[vtsnowedin]

My local dealer has new Leafs for $27,400 ( $19,900 after proposed rebates) and that is at the low end of present EV prices as far as I know. But that is a traditional sedan body car and not what I am considering for the future. The light , evolved golf cart or hightec. trike of the future might run in the $4000 to $12,000 range and be an addition to your garage not your primary or foul weather vehicle.
Of course if we get $10.00+ gas and 0.40/KWH electricity such a vehicle might get pressed into 90 percent of your driving, especially if it can be charged by your off grid roof top solar panels.

[AdamB]

Of course if we get $10.00+ gas and 0.40/KWH electricity such a vehicle might get pressed into 90 percent of your driving, especially if it can be charged by your off grid roof top solar panels.

In terms of trips, I'm already at 95% of everything gets done in the Leaf. No high prices required. We've given away 2 of the ICE machines to the kids when they graduated college, and am now debating...what's next? The wife says Tesla, but she knows that the 5% of my trips that aren't running around town are cross-continental spanning road trips. I have no intention of using a full EV for that, but it would need to be AWD, and efficient, and wouldn't hurt if it were an ICE with a battery drivetrain capable of 20-50 miles itself. So it could be used for winter use locally. No way I take the Leaf (or any of the Gen I or Gen II hybrids I've owned) out in the snow, the traction control systems have been useless in snow, and even just slick slime on the driveway, let alone the real world. They just shut down wheel spin and there you sit.

[vtsnowedin]

It sounds like you are working yourself up to a Ford Lightning F-150 or one of it's competitors. If Biden gets half his proposed chargers installed cross country trips will be no problem.

[AdamB]

It sounds like you are working yourself up to a Ford Lightning F-150 or one of it's competitors. If Biden gets half his proposed chargers installed cross country trips will be no problem.

The wife won't allow a Lightening before a Tesla. I haven't figured out yet how to change that trajectory.

[The_Toecutter]

The light , evolved golf cart or hightec. trike of the future might run in the $4000 to $12,000 range and be an addition to your garage not your primary or foul weather vehicle.
Of course if we get $10.00+ gas and 0.40/KWH electricity such a vehicle might get pressed into 90 percent of your driving, especially if it can be charged by your off grid roof top solar panels.

I've already built that vehicle and use it as my daily driver.

I get slightly more than 100 miles per kWh(no joke, not a typo). It tops out at 45 mph, has a brushless PMDC hub motor with a 46.8V 31AH battery, gets a 200 mile range @ 30 mph, a 150 mile range @ 35 mph, and is efficient enough that using the separate bicycle drivetrain I can even turn the motor off and pedal it to 35 mph on flat ground in a sprint. I can carry 40 lbs of groceries in the trunk without a problem. In its current form, it could be replicated for about $3,000 of mostly expensive, low-volume, hand-built parts and with hundreds of hours of labor hand-assembling it. Which means it's not out of the realm of plausibility such a vehicle could be mass produced and sold for under $2,000 if the market existed for such a thing. It currently weighs about 90 lbs and I'm running the motor at about 3 peak horsepower, which is enough to do donuts in parking lots and out-accelerate some of the slower cars at the stoplights, but the low battery pack voltage limits its top speed. Cruising at 45 mph, I'm not even using 1 horsepower from the motor to maintain speed.

Once I get enough time off work, I'm going to upgrade it. It needs a roll cage, more slippery body shell, hydraulic brakes, an added rear suspension(currently only has front shocks), and I have in my possession the parts required to make it able to reach a 100+ mph top speed with motorcycle-like acceleration all of the way there with the motor in use. It's going to make about 13 peak horsepower when I am done with it, which for what the vehicle is, will be plenty. If necessity dictates, it will still be pedalable with the motor completely shut off at slightly faster than bicycle-appropriate speeds in most terrain(with steep uphill climbs, with the motor shut off it will be slower than a bicycle due to the mass). Some solar panels are on the way for it as well, which will be integrated into the next body shell design. 150W or so should be enough to cruise 25 mph all-day-long in direct sunlight, no pedaling required, without draining anything from the battery pack. Sunlight plus modest pedaling would increase that to about 30 mph, without draining the battery. I plan to make it efficient enough that a 2.5 kWh battery pack could get it about 100 miles range @ 70 mph, increasing that to 120 miles with the solar helping out in good weather.

And because the battery pack is so small, in terms of recharge time, a common 110V outlet is the equivalent to Level II or ChaDeMo charging and a 220V outlet is the equivalent to a Tesla Supercharger.

I have in mind building a "car" that is suitable for a single person, that is so light and efficient that energy costs, no matter what they might become, will remain a non-issue. So efficient, you could put a bicycle drivetrain in it and with the motor disabled you could pedal it to near-highway speeds(at least on flat ground), or while using the motor, cruise highway speeds with a small amount of pedaling akin in effort to walking accounting for nearly 1/3 of the amount of the energy used to move the vehicle. And it will be fast enough to out-accelerate vehicles with 15-20x its horsepower with the motor in use.

Best of all, my vehicle concept uses a lot of low-tech and dumb-tech.

[AdamB]

I have in mind building a "car" that is suitable for a single person, that is so light and efficient that energy costs, no matter what they might become, will remain a non-issue. So efficient, you could put a bicycle drivetrain in it and with the motor disabled you could pedal it to near-highway speeds(at least on flat ground), or while using the motor, cruise highway speeds with a small amount of pedaling akin in effort to walking accounting for nearly 1/3 of the amount of the energy used to move the vehicle. And it will be fast enough to out-accelerate vehicles with 15-20x its horsepower with the motor in use.

Best of all, my vehicle concept uses a lot of low-tech and dumb-tech.

So...those of us who want to put 4 people in an EV, heat it and cool it, winter and summer, and don't care that instead of spending $0.50/charge we spend $1.50/charge for all this convenience, are you going to build one for us? Or will your design stay with something a lazy bicyclist would love, who upon impact with a run of the mill 4000# SUV will die heroically in the name of efficieny uber alles? You haven't mentioned much about how many airbags your better design will have? I would really like to survive even a moderate collision in my EV, and I imagine most users might feel the same.

[The_Toecutter]

So...those of us who want to put 4 people in an EV, heat it and cool it, winter and summer, and don't care that instead of spending $0.50/charge we spend $1.50/charge for all this convenience, are you going to build one for us?

The 4-seaters already exist. You own one called a Nissan Leaf. Albeit they aren't nearly as efficient as they could be, and their price is not in the above-mentioned range. It would be possible for a 4-seater vehicle passing safety regulations to consume ~0.1 kWh/mile with proper attention to aerodynamics and weight reduction. It might increase materials cost by a few thousand dollars per unit, BUT that could be more than offset with a reduction in the amount/cost of batteries needed. For what such an ideal 4-seater vehicle might look like in terms of appearance, see the Edison VLC2. Or if you don't mind a bit more weight, the Stella solar car.

Or will your design stay with something a lazy bicyclist would love, who upon impact with a run of the mill 4000# SUV will die heroically in the name of efficieny uber alles? You haven't mentioned much about how many airbags your better design will have? I would really like to survive even a moderate collision in my EV, and I imagine most users might feel the same.

Formula 1 race cars often crash at 200+ mph, and the occupant typically walks away without significant injury. Without airbags. A well-designed monocoque with an integrated roll cage can do many wonderful things for safety.

That said, my vehicle is no formula race car. It's much lighter, and is a different class of vehicle than any car or motorcycle. There is no legal definition for it where I live and I legally operate mine without a drivers' license, insurance, title, tags, or registration. The cops have pulled me over 10+ times and weren't able to do anything about it. The closest fit legally is "bicycle", and it is functional as such. Before I motorized it, I got pulled over doing 50 mph down a slight downhill in a 35 mph speed zone. The officer was mind blown that such a thing was even possible.

I've been in three wrecks with cars in my pedal vehicles at 15, 25, and 30 mph respectively, by either inattentive or malicious automobile operators. I was not hurt in either of those wrecks, although the vehicles were smashed up a bit and needed repairs. Having an actual roll cage will make things significantly safer. In order to avoid being crushed in a collision with a single vehicle, the vehicle only needs to be able to absorb as much force as its weight. The lighter the vehicle, the easier this is to do. HOWEVER, this principle will not protect you if you get pinned between two vehicles or a vehicle and a heavy object. Which is why I need a stout roll cage. In a wreck where I get pinned between two cars, my custom vehicle is a complete and utter death trap at the moment. BTW, the body material I survived a 30 mph collision in it uninjured is none other than corrugated plastic, that flimsy crap used for election signs! The Milan velomobile built by Rainforest Designs Canada was involved in the other two wrecks, but it is made out of carbon fiber and kevlar, and is requiring a significant amount of work to fix, and was even flipped in its most recent wreck, deliberately, by a tailgaiting, impatient, cell-phone-toting bitch of a Karen in a white SUV who rammed me and sped off.

But you know why this idea holds appeal to me? The potential for 1 horsepower per pound of vehicle and all wheel drive with vector control. This could be done using inexpensive and mostly off-the-shelf high-power-density ebike parts. Can you imagine what 0-120 mph acceleration in 4 seconds would be like!?

[AdamB]

Can you imagine what 0-120 mph acceleration in 4 seconds would be like!?

Yes. But only because Elon built a damn fast version of the S, which my wife's boss owns, and it can't accelerate that hard. 0-120 in 4 seconds, which is what, 1.35G's of acceleration? That is going to require something you haven't mentioned yet, and that is traction. Strap a 800HP Ferrari to 4 bicycle tires and that 800HP ain't going much of anywhere, regardless of the power to weight ratio.

The Tesla S Plaid is supposedly capable of 0-60 in 2 seconds or so, the same acceleration you are suggesting even if over only the first 1/2 of the velocity delta. I imagine it would be quite exhilarating.

However, I've never been a cager at heart. First ride I ever owned was a motorcycle. First apartment I moved into was having friends carry furniture on the back of that motorcycle, one piece at a time to my apartment. Walked to first full time job if there was snow on the ground because I didn't have a car. I figure, you can teach a chimpanzee to use a go pedal, stop pedal, and big wheel. Then we hand them licenses and turn them loose on public streets, with these folks pinballing randomly between street lamps, sidewalks, other motorists, baby carriages, etc etc, making them very dangerous places. I did my drivers ed in a safe learning environment.

[The_Toecutter]

Yes. But only because Elon built a damn fast version of the S, which my wife's boss owns, and it can't accelerate that hard. 0-120 in 4 seconds, which is what, 1.35G's of acceleration? That is going to require something you haven't mentioned yet, and that is traction. Strap a 800HP Ferrari to 4 bicycle tires and that 800HP ain't going much of anywhere, regardless of the power to weight ratio.

Quite true. I won't know what it will actually be capable of until I get a chance to try it. But I do have a type of solar race car tire in my possession, which are low enough in rolling resistance to still allow it to be pedaled at a decent speed with the motor shut off, but robust enough that they can handle highway speeds without significant risk of catastrophic failure and are designed to have good traction(certainly better than any bicycle tire). Having a motor in each wheel with instantaneous slip detection will allow the tires to be used for everything they are worth, so for the vehicle's parameters regarding weight distribution, mass, torque curve, ect. I'll get the maximum possible acceleration from that setup, whatever it happens to be. It's just that theoretically, with perfect traction, the math does suggest 0-60 mph under 2 seconds with that sort of wild and crazy setup. And having such low drag, that acceleration would carry over into the second half of that delta given how little power would be needed to maintain the max speed for that delta relative to the power available.

I'm looking at the possibility of custom making some hub motors based on AMZ's technology. Their motors were able to output 50 horsepower peak out of a 7 lb hub motor. Hub motors have no need for a number of components that may break(CV joints, transmissions, transfer cases, ect.). I have a controller in my possession that is about 1 lb that can output almost as much peak power as that AMZ motor is capable of handling. You can buy LoneStar cells off the shelf where a 20 lb pack would give you multiple hundreds of peak horsepower(the cells are rated to 200C burst discharge), and those aren't even the most powerful available anymore.

So basically, a 100-120 lb "car" may be able to be made to reliably output close to 150 horsepower, without shit breaking. We'll see when I eventually get the chance to try it. My current project will be a far cry from that goal once the next iteration I'm putting together is ready, with a mere 13 horsepower, which theoretically could have me doing 0-60 mph in the upper 6 second range, *IF* I can get enough traction on the single rear wheel, and topping out around 110 mph with battery pack voltage being the limiting factor to that top speed(I'd only need about 7 horsepower to maintain it with a CdA of 0.06 m^2, albeit the motor itself should be good for about 4 horsepower continuous for the duration the battery charge lasts, which would be a max cruising speed around 90 mph).

[vtsnowedin]

As toe-Cutter's concept car is refined and commercialized would not AI safety features like automatic emergency breaking be employed to the degree that the need for airbags and other weighty safety features is reduced?
I would not be a fan of any pedaling requirement but for those that want it would it be possible to turn a generator by pedaling to charge the battery pack with the car either in motion or stopped at say a traffic light? Would the in-out efficiency of that be less then the direct pedal to drive sprocket of a bicycle?
I have to doubt Toe-Cutters 100 miles per KWH but as he doesn't provide the weight of the vehicle or say how much pedaling contributed to the figure it remains plausible.
Consider the Tesla Model S with a curb weight of 4883 pounds and a 1200 pound battery pack holding 80KWH at full charge . It uses 30 kwh per 100 miles or 0.3/mile.
That battery pack consists of 16 modules each weighing 75 lbs and holding 5.3KWHs.
If you built a car around two of those modules keeping the curb weight to battery weight ratio the same you would get an ultra light 610 lb vehicle with the same 300+/-range as the model S. Hopefully for a lot less then the S's $80K price tag.

[theluckycountry]

An ICE motorcycle like mine has 200Hp, can carry a decent amount of groceries and achieves around 6L per 100km. That's like $20 a week in gas for hundreds of km in pleasurable trouble free motoring. Why would you bother making some niche trike for commuting to the store aside from your own love of bicycle projects? It's not like using one will really make a difference, and they will never go into mass production this side of a total collapse in oil supply and even then it's doubtful. They are as dangerous as hell in traffic! Sure you can fit a roll cage but that wont be of much use when a 5 ton truck rolls over you. Some would say my liter bike is just as dangerous but it has the power, and more importantly, the handling (maneuverability) and braking to get me out of those sort of scrapes.

I have an electric bike too, 700W, it's fun but I only ride it on the backroads and I get off onto the verge when a car passes. Push bikes are just too light and flimsy to safely be out in the normal flow of traffic. People have been making electric cars since the 1900's and they have never made sense as a practical vehicle and never will as long as we have gas stations. Make an electric trike if you wish but please don't portray them as the "future" of mass transit. By the time they are practical the roads will be in such disrepair you'll need a 4x4 just to negotiate them.

I live in the real world, not the "We should do it this way world" Lets just burn the damn oil and Après moi, le déluge

[Tanada]

Seems to me a lot of folks are making the perfect goal the enemy of what you could do right now. For example Lit Motors has had their concept out there for about a decade now, it had great reviews and so far has not had a noticeable impact.

https://www.iamabiker.com/motorcycle-ne ... it-motors/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5ZRzjenACE

https://www.litmotors.com/

[The_Toecutter]

As toe-Cutter's concept car is refined and commercialized would not AI safety features like automatic emergency breaking be employed to the degree that the need for airbags and other weighty safety features is reduced?

I'm not sure they'd be of much help in my vehicle, especially against a collision caused by a much older/heavier vehicle that doesn't have these things. It might take 20 years for the current vehicle fleet to turn over before these items are commonplace enough to matter to the safety of the trike operator as well.

I would not be a fan of any pedaling requirement

I designed mine with a functional bicycle drivetrain in order to get around licensing/insurance/registration requirements. Thus far it has worked.

I plan to eventually build a car version without a bicycle drivetrain.

but for those that want it would it be possible to turn a generator by pedaling to charge the battery pack with the car either in motion or stopped at say a traffic light?

Generators add significant weight, and they are inefficient compared to a bicycle drivetrain. Further, you cannot run the vehicle directly off of pedaling if the bike is set up for your pedaling to run a generator. If the battery runs dead, you're stranded. I like the redundancy of two drive systems. I can pedal mine with the EV drivetrain completely disabled because I retained a bicycle drivetrain, and once I install a Schlumpf drive, I'll have gearing to allow my pedaling to account for some of the thrust to move at 100+ mph after doing the upgrade I'm planning on.

Would the in-out efficiency of that be less then the direct pedal to drive sprocket of a bicycle?

Greatly so, plus the penalty of added mass. A bicycle drivetrain is about 95-98% efficient. A generator, typically around 50-80%.

I have to doubt Toe-Cutters 100 miles per KWH but as he doesn't provide the weight of the vehicle or say how much pedaling contributed to the figure it remains plausible.

That figure is at 35 mph cruising speeds and light pedaling. The vehicle weighs 90 lbs. But it is the aerodynamics, and moreso than the weight, that allows this efficiency. With zero pedaling, using throttle-only, it can hold 30 mph with 400W drawn from the battery, or about 0.013 kWh/mi, but with ~150W of pedaling that drops to about 0.007 kWh/mi.

This body shell is nowhere near as efficient as the next one will be. My unmotorized Milan SL can do 30 mph on about 150W of pedaling, and I bought it to reverse engineer to improve my own design. Without a motor, I can almost reach 50 mph in the Milan on flat ground.

With the sort of aerodynamic slipperiness I'm after combined with low weight, it is theoretically possible to build a vehicle that can cruise 70 mph using only 0.015-0.020 kWh/mi, and not even need the motor on at all to do 30 mph on flat ground with light pedaling. I'm not there yet with my prototype, even though it is usable at much lower speeds than 70 mph on a daily basis, with over 65,000 miles on it now.

Consider the Tesla Model S with a curb weight of 4883 pounds and a 1200 pound battery pack holding 80KWH at full charge . It uses 30 kwh per 100 miles or 0.3/mile.
That battery pack consists of 16 modules each weighing 75 lbs and holding 5.3KWHs.
If you built a car around two of those modules keeping the curb weight to battery weight ratio the same you would get an ultra light 610 lb vehicle with the same 300+/-range as the model S. Hopefully for a lot less then the S's $80K price tag.

You also need to consider aerodynamics matter greatly more than weight at the highway speeds the Tesla's range is obtained at. It is CdA that is the determinant of how far you go for a given battery(CdA = drag coefficient multiplied by cross-sectional area).

[The_Toecutter]

An ICE motorcycle like mine has 200Hp, can carry a decent amount of groceries and achieves around 6L per 100km. That's like $20 a week in gas for hundreds of km in pleasurable trouble free motoring.

$20 of electricity would get mine more than 20,000 miles at speeds appropriate for city streets @ $0.10/kWh. Once it is highway capable, that might drop to 5,000 miles for $20. With electric, a drive system capable of increased peak power generally imposes no penalty on efficiency if you operate it the same as you did before the performance increase, albeit the extra power does give you the potential to operate the vehicle in a less efficient manner.

Why would you bother making some niche trike for commuting to the store aside from your own love of bicycle projects?

Humans cannot make much power compared to a motor. Allowing human propulsion to move the vehicle is thus an excellent test of the vehicle's efficiency. The farther you can go on a fixed amount of energy, the faster you can go on a fixed amount of power. I'm a speed freak, and I want to build something ridiculous. I'm curious to see what happens when a vehicle is made to have the efficiency and mass of a human powered vehicle, but the power of a car. I also built my vehicle not just as a test platform, but as a practical and inexpensive means to get around. It is literally an order of magnitude cheaper per mile than taking the bus or light rail, and greatly more convenient to use since it can move about like a car. If considering food calories required to walk as well as wear and tear on shoes, and food calories consumed pedaling(not included in the cost below given those are needed whether I ride the vehicle or not), it's possibly cheaper per mile than even walking.

Ongoing maintenance including tires is about $0.025/mile. Electricity doesn't even register as significant. at about $0.001/mile. The most expensive component of my ongoing maintenance cost thus far is tires at about $0.009/mile. This is followed by bicycle chains at $0.004/mile. Then brake pads and lubrication. Overall operating cost since building the vehicle has been about $0.07/mile including the cost of building the vehicle AND all the parts purchased for it to keep it running. The more miles I use it, the more the overall cost per mile of using this vehicle drops because building it accounts for a majority of that overall money spent in total.

Sure you can fit a roll cage but that wont be of much use when a 5 ton truck rolls over you. Some would say my liter bike is just as dangerous but it has the power, and more importantly, the handling (maneuverability) and braking to get me out of those sort of scrapes.

A roll cage will prevent the rider from being crushed, but will not reduce the impulse experienced in a collision with a heavier vehicle. There is no real way to engineer safety around the mass differential between the two vehicles. That said, it is plausible to make such a vehicle with safety comparable to a small sports car from the mid 20th century, and marginally safer than a motorcycle. For what it is, I'd consider that adequate.

Mine brakes and maneuvers just fine. It's more agile than any car I've driven(I have a Triumph GT6 EV conversion and have driven a V8 Mazda Miata conversion), and it will soon have more than enough power to accelerate away from trouble once I perform the upgrades I intend. I'm soon looking at the possibility of 0-60 mph < 7 seconds using a cheap $250 Chinese hub motor that weighs a grand total of 16 lbs, if I can get sufficient traction.

[AdamB]

Having a motor in each wheel with instantaneous slip detection will allow the tires to be used for everything they are worth, so for the vehicle's parameters regarding weight distribution, mass, torque curve, ect. I'll get the maximum possible acceleration from that setup, whatever it happens to be. It's just that theoretically, with perfect traction, the math does suggest 0-60 mph under 2 seconds with that sort of wild and crazy setup.

Elon does something similar, but a motor for each wheel isn't required if you just split a single motors output and modulate it independently. That's all about the software and electronics to control wheelspin, and motorcycles have that now for Joe Average so he doesn't hurt himself in the rain, or when Joe grabs too much throttle while banked over. Took all the fun out of high sides. And theoretically isn't what is raced, which demonstrates how some are better at approaching theory than others. Ferrari's on bicycle tires approach nothing at all.

And having such low drag, that acceleration would carry over into the second half of that delta given how little power would be needed to maintain the max speed for that delta relative to the power available.

Assume cd is equivalent in my example, of course.

So basically, a 100-120 lb "car" may be able to be made to reliably output close to 150 horsepower, without shit breaking.

Theoretically.

I can see the branding already though, "ToeCutter Motors".

[theluckycountry]

Seems to me a lot of folks are making the perfect goal the enemy of what you could do right now. For example Lit Motors has had their concept out there for about a decade now, it had great reviews and so far has not had a noticeable impact.

It's different, the gyro system is incorporated to good effect. There was this one too, linked off the tube page https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X9hVqKbgS4
Similar but without the Hi tech. That would be my only concern, failure of the tech at 100 km/h in a corner. The C1 appears to steer like a car, using the gyros to balance some, or all, of the roll torque typically generated by centrifugal force with that of the gravitational forces. As long as that C1 system never fails, AND providing it has the maneuverability to change direction very quickly, it would be safe. Otherwise... One thing I know is inherent in these gyro systems, the weights are heavy, and they don't change speed or direction quickly. That's their whole purpose and what makes them so useful in boats.

These underlying issues are of the type the autonomous vehicle designers discovered. Everything worked fine in a carpark in silicon valley, but out in the real world the vehicles couldn't cope. In 2015 the chatter was endless, they were all the rage and were soon going to replace cabs, delivery trucks and our personal cars. But today all I hear is, *crickets*

[theluckycountry]

Mine brakes and maneuvers just fine. It's more agile than any car I've driven(I have a Triumph GT6 EV conversion and have driven a V8 Mazda Miata conversion), and it will soon have more than enough power to accelerate away from trouble once I perform the upgrades I intend. I'm soon looking at the possibility of 0-60 mph < 7 seconds using a cheap $250 Chinese hub motor that weighs a grand total of 16 lbs, if I can get sufficient traction.

I think it's a good project you have there, What sort of tires do you run? I bought a Bafang conversion MTB just to dip my toe in the EV bike scene but plan to build one myself on a modern dual suspension MTB, whatever one has the geometry to allow the battery pack on the down-tube. I'll go the bigger motor in that one, 52V and the biggest battery pack I can fit, tubeless knobby tires as they are more practical for the gravel roads I intend to explore with it.

I like the Bafang mid-mount motor design as it allows for steep climbing without straining the motor. My 750W with it's big rear cluster will literally climb trees! Of course these motors put a lot of strain on the chain, which are designed for human power levels, 250W, 500W max? It's one thing I think we'll see an evolution in in the years ahead, beefier drive train components. As for now I'll just buy the best chain on the market.

I envisage a day, possibly, when these sort of bikes might be a practical alternative to petrol vehicles, but that wouldn't happen until petrol vanishes or is severely rationed. For all practical purposes I find petrol vehicles vastly superior for my day to day activities, and like my air conditioners and other modern luxuries, intend to use them until the final crunch. If I live that long.

[The_Toecutter]

Elon does something similar, but a motor for each wheel isn't required if you just split a single motors output and modulate it independently.

Small hub motors are so cheap to make that there is little point to splitting their output. Building it into a wheel eliminates the need for a complex series of components. The biggest downside is the addition of unsprung weight, but if the motor is sufficiently light, that problem ends up a non-issue as well.

I can see the branding already though, "ToeCutter Motors".

I don't know what my brand would be, but I might call the vehicle the "Hoonabout", if it isn't already taken. It would be so small that anyone who outruns the cops in it could pick it up and carry it into an apartment. And it would be perfect for random acts of hooliganism and jackassery.

I think it's a good project you have there, What sort of tires do you run?

On my custom build, I currently have some Schwalbe Marathon Greenguard 20x1.5" on the front wheels and a Schwalbe Marathon Plus Tour 26x1.75" on the rear wheel. These are 30 mph ebike tires.

Once I perform the upgrade, I'm going to have Mitas MC2 16x2.5" on all three wheels with 16x1.5" moto rims laced with 12ga spokes. These tires are commonly used on solar cars. They're rated for 62 mph in vehicles that can weigh close to 1,000 lbs. These rims can also fit 20" bicycle tires, which are perhaps the most common bicycle tire sold and available. In a post SHTF world, this vehicle could be kept running(at slower speeds) using tires stripped from a child's BMX bike.

I like the Bafang mid-mount motor design as it allows for steep climbing without straining the motor. My 750W with it's big rear cluster will literally climb trees!

You can do the same with a hub motor with the correct selection of components. There's pluses and minuses to either setup.

Of course these motors put a lot of strain on the chain, which are designed for human power levels, 250W, 500W max?

This will be an issue with a middrive, although there are chains rated for ebike usage. They aren't cheap. A hub motor bypasses this issue and is generally less expensive, at the cost of a few lbs more weight, and the requirement of a more expensive FOC controller to match the applied motor voltage to the realtime operating point if you want to avoid overheating the motor during low-speed steep climbs(a higher applied voltage reduces PMDC motor efficiency at low speeds, and trapezoidal waveform controllers just dump the full pack voltage to a hub motor, which is why mid drives have an advantage since they are geared and can spin to a decent rpm to avoid producing excessive heat when using a primitive controller. FOC controllers can vary the applied voltage to maximize efficiency, bypassing this issue).

I envisage a day, possibly, when these sort of bikes might be a practical alternative to petrol vehicles, but that wouldn't happen until petrol vanishes or is severely rationed.

Times are volatile, and that day where petrol is difficult to obtain could come with little or no warning.

My vehicle is all about being practical.

https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=110298

I can carry a week's worth of groceries in the trunk along with my tools and food/water for the ride.

The next shell will have significantly better aerodynamics, will be fully enclosed for comfortable bad-weather riding, and have significantly more storage space, hopefully enough to carry camping gear, 5 changes of clothes, 5 gallons of water, hygiene items, tools, laptop computer, and a week of food all at once with some space left over. I'm going to set it up that I could live out of it if need be, and carry everything I need to rebuild it, as well as solar panels to power my electronics.

[vtsnowedin]

As toe-Cutter's concept car is refined and commercialized would not AI safety features like automatic emergency breaking be employed to the degree that the need for airbags and other weighty safety features is reduced?

I'm not sure they'd be of much help in my vehicle, especially against a collision caused by a much older/heavier vehicle that doesn't have these things. It might take 20 years for the current vehicle fleet to turn over before these items are commonplace enough to matter to the safety of the trike operator as well.

I would not be a fan of any pedaling requirement

I designed mine with a functional bicycle drivetrain in order to get around licensing/insurance/registration requirements. Thus far it has worked.

I plan to eventually build a car version without a bicycle drivetrain.

but for those that want it would it be possible to turn a generator by pedaling to charge the battery pack with the car either in motion or stopped at say a traffic light?

Generators add significant weight, and they are inefficient compared to a bicycle drivetrain. Further, you cannot run the vehicle directly off of pedaling if the bike is set up for your pedaling to run a generator. If the battery runs dead, you're stranded. I like the redundancy of two drive systems. I can pedal mine with the EV drivetrain completely disabled because I retained a bicycle drivetrain, and once I install a Schlumpf drive, I'll have gearing to allow my pedaling to account for some of the thrust to move at 100+ mph after doing the upgrade I'm planning on.

Would the in-out efficiency of that be less then the direct pedal to drive sprocket of a bicycle?

Greatly so, plus the penalty of added mass. A bicycle drivetrain is about 95-98% efficient. A generator, typically around 50-80%.

I have to doubt Toe-Cutters 100 miles per KWH but as he doesn't provide the weight of the vehicle or say how much pedaling contributed to the figure it remains plausible.

That figure is at 35 mph cruising speeds and light pedaling. The vehicle weighs 90 lbs. But it is the aerodynamics, and moreso than the weight, that allows this efficiency. With zero pedaling, using throttle-only, it can hold 30 mph with 400W drawn from the battery, or about 0.013 kWh/mi, but with ~150W of pedaling that drops to about 0.007 kWh/mi.

This body shell is nowhere near as efficient as the next one will be. My unmotorized Milan SL can do 30 mph on about 150W of pedaling, and I bought it to reverse engineer to improve my own design. Without a motor, I can almost reach 50 mph in the Milan on flat ground.

With the sort of aerodynamic slipperiness I'm after combined with low weight, it is theoretically possible to build a vehicle that can cruise 70 mph using only 0.015-0.020 kWh/mi, and not even need the motor on at all to do 30 mph on flat ground with light pedaling. I'm not there yet with my prototype, even though it is usable at much lower speeds than 70 mph on a daily basis, with over 65,000 miles on it now.

Consider the Tesla Model S with a curb weight of 4883 pounds and a 1200 pound battery pack holding 80KWH at full charge . It uses 30 kwh per 100 miles or 0.3/mile.
That battery pack consists of 16 modules each weighing 75 lbs and holding 5.3KWHs.
If you built a car around two of those modules keeping the curb weight to battery weight ratio the same you would get an ultra light 610 lb vehicle with the same 300+/-range as the model S. Hopefully for a lot less then the S's $80K price tag.

You also need to consider aerodynamics matter greatly more than weight at the highway speeds the Tesla's range is obtained at. It is CdA that is the determinant of how far you go for a given battery(CdA = drag coefficient multiplied by cross-sectional area).

So the vehicle weighs just ninety pounds? Does that include the battery? How about your own mass? After all it is the curb weight plus the passenger or passengers plus the cargo/ groceries that has to be lifted over the next hill plus the rolling resistance.
AI will not at present keep the Mack truck from crushing you but at the rate it is evolving it may well be able to remove you from that fatal position or path more often then not within the next decade.
I expect registration and licensing retirements to evolve along with the technology.
Could not the drive motor or one of them in a multi motor set up be capable of being both a motor and generator as needed to not add any additional weight to the vehicle? They are very much alike in construction and might just need the right chip in the control center.
I can envision being at zero battery, out in the boondocks, on a dark night, far from the end of any extension cord and just pedaling away while watching a two hour movie to get me going again and off to grandma's house.
If you go back to the Tesla figures which some would say are the state of the art at present, you could calculate that you could double the weight of your light vehicle to 1250 pounds and cut it's range to 150 miles without making it's drag coefficients any better or worse. You could probably make a vehicle at that weight safe enough for you to put your wife and children in it.

[The_Toecutter]

So the vehicle weighs just ninety pounds? Does that include the battery?

Dry weight including battery, ready to ride, is 90 lbs. The battery is part of the vehicle and factored into that weight, but it weighs about 18 lbs assembled and is roughly 1.5 kWh in size. It's enough to consistently get a 150-200 mile range with cruising speeds of 30-35 mph and light pedaling effort.

How about your own mass? After all it is the curb weight plus the passenger or passengers plus the cargo/ groceries that has to be lifted over the next hill plus the rolling resistance.

I weigh about 145 lbs and carry roughly 15 lbs of tools/supplies on board. So 250 lbs, rolling down the street.

Could not the drive motor or one of them in a multi motor set up be capable of being both a motor and generator as needed to not add any additional weight to the vehicle? They are very much alike in construction and might just need the right chip in the control center.

The drive motor has a unidirectional freewheel on it, so it isn't exactly viable to charge the battery while riding. It is set up to allow the rider to add mechanical power to propel the rear wheel while the motor is in use, with a 7 speed freewheel in the rear, and a 3-speed crankset up front. I designed it this way so that range anxiety doesn't exist. If the battery runs dead, I can still pedal it at 20+ mph on flat ground for hours at a time, and sprint to 35 mph. Using the motor, my pedaling can extend the range by about 50% versus what it would be with throttle only.

A generator run from a pedal crank charging the battery would not allow nearly as much continuous speed to be possible when operating with no power output from the electric motor, nor would extend range nearly as much. If I pedaled a generator to charge the battery, I'd be lucky to do 12-13 mph for the same effort I could do 20+ using the chain drive, and if the battery malfunctions or fails outright, this setup would leave me stranded, because there is no way to power the rear wheel directly from my legs.

That said, the motor does have regenerative braking enabled via controller. I have it set to where when the brake lever for the rear wheel is engaged, I get a light amount of regen similar to an engine brake in a car with an automatic transmission. If I press the brake lever harder, only then does the rear brake caliper activate as well. According to my computer, this extends my range anywhere from 6-15% depending upon terrain, traffic conditions, and other factors. I also have disc brakes on the front wheels for more urgent or even emergency stops.

I can also put the rear of the frame on a stand to lift the rear wheel, then pedal it, and allow the motor to regen while pedaling by activating the brake lever. This is handy to get a small amount of charge in the battery so that I can set the computer/controller/motor to 0W assist and then pedal home with the near-dead battery throwing just enough power to kill the cogging torque losses of the motor, adding 2-3 mph to my cruising speed when riding without electric assist enabled versus what the cruising speed would be if I had to power through the torque cogging losses.

I can envision being at zero battery, out in the boondocks, on a dark night, far from the end of any extension cord and just pedaling away while watching a two hour movie to get me going again and off to grandma's house.

The amount of power needed to run that laptop to watch that movie is probably enough to ride 10+ mph on flat ground. It's better put to use moving the vehicle, unless you don't mind doubling the time to get home.

If you go back to the Tesla figures which some would say are the state of the art at present, you could calculate that you could double the weight of your light vehicle to 1250 pounds and cut it's range to 150 miles without making it's drag coefficients any better or worse.

From an efficiency standpoint, weight really is only noticed in accelerations or while going up hills. There are 500 lb motorcycles that require more power to maintain 70 mph on flat ground than the 5,000 lb Tesla Model S.

That said, stop and go driving makes weight matter quite a lot. Steady state cruising on the highway, where range matters more than in local trips around the city, is mostly impacted by aerodynamics,

You could probably make a vehicle at that weight safe enough for you to put your wife and children in it.

That could be done. Modern cars are designed for maintaining a paradigm of planned obsolescence and manipulating the desires of the potential buyers, moreso than most else. That's how profits are maximized. Tesla has upset a lot of apple carts by doing something so obvious, something that GM could have been doing in the 1990s, and even their vehicles fall well short of what is actually possible regarding efficiency today, yet are leaps and bounds ahead of almost everything else. The major automakers probably didn't intend for cars as efficient as Tesla's offerings to be available until the 2050s, if ever. They could have built 35-40 mpg big block musclecars in the 1970s with proper attention to streamlining and weight reduction, but instead we got the anemic 14 mpg Pinto that kept all the same crap aerodynamics and bloatedness. The average 2021 new car has the same drag coefficient as the 1921 Rumpler Tropfenwagen, approximately 0.28. The low to mid 0.1X range is possible for a practical 4-seater vehicle that can traverse bad roads. The Tesla Model S, the most efficient car currently on the market, is about 0.21. My Milan SL velomobile has a 0.08, for comparison.

Multiply the drag coefficient by the frontal area, and you get the CdA value. My 1969 Triumph GT6 has a lower CdA value than the vast majority new cars you can buy today, and it wasn't even designed with the benefit of a wind tunnel or CAD. If I were to put a 3L turbodiesel from an 80s era Mercedes 300D in it, it would likely exceed 60 mpg, and out-perform the average new car in most performance metrics(acceleration, braking, cornering, top speed, slalom, ect), and it was using 1930s era tractor-manufacturing technology when it was built. That's more than a bit of an indictment about the state of the industry today and over the last several decades. Lots of hydrocarbons have been needlessly burned to benefit the profits of the few, to the detriment of everyone else.