> These are the things that start becoming possible if we let our idea of an EV move beyond a 4000lb automobile to move your maybe 200lb self.
I see you live in an area with significantly more days of good weather than bad!
I see you live in an area with significantly more days of good weather than bad!
If your solution to this problem doesn't account for the disabled, elderly, physically unfit, or requires that some or all people be unable to drive in weather that personal vehicles right now handle without issue, like freezing rain, you're not gonna get much buy-in.
A vehicke that can survive a crash at 60 km/h and reach 200km/h and handle properly at that speed is going to weigh accordingly.
And that's in ideal conditions - real world could easily have multiple passengers and a full load of luggage/cargo that'll slow things down.
Likewise with going 120mph - highway speeds are anything from 60 to 85mph. Most vehicles aren't at 100% engine load when cruising on the highway.
And with the 120 on the other end, sure, maybe the engines are good for that, but why even allow the car to go that fast? Why not just put in a speed limiter? Doesn't make much sense why we have all this power imo when the driving rules and laws were written around cars that probably took 20 seconds to reach 60mph and might have needed to go downhill with a tailwind to breach 75mph. And what do you know, the laws always have to account for these anemic vehicles thanks to just old vehicles and stuff like commercial equipment that is going to be heavy and slow no matter what, so you won't find yourself ever needing more performance to keep up with faster interchanges or anything like that since things are always going to built to these meager performance expectations. It's like buying a $4000 gaming PC to run microsoft word 98; wrong tool for the job.
FWIW, the Aptera three-wheel EV design gets IIRC 10X better distance/kWhr than most EVs, and has a US classification as a motorcycle.
It's impossible to use anything but cars in places with bad weather. Science has proved it!
For a rare few places in the world, open air transportation could work year round. For the rest, you'll need an equally sized fleet of cars for the bad days, and scooters for the good days, than can be easily swapped.
1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15389588.2020.17...
> During the observation period, a total of 875 GC-related crashes occurred, representing an average of 136 crashes, 65 hospitalizations, and 9 dead or disabled annually. Of all crashes, 48% resulted in hospitalization, severe trauma, or death. Of these, ejection occurred in 27%, hospitalization in 55%, and death or disability in 15% of crashes.
2. Random YouTube for scale: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xHh1vAGd8Uk/hqdefault.jpg
Nice personal attack.
You have 0 info about me to say anything. You know what they say: "if you have nothing to say, just shut up". Your mom should have taught you that ;-)
> For a rare few places in the world, open air transportation could work year round. For the rest, you'll need an equally sized fleet of cars for the bad days, and scooters for the good days, than can be easily swapped.
A rare few places?
Bikes are common in South East Asia (hot, wet).
Bikes are common in the Netherlands (wet, windy).
Bikes are common in Finland (icy).
Electric bikes are starting to make even hilly terrain bikeable.
Unless population density is low, bikes + scooters + public transport can cover everything.
People just don't want to do that. That's a different story to "it can't be done!!!11!!".
The path I was on wasn't really maintained with winter bikers in mind, and I never even thought of researching winter tires, and I wasn't a particularly skilled cyclist (I don't think I cleaned the chain once in several years).
So I did what any stubborn-minded fool who had to bike to their job rain or shine would do: I simply fell over repeatedly until I started getting the hang of things (pro-tip: just don't turn at all and you won't fall over)
Nowadays I'm too old to consider regularly crashing during my commute to be a particularly sane idea; though I still don't have a car and wish cycling infrastructure would get even a fraction of the attention that car infrastructure does.
However there is a strong lack of will for it in many places.
In many others the population density doesn't really allow it.
As usual, it's a mix of things, just that the current default of "cars everywhere" should be turned on its head. It should be: "no cars everywhere, and then introduce cars where they are actually needed".