asg70 wrote:It seems like every time a company tries to bring a super-light vehicle to market (i.e. 3 wheel, like Aptera) it just stalls as vaporware.
The Aptera is still of a similar form factor to a car. It may be much lower drag and weight than a normal car overall, but it is still closer to a normal car in terms of size/efficiency than it is to a human powered vehicle.
We have different ideas of what "super-light" means. You can't pick up an Aptera and bring it through a doorway or fit three of them in a parking space.
I really don't see a commercial case to be made for something like this while traditional form-factors keep getting cheaper and offer better safety and creature-comforts.
What if the cost was well below $5k? Theoretically, this is possible, but not without mass production nor will profitability be possible without a sizable enough market to justify it. 3D printing technology may nullify the need for mass production in the medium term future.
For instance, what kind of climate-control would a vehicle like you're describing have?
A small ceramic heater for heat/defrost, and NACA ducts/windows for cooling. No AC. The idea is to keep the vehicle light enough for a strong person to pick up and carry into an apartment.
How well would it fare driving through slushy winter roads?
If my current prototype is any indication with just rear wheel drive, probably more than adequately if it ends up having all wheel drive via hub motors.
My current pedal vehicle is rideable in the winter but not quite the safest or most stable thing. That's because it is a 3-wheeled tadpole layout with rear wheel drive. If care is not taken, it can become uncontrollable. Still, I've ridden it on slushy roads at 30 mph in traffic, but I really have to be careful how I operate it, especially with cable pull brakes and no ABS. Joe Sixpack would kill himself in this thing.
A variant with all-wheel drive hub motors, brake by wire with ABS, and increased ground clearance would probably be adequate, a 4-wheeled variant even better still. Making such a thing safe and stable in inclement weather, even in the event of a tire failure, is not rocket science.
Velomobile class vehicles work OK in conditions that are amenable to bicycles but they are a pain to operate in harsh weather conditions.
Depends on the design, more than anything. Velomobiles are much more pleasant to operate in the winter or in the rain than a normal bicycle, and is closer to a car in terms of practicality. What I'm describing isn't a velomobile though, but a single-person car built like a velomobile, with the bicycle drivetrain parts either removed altogether or to serve as a secondary propulsion mechanism(given that it would be light enough and aerodynamic enough to be pedaled, given adequate gearing).
I understand that in a "powerdown" future, beggars can't be choosers, but I think by the time we get there that there will be a robust and affordable used car market for previous gen EVs,
But will there be hundreds of millions of them to meet vehicle demand? That depends on what the collapse or powerdown scenario looks like and when it happens.
and all else fails, transport-as-a-service.
I could see this growing exponentially. In fact, it is.
Yes, there will be Velomobiles and NEVs, but I doubt they'll ever really become much more popular than they are now as long as other options are available.
I could easily see velomobiles taking off and increasing their numbers by factors of thousands. This would still make them less than 1% of vehicles on the road, but it is definitely unexplored potential. The embodied energy in a car sized and shaped like a velomobile would be orders of magnitude less than a conventional automobile, while allowing a similar level of function, at least regarding the transportation of a single person, and then there's the possibility of an order of magnitude improvement in energy consumption versus a conventional electric car.
Those other options may not be available in the future. People take everything they see around them for granted. Then again, the future is not known.
The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the old growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder. ~Thomas Jefferson