars outsold trucks for ordinary passenger use 10 to one, and the fleet average fuel economy was 27 mpg. The idea of ordinary soccer moms driving 6000 lb vehicles in the future would have made us think, then, that future cars would have to be nuclear powered, or some such -- otherwise, why would anyone want to drive a land yacht when they could drive a smaller, more responsive, safer and more fun sedan or coupe. Now, by driving gas guzzlers that would have been considered impossibly large in the eighties, we have driven () our fleet average down to just over 20 mpg.