Super! Yes, and the Pentax sponsored photovoltaic powered electric auto that won a worldwide contest about 8 years ago. But my favorite is the beautiful warm silver colored turbine powered concept car that was the star of the 1956 or 57 Motorama I attended in Boston when I was an impressionable 16 years old. Might still have a postcard or two of the car that were stacked on a table near the car. It had a bubble "fighter style" cockpit. If memory is good, it was named the F-100. All control of the vehicle was via a center console mounted stick so the car could easily be driven from either side of the two seater. It was as impracticable then as it would be now. Push forward for braking, pull back for acceleration, move the stick left and right for steering.
It was fully operational, as I've seen in several short movies about the car with the side and tail fins. Problem was if you braked sorta hard, you were naturally thrust forward a bit from the deceleration, which put the brakes on REAL HARD. This was before seat belts in most cars, but don't remember if it had them at the time. If you accelerated hard, you tended to pull the stick all the way back. Not a problem in this vehicle, as the gas turbine engine was not very strong. And finally if you tried to corner at speed, the driver tended to be moved by the cornering force, ending up over steering. Fun ride, eh? On Aug 1, 2012, at 05:11 , Mark Roberts wrote: > Bruce Walker wrote: > >> Cool video from seldom seen GM collection ... >> >> http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?feature=endscreen&=R=1&v=RvVmDsWnMOk > > You'll notice that the solar-powered race car in that video has > "Pentax World Solar Challenge" on the side! -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
