Administrator wrote:
The irony here is that the light weight and low speed are meant to minimize the personal hazard of operating a light vehicle with little or no crash protection.
That works if the vehicles wind up being driven only on low-speed urban streets, and never get hit by normal "heavy" vehicles at high speeds. However, these NEVs are usually driven on the same roads as 2-ton cars and many-ton trucks. Accidents are inevitable.
I think Amory Lovin's "hypercar" concept is a better idea. Design the car to be lighter in the first place, yet *keep* all the safety devices and crash protection. It's obviously possible. Solectria's Sunrise had seat belts, air bags, impact protection, and passed DOT crash testsas a normal high speed automobile. Yet it weighed *half* as much as a normal car of the same size.
We're trying to make it a kit car, but it's slow going! See http://www.sunrise-ev.com/ -- If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work. Rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -- Lee A. Hart, http://www.sunrise-ev.com/LeesEVs.htm _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
