On 11 Sep 2022 at 10:15, Arnold Ligurs via EV wrote: > Am I the only one that thinks this sort of 3 wheel configuration is not > optimal?
Nope. :-) I'm not an engineer (duh), but I get the impression that 3-wheelers can be made reasonably stable with clever engineering. But you have to be really careful what you do with them once they've left the drawing board, because that engineering depends partly on precise center of mass and balance. A trike uses less material, at least in theory, and that may be why they're being designed today. However, I remember several EV trike propsals in the 1980s and 1990s, including at least one that made it into significant production numbers (Corbin Sparrow). There've also been some Chinese made EV trikes imported by ... er ... perhaps somewhat dodgy US firms. The less said about those the better. The designers back then (80s/90s) pretty freely admitted that they weren't doing trikes for technical advantage. They did them for regulatory reasons. In some (most?) states a motorized trike is considered a motorcycle. So you can neatly sidestep FMVSS compliance. This saves a small company a LOT of dough. You could argue that that saved dough is at least partly paid for with the lives and disabilities of people who crash those vehicles and die or are maimed. Or you could argue that anyone who buys such a vehicle should know the hazards just by looking at it, so his life ought to be his own look-out. Take your pick. BTW, in the EU vehicke safety laws are in some ways more flexible. They allow for a class of 4-wheel license free vehicles called quadricycles. You see these pokey little cars, many of them kitten-cute, all over France, which seems to be the country consuming the largest number of them. There they're often - maybe predominantly - used by alcoholics who've permanently lost their driving licenses. French law allows this. The possible rationale will be left as an exercise for the reader. An aside: South Korea's postal service is replacing some of their ICEV delivery scooters with Renault Twizy quadricycles, built there by Samsung, which has a partnership with Renault. So if you doubt that there's a place where small, efficient EVs can shove ICEVs out, there's your evidence for it. Here's another quite interesting small, light EV, though it's unlikely that you'll ever be able to drive one here. https://www.citroen.com/en/Highlight/131/ami-100-electric-mobility- accessible-to-all or https://v.gd/nypeFb Also: https://www.citroen.co.uk/ami David Roden, EVDL moderator & general lackey To reach me, don't reply to this message; I won't get it. Use my offlist address here : http://evdl.org/help/index.html#supt = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = I see a set of solutions but I don't know what problems they exist to solve other than "How can we use these to absorb all this spare money that's washing around?" -- Brian Eno on Cryptocurrency and NFTs = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _______________________________________________ Address messages to ev@lists.evdl.org No other addresses in TO and CC fields HELP: http://www.evdl.org/help/
