Predictive Suspension

Most of us have seen Roman Holiday. It has Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn on a scooter in Rome. Its one of the more popular nostalgia scooters.

Doesn't she look like she's having fun?

This is not the only bit of media with a scooter in it. They turn up from time to time. I'd love to see more villains on them. They're surprisingly discreet vehicles. And the transportation of the future, sort of. Picture any TV villain. Get him out of the suit, into basic riding clothes which doubles as the anonymous disguise, a pair of black shades, a mean expression, possibly a cigarette, and tall boots to decisively plant on the pavement, while stalking the oblivious hero. Isn't the modern boogeyman a banker/terrorist stalker lurking in an alleyway with a gun and bomb? Ready to blow up the MILF heroine and kill her babies, just to motivate her for revenge? I have to say, modern times are irredeemably dark. A little too Kill Bill or Batman's Joker. Lazy comic book writers. They never kill off the Joker. They'd have to make a new villain. That's like... work or something. Sheesh. Modern movie villains are like the muslim terrorists, only with better monologues than "Allah Akhbar!".

My favorite manga of all time is Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, translates to Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip. Its also known as Cafe Alpha or Quiet Country Cafe (anime version). Its special because it has no plot yet was hugely popular and ran for years. You can read YKK online, translated into English. Its about daily life in a scifi future where Japan is sinking into the ocean. There's also been disaster with nanotechnology affecting the human population too. Birth rates are way down and it can't be stopped or reversed. The species is dying out. The heroine of the story is an android, a human appearing robot, with both biological and synthetic parts who is immortal and runs a coffee shop in the countryside, near what used to be a road but has no passerby anymore. There's some of the anime version online, btw. A lovely program which does a good job of catching the original mood, that of post-violence post-apocalypse setting. The violent people are already dead so early on she puts away her gun for good and takes up a camera. There are few people left and they want to die with dignity of old age. Most do.

Here's the first episode. My mom got to watch some of it before she passed on. Alpha owns a scooter as her primary transportation.

Note the larger wheels. This is an underbone, suitable for the roads. Its also a 2-stroke, which you can hear in the anime. The roads are like this:

As the years pass in the story and the kids grow up, the roads get more broken, more overgrown, more lost into single-track. When the gasoline deliveries stop and the old man at the gas station down the road vanishes (dead of old age), Alpha simply hikes instead.

Its a very basic machine, probably 50 cc, very slow, but she's dealing with no traffic, no people most of the time. The population is a tiny fraction of what it was. Naturally, this is not the only anime with a scooter in it. There's FLCL, see below.

Rideback has them too, though Rideback would have been a better anime if they'd kept up the sports theme and dropped the terrorism one. Most of those are a cross between a segway and a street bike, but the veteran soldier has a scooter with a 2-stroke engine, tiny little thing. With him, its just more bad455 because he doesn't need the full kit.

While some parts of that tech are bs, mainly the arms, articulated wheels and autobalancing? Yeah, that's already happening.

Picture this with wheels and computer speed agility and eventual lane picking so it can navigate, bounce, use physics to its advantage to move faster than the eye can track. We won't be able to keep up. They plan to put guns on this. And grenade launchers. Now picture the same UN that forced people into concentration camps in Bosnia, then stepped aside when the machine guns came so the genocide was neater. I don't like that.

The upside of such technologies is we could end up with articulated self balancing walkers which can cross rough terrain at reasonable speed and maybe offer real mobility to crippled people, rescue workers, and new sports in wild places. Lots of the terrain I hiked as a geologist I'd have been able to see faster riding a larger version of the Big Dog. The 4-wheeled Yamaha leaning quad bike prototype would be far more interesting with active controls and all wheel steering.

All the fun of a bike but double the safety on corners. Especially corners with loose gravel like I see everywhere here. I really hope they actually build, market, and export this to places like the USA. It would be interesting.

Citroen used to have a car with active suspension that leaned into corners, like an amusement park ride. It was famously uncomfortable. And unreliable. Audi and Porsche use iron filings in their shock absorbers and electromagnets to change the viscosity of the liquid inside, affecting how much they move and how strong they are, by the millisecond. This is on lots of cars, and will probably become standard like ABS has because its fantastic for handling and not actually that expensive.

A trophy truck does this mechanically with a very loose suspension and strong antisway bars for races like the Baja 1000.

This is how a suspension should work. Its hard to get it to work perfectly because we don't have predictive variable suspension yet, which would stiffen or relax based on coming terrain, like a person or animal does when we run or ride. It would require proper shape recognition software which actually works, and on a moving vehicle going faster than the robot can think, could kill the driver, leading to a lawsuit. Not to say rich car companies don't advertise for HUDs with infrared they claim will spot the jogger or deer on the road ahead of you. We've all seen that advertisement. This is handling, and that's easier to sue for. If they get it right that would be the next big thing.

Fully active suspension would offer all sorts of advantages but when those reach their limit and you get stuck in the boonies you still have to get out and push, or even grab a shovel. Picture active legs that sprout from the sides to lift a vehicle out of a hole their wheels have dug, then retract out of the way again to drive on. That would beat the heck out of traditional jacks or getting out to push. All wheel drive with predictive active suspension? Really amazing potential.

I wonder how hard it is to get a serial number for a kit car vehicle without all the nonsense of crash testing etc. I'm not doing that for an experimental vehicle. Can I build a jeep/buggy frame and put in the active suspension and radar, computers etc, active antisway so it doesn't lean the wrong way around corners? Or just do it mechanically? Can I figure out the vertical wheel travel optimum, the wheel size, the fenders etc, and get the thing good cooling, and a all wheel drive that really works? And should I keep bicycling between now and when its finished enough for legal road testing? And is this a really dumb idea? Should I sell my Honda and just buy a Subaru instead? I really should know my costs. Most of the Subarus which would suit me are $22-25K, list price. Tax and DMV stuff gets me to $25-27ish. On my current wage? Uh uh. Is that cheaper than both a scooter and a welder setup, and DMV experimental vehicle fees and all the work hours required? Hmm.

I have to wonder if maybe buying a 3-cylinder Geo Metro that's wrecked out and putting that and its critical drivetrain welded to a proper tube race frame might not be the answer. Its cheaper than a jeep. The tricky bit is all wheel drive. Might be easier to start with a subaru AWD system, and their typical opposed 4 engine, and then put the frame on that. That would keep the weight down. If I can either find a supplier for carbon fiber race seats or learn how to make them myself, with a 4 point harness because I dislike anything not-female pressing against my sensitive parts. More research must be done.

Electrics would need the scavenged computer, the signal relays going to LED lights and use a lighter battery, assuming it can trip the engine to start consistently, with solar panels on the roof to trickle charge the battery while its parked. And HID headlamps, with secondary ones on the roof for crappier conditions? Dunno. I wonder if there's a model that does most of this already, just needs weight reduction to get it there. I suspect that I might get happier results if I can pull that off. Meanwhile I can drive to and from work with the windows open and pretend.