Points of Interest | Green Energy News

April 4, 2004 – Vol.9 No.2

POINTS OF INTEREST.

A weekly collection of websites worth visiting.

What if cars were about three feet wide instead of about six? If cars were narrow, like motorcycles, existing roads could handle twice as much traffic just by painting a line down their center.

But to make skinny cars people would have to be much thinner, or more likely, driver and passenger would sit one behind the other in tandem. It seems unlikely that thin cars would be built that carried say six people sitting in a column, but rarely do cars have more than one or two people in them anyway, so two-person narrow cars would be the norm.

And what about the number of wheels? Two wheels are unlikely since driving the vehicle would require special skills. Three is more likely, like a tricycle, but to keep the vehicle narrow with the two parallel wheels close together, and keep the vehicle stable (keep it from rolling over in a turn), special engineering would be required.

Fortunately that engineering is available today as a result of a European Union funded project at the University of Bath in the U.K. as well as from a private company.

The U. Bath project is Clever (Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport), a three-wheeled vehicle with a hydraulically controlled tilting mechanism that keeps all three wheels planted firmly on the road in a turn yet allows the passenger compartment tilt inward as it goes around a corner. Researchers have gone out their way to make the vehicle attractive and have included an important feature to lure in potential buyers. Clever is narrow but is as tall as a normal car so that people in it won’t feel intimidated in traffic.

If put into production, Clever would sell for about GBP 6500 ($12,000) and be fueled with natural gas for cleaner air and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

Private company Brink Dynamics is already selling Carver, a three-wheeled tilting car. (Selling means buying an option and being put on a waiting list for the next production run.)

Carver is meant to be more sporting than Clever and gets about 40 miles per gallon with a gasoline fueled engine.

To-fro, front-back tandem seating in a three wheeled vehicle has been tried before. The Messerschmitt Bubble-car comes to mind. Over 50,000 variations on that vehicle were produced from the early 1950’s to the mid 1960’s. The Messerschmitt didn’t tilt. Drivers learned to be careful.

Visit Clever at http://www.bath.ac.uk/pr/releases/vehicle , Carver at http://www.carver.nl/ Brink Dynamics at http://www.brinkdynamics.com/ and http://www.messerschmitt.co.uk is one website for the now collectible econo-commuter cars.