Experimental Vehicles

As much as I enjoy the prosaic reviews and snarky asides of Jeremy Clarkson, its his willingness to build stupid cars which helps remind us of the joy of hobby vehicles, of experiments rather than safety. And yes, he's often doing the "hey bubba, watch this!" move.

Look at it. An experiment in small car size, and a good joke. Of course, putting a protective shell on top of an ATV is absurd. But can you scale this up till its a bit more comfortable? Yes. Look at a Fiat 500 or a Smart 42. Those are tiny platforms and they work as City Cars. The Toyota Aygo/iQ, and Honda Fit and VW Fox are also tiny. If they were carbon fiber they'd be lighter and faster. So how do you do that? And why does doing it have to be illegal? Safety is largely imaginary. Its a goal, but you can spend infinite money and effort and still never be safe. This is why banning firearms is a retarded move. You can't make cars safe either. You can make them SAFER, but the safest you can be in a car is sitting still, away from a road, preferably outside it sitting on your couch or walking away from the explosive filled bomb on wheel. I wish they would teach how to make things out of carbon fiber at the local community colleges, but they don't. If Clarkson's car had a body and a door, and a window defroster and maybe a bit longer wheelbase and gearing to deal with highway speeds, he might have had a better end product. Might need stiffer tires so it would track properly. Real cars have these.

 

When I was a lad, there were a few experimental electric cars in the county, including the one by the owner of Zap in Sebastopol, which were nearly as ugly as the Hammerhead Eagle iThrust they built on Top Gear. Sure, this ended up junk, and suffers from the usual range problems, but the more people building these, the more solutions will be found. Tesla said they're sharing their discoveries, open source, which is great. A pity about the battery problem, but still, the power management and such will prove useful to other builders and people experimenting. Again, knowing how to work with Carbon fiber would be helpful.

 

Another example that Top Gear fiddles with, mostly as a joke, is their RV episode, where they build RVs onto cars, the most absurd they could come up with, essentially taking ones they've seen on the highway and going to 11. Clarkson's very tall campervan is silly. And eventually falls over in the crosswind in Cornwall. Could anybody not insane improve that? Sure. Even with that vehicle. Most truck campers are better and work reasonably well. They're minimal space inside, but more secure than a tent and more comfortable inside when its raining or snowing. No bathroom, unless you get one of the really long ones, but they do highway speeds and don't try to flip over. There's also the matter that you can build an RV shell  out of carbon fiber rather than aluminum sheeting, which would reduce the weight and improve the strength. Carbon fiber also insulates better than aluminum so you could be warmer or cooler as needed. Insulation is a real bugbear in a camper. Experimental vehicles generally get around limitations on RVs, since they can be made to disconnect thus avoiding destructive crash testing, which while safe, sort of, are impossible for a small hobbyist to afford.

 

Ultralight cars would be really great to have here, even kit cars. The Elio is going into production, but the Caterham super 7 ultralight would be great fun on our often sunny roads. Same with the Arrow and the Carver, if that one could be brought back from the dead. I think that any car under 1500 pounds wet weight (fully fueled with oil and gasoline) should be allowed to skip the crash test requirements that force these onto 3 wheels and allow them to be 4 wheel cars. Give them a bright orange paintjob so other drivers know these are experimental and unsafe. Make the driver wear a helmet and maybe even a firesuit and 4 point harness. And an external, labeled fire extinguisher button just in case they roll it and catch fire. In exchange, no road tax, any fuel they want to use, and no whining about noise or safety. They won't be comfortable in the firesuit, so only determined people will build and drive them, but it allows real world testing. We don't have to limit these to tracks or other expensive facilities. We can find out if the test vehicle can carry groceries, or that the turn radius is too wide to get in and out of a parking space. Or that stripping down a Geo metro to its frame and replacing panels with carbon fiber painted pumpkin orange does draw attention, as well as raise its fuel economy to 62 mpg.

Yes, amphibious cars seem silly, but here's something you should know. Most cities in the world at near the coastline, and most of those cities are on river mouths. As the dams upstream were built roughly a century ago, many of them are filled it, turning into meadows with a waterfall. Flood control no longer works because the dam can't absorb much water before it rushes over the spillway. This means that heavy storms cause floods just like they used to. And since levees are also overfilled and the natural physics of water's carrying capacity for sediment (that's hydrology 301) the levees are a very unnatural barrier and are going to fail. Not just here in California but down in the Mississippi River Valley. Rivers move, cut, flood, find new channels. They shift. There's a good reason that the Old Kingdom of Egypt was ruled by surveyors who could use a Rod to measure someone's land and put them and their neighbors back in the right places after the Nile floods came down again. So amphibious craft are actually a good idea. Not these, exactly, but you can see how they'd go wrong and what is needed to make them work properly. The Marine Corps has lots of good amphibious armored cars. When the Feather, Yuba, and Sacramento Rivers flood and burst their banks around Marysville, and the San Joaquin floods Stockton, getting around will be a mixture of johnboats and long detours or amphibious cars to cross those missing bridges or flooded roads. And the water levels will probably vary, too.

This is ridiculous, of course.

So is this, but they are making a point about flooding in the English lowlands. Ironically, parking lows and storm drains make flash flooding much worse because the ground shifts the water very quickly into fast moving flows which can overwhelm stream banks. This is a problem in California and Las Vegas, for example. Texas doesn't even bother with ditches because it is so flat the water can't drain anywhere. Houston has flooding signs on almost every street.

These Gibbs ATVs were built for the Gulf of Mexico swamps, in Florida and Louisiana. The wheels fold up out of the way. It's actually fairly amazing. And a bit expensive, but if you have to cross 10 mile of swamp and road mix, you can't drive and can't motorboat on the highway and portaging a canoe would be unpleasant. Btw, when those floods happen, a billion mosquitoes and malaria comes back. The tonic water we drink now tastes only faintly, and the quinine isn't the real thing. Thankfully there are meds for malaria, and I guess we'll have to mass produce them to save our surviving population, else malaria will cut our coastal and estuarine population dramatically. Good for the fish and birds, however. And the beavers will love it. Disaster management can be so burdensome and disaster prevention so expensive that sometimes you just can't avoid it. Californians build homes in earthquake zones, but so do the people within 200 miles of Memphis Tennessee. All of that will fall down in the Big One, there. And Oklahoma had more quakes than California, thanks to Fracking reactivating all those faults.

There are a fair number of disused railroad tracks in California. One of the largest is the Pacific Coast Railway which runs from Petaluma to Crescent City, I think. It used to haul lumber from the mills on the North Coast interior down to Vallejo to build houses in the Bay Area. The tracks went right through my home town, blaring at all hours of the day and night, and suicidal hobos would sleep on them to die. Fully loaded trains would go through a parking lot where I worked, between buildings, which was a real shock the first time that happened. So the trees were cut down, the mills closed, and the tracks abandoned. Turns out you can modify a car or truck or other vehicle to run on railroad tracks. This is stupid but fun. The lightest ones carry people are materials to repair the tracks, but you can make silly ones like this Top Gear Sports Train. This sort of transportation is less silly than you might think.

 

Railroad tracks have separate bridges from car bridges, most of the time, and are often built sturdier and maintained better than car and truck bridges, which most civil engineers claim are falling apart. The collapse of the bridge in St. Paul Minnesota killed several people. Civil Engineers give America a D+ for our infrastructure, but that could be them looking for jobs. When I look at stuff I see problems too. Stockton is already a violent racists drug addled hellhole. Flooding it because the levees failed would uproot a large population already prone to violence. They'd go somewhere, maybe where you live.

 

If these vehicles seem excessively expensive to you, or peculiar for their applications, remember that some of experimental vehicle designs are good for basic things like reducing vehicle weight, improving fuel economy, increasing available power. Removing the back seats from your car pulls a couple hundred pounds from it, and you'd notice it when accelerating. If the metal doors were replaced with carbon fiber, that's another hundred pounds of weight loss. Less safe in a side impact, certainly, but the fuel economy improvements are probably more important to you.

Note that the Elio motors car has two wheels in the front and one in the back, like a Morgan. When you hit the brakes, the weight is shifted onto those front wheels and being supported won't flip over like the Reliant Robin does. Clarkson asks the local miners why they drove these dangerous cars and its because they couldn't afford a proper licensed 4-wheeled car when being a miner paid so little. The English could have changed the laws to stop killing miners, but the English don't like miners and killing them was sort of the point. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? "Lets import thousands of grizzly bears into the Sierras so they can eat people. I don't live there so its fine!" says the jerk in Berkeley. Yep. Good thing they've banned ammunition to shoot the bears. So we're helpless. Did I mention that separating California into multiple states means we can pass laws that allow for the above sorts of experimental vehicles on the roads, without crash testing requirements? Yeah, it does. No more Nerf(tm).

I want to see these on the road. They're silly and fun and great fuel economy and unsafe. So what? Life isn't safe. Its rolling art. And allowing us to build rolling art, and use it day to day, makes California a more beautiful place.