Today’s buyers of electric cars are obsessed with range. The distance an EV can go on a charge is easily one of the first questions anyone has when a new car launches, and a lot of people feel that a range of around 300 miles is just right. Three decades ago, a company did something impressive when it built an electric car that, when driven really carefully, could go 375 miles on a charge. This is the Solectria Sunrise, a car fading into the history of a promising era of electric vehicle technology.
It must have been a wild time to be a car buyer in the mid- to late-1990s. It seemed that the electric car revolution was right around the corner, with the GM EV1 inspiring so many, and other cars from that time adopting so many futuristic touches.
Our Jason Torchinsky once broke the history of electric cars up into different, distinct eras. Electric cars go back about 200 years, and for about a century, electric cars were wild and experimental. But, importantly, as Jason would note, the so-called Contender Era was a time when EVs were viable as the dominant form of car. Then came the Crap Era, the period after about 1920 when electric cars sucked because they had terrible batteries and weak motors. We’re living in the Tesla Era now, where electric cars are sexy, fast, and usable as everyday vehicles.
Based on Jason’s splitting of EV eras, the Solectria Sunrise came right at the beginning of this Tesla era, and that makes sense. The Sunrise, like its contemporaries, were several steps above the Crap Era.
According to a 1991 issue of Popular Science, EVs were becoming a huge deal in the early 1990s and it was largely thanks to California. Los Angeles suffered from heavy air pollution, and state lawmakers had considered several ideas on how to reduce harmful emissions. In 1988, Los Angeles city councilman Marvin Braude proposed the L.A. Electric Car Initiative. The proposal called for the city to sponsor a green vehicle competition where the winner scored a contract to make 10,000 EVs for the city. Los Angeles sent 200 proposals to various companies, only 19 of which responded. Of that list, the competition was whittled down to just three small companies.
While the L.A. Electric Car Initiative kicked off, the California Air Resources Board had an even more ambitious plan. The Zero-Emission Vehicle Program of 1989 originally required that two percent of a large auto manufacturer’s total sales in California be zero-emission vehicles by 1998, at which point California would have put its foot on the throttle, requiring zero-emission sales to rise to five percent in 2001 and 10 percent in 2003.
Ultimately, this plan would fall apart, but not before getting automakers to spring into action with glorious EV concepts. This era produced such weirdos as the Chrysler TEVan, Ford Ranger EV, Nissan Altra EV, Toyota RAV4 EV, Honda EV Plus, and, of course, the iconic GM EV1. Another promising entry in this new era of EVs was Solectria, and its cars were wild.
From Go-Karts To Solar Cars
As the MIT Alumni Association writes, James Worden was not an environmentalist or a businessman. He just loved technology and had a knack for building electric cars since his teenage years in the early 1980s. Worden’s first builds were go-karts, then he got burned by a kart’s engine.
The anger of getting burned got Worden thinking about how much that go-kart engine sucked in the first place. It was loud, hot, dirty, and emitted fumes. He wondered if there was a way to replace gasoline with electricity. As luck would have it, Worden read about a solar-powered car in National Geographic, and he set about making his own version. In 1984, Worden appeared at the 1984 Massachusetts Science Fair with the Solectria I, a cardboard and wood solar-powered car that was so cool that it won the science fair. This project also helped Worden get into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology only a year later.
It was during Worden’s first year at MIT when a friend convinced him to enter the Tour de Sol solar vehicle race in Switzerland. Worden and a team of MIT engineers built a series of solar cars and took them racing. MIT credits Worden’s work for the creation of the MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team (SEVT). The SEVT accomplished some impressive feats, including the Solectria V, which set a solar car world speed record of 90 mph in 1988.
By 1989, Worden decided to make electric cars his career, founding the Solectria Corporation with his then-future wife, Anita Rajan. The company spent its earliest years selling electric car and solar components, but Worden had greater ambitions. He never stopped designing cars. Solectria’s first car was the 1990 LightSpeed (above), which weighed just 1,200 pounds due to its aluminum spaceframe and composite body. The LightSpeed was also somewhat sporty for an EV, with a 60 mph acceleration time just a touch over 8 seconds and gullwing doors. But the best part? It got a whopping 120 miles on a charge on plain lead-acid batteries.
Solectria’s first car sold to the public wasn’t nearly as ambitious as the LightSpeed. As the book Charging Ahead by Joe Sherman notes, Worden and crew had huge dreams and talents, but Solectria didn’t have the cash to make it happen. They had viable technology and wanted to put it into their own flashy car, but the company needed income sooner rather than later. The idea then shifted to converting cars first, getting a cash flow started, and then returning to make a bespoke car.
The Solectria team first experimented by removing the engine from a Geo Metro and seeing how well EV parts would fit in their place. Charging Ahead claims that the Solectria team wasn’t all that great at putting the Metro’s original ICE drivetrain back together, which is sort of hilarious, but they did find out that a Geo Metro electric conversion was viable.
In 1991, Solectria kicked off production of what it called the Force by buying a new Geo Metro and converting it. EV conversions weren’t new back then, but Solectria wanted to set itself apart with greater polish than other companies, making a driver feel that they’re driving a complete electric car, rather than a Geo Metro with some EV parts slapped onto it. This meant converting everything from the motor and transmission to the instrument cluster. Unfortunately, as Charging Ahead notes, the super lightweight transmission chosen by Solectria was a loud unit.
The Solectria Force went racing, and the first nine production examples went to public utilities in California and Arizona. The vehicle used a three-phase AC electric motor and had a top speed of 70 mph. Energy in the base version came from a 156-volt battery consisting of 13 lead-acid batteries. There was also a nickel-cadmium battery and later a nickel-metal hydride battery available.
The lead-acid version of the car had an initial base price of $26,050 (later raised to $33,995) and a range of up to 50 miles, while the nickel-metal hydride version cost an eye-watering $88,895 for a range of up to 100 miles. One is for sale on Facebook Marketplace right now for $2500!
Charging Ahead notes that a major reason why the Solectria Force was so expensive was that the company initially could not obtain stripped-down Geo Metro gliders from General Motors. Instead, Solectria was forced to buy fully-operational Geo Metros just to strip the cars down itself. This meant that when Solectria made a pickup truck, the E-10, it had a starting price of $43,000 because Solectria was forced to buy operational Chevy S-10s for $12,000 before stripping them down and rebuilding them.
Solectria was busy with a lot of projects, and Worden even managed to have a brush with danger. In 1992, he was racing an electric car powered by zinc-bromine batteries from Johnson Controls. According to Charging Ahead, a computer system existed to monitor the batteries and operate their pumps, but Johnson Controls couldn’t get the computer to work right. Charging Ahead writes that Worden opted to send the car racing with him manning the pumps manually and without the computer monitoring. One of the battery supply lines apparently popped off, filling the car with bromine liquid, which vaporized in the intensely hot car’s interior, creating bromine vapor, which can be deadly.
In a retrospective, MIT argued that Worden’s landing himself in an intensive care unit and having a near-death experience over the bromine vapor incident was indicative that EV startups like Solectria still had a lot to learn.
Dreaming Big
But Worden never gave up on his dream, and between converting existing cars, he wanted to build the electric car of his dreams — the car that would be known as the Sunrise. This car was supposed to be built from the ground-up to be an ultra lightweight, super cheap and practical electric car that ran on conventional batteries. The Sunrise would be a great car out of the box, made only better as battery technology evolved.
Charging Ahead notes that when progress on the Sunrise began, millions in lobbying dollars had already been spent on large automakers and the oil industry trying to kick California’s mandate to the curb. Apparently, there was some doubt about the mandate surviving, but Worden didn’t let that stop him. Worden wanted to build the most efficient car ever sold in America.
The original concept for the Sunrise was penned by Richard Gresens. Then, James Kua, ArtCenter College of Design graduate, racer, and mechanical engineer, refined the design. Solectria’s work on the Sunrise caught the attention of Boston Edison and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), who became major investors. Other investors included TPI, Inc., Design Evolution 4, Inc., Advanced Product Development, Pepin Associates, Inc., Black Emerald Group, IBIS Associates, Thermal Wave Imaging, Inc., and the University of Massachusetts.
This became a bit of a big problem from the jump. Worden wanted to build a car about the size of an old Honda Civic, while Boston Edison wanted something roughly the size of a Lincoln Town Car. Worden gave Boston Edison a compromise, setting for a mid-size car.
As Charging Ahead alleges, the Sunrise project stalled out during development. James Kuo also reportedly leveled an accusation against Solectria. From Charging Ahead:
In Kuo’s estimation, neither James Worden, his chief lieutenants, nor the Sunrise partners knew much about design, manufacturing, or sales.
Kuo, via Charging Ahead, went even further to explain why the car was perpetually behind schedule:
He blamed the lack of knowledge and an unrealistic schedule. “All the people making plans,” he said, “they didn’t know you had to go through concept sketches, clay modeling, one-quarter size, and full scale. You may, or may not, have to go through wind tunnel tests. We did wind tunnel. The wind tunnel technician called the aerodynamics ‘phenomenal.’ Finally, there is full-size packaging. All the partners know is jump right into full-scale. It has taken five months to get to that stage. That is why we are five months behind.”
Sadly, I could not find usable interior photos, so check out this test drive video:
Kuo also noted that the Sunrise development was full of compromises. From the book:
Designing Sunrise had been a hard learning experience for Kuo. Basic engineering principles cherished by Solectria had been in conflict with his sense of style and aesthetics. Compromises had to be forged often. More troubling to Kuo had been his gradual discovery that the engineering mind-set that dominated Solectria didn’t respect aesthetics and visual style as much as he felt they should be respected.
Through all of this, Solectria still had high hopes. The company thought that maybe, it would score a deal with a major manufacturer to build the car. It just had to get to the finish line. Unfortunately, more headwinds were encountered when, in 1995, California backed down from its ZEV mandate after mounting pressure. Suddenly, a hyper-efficient, super slick EV wasn’t all that necessary anymore.
A High-Range EV, 30 Years Ago
Despite all of the massive speedbumps, Solectria managed to push out something amazing. The Sunrise was different right from the start. It featured a monocoque unibody made entirely out of composites. That’s right, a composite chassis, not just body! That’s crazy enough, but then Solectria was quick to point out its coefficient of drag of 0.17. For comparison, the original Honda Insight, another great engineering masterpiece, had a coefficient of drag of 0.25.
The car was a lightweight, too. Solectria targeted only 1,600 pounds complete, with batteries. A complete Sunrise without batteries weighs 1,433 pounds, but weighed closer to 2,300 pounds when loaded up with batteries. That’s a lot of weight in batteries, but that’s because the car came with two dozen GM/Ovonic 12v 90Ah nickel metal hydride batteries. Alternatively, Solectria figured you could opt for a cheaper version of the car with two dozen Deka Dominator lead-acid batteries.
That juice was routed to a 67 HP Solectria AC24 induction motor and a DMOC445 inverter. Power reached the wheels through a Geo Metro’s transaxle. Geo Metro parts show up elsewhere in the front MacPherson struts and front brakes. Dodge Neon parts show up in the form of the rear MacPherson struts and rear drums.
In terms of performance, the Sunrise was good for acceleration to 60 mph in 17 seconds. That’s not fast, but the car’s true performance was range. Solectria targeted 100 miles with lead-acid batteries and 200 miles with nickel metal hydride batteries. A Sunrise was taken on the 1996 American Tour de Sol, where, through some aggressive hypermiling, the car hit an incredible 375 miles on a charge from its NiMH batteries. The Sunrise was also driven 217 miles from New York City to Boston, doing the drive in normal traffic at normal speeds on a single charge.
Normally, a range like that wouldn’t be impressive today, but you have to remember that this happened 29 years ago! A publication even managed to review one. Here’s a short drive review from Design News:
Solectria’s technological tour de force is the Sunrise, winner of the 1996 Tour de Sol endurance race sponsored by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, Greenfield, MA. The EV, an advanced prototype of a vehicle scheduled to go into production in less than two years, managed a run of 375 miles before its NiMH batteries had to be recharged. The record for a production vehicle, by the way, is 249 miles. This was established during the 1997 Tour de Sol by a NiMH-equipped Force.
At first glance, the Sunrise is an aerodynamic cousin to GM’s EV1. However, the composite body does not use a lick of metal structurally, making it a lighter. The workshop where Sunrise prototypes are assembled resembles a boat shop. In fact, the fiberglass-like body panels are outsourced to a sailboat maker. The Sunrise seats four comfortably with ample surplus legroom for the driver and front passenger. The car has a vast expanse of dashboard for keeping great quantities of the sundry items that tend to accumulate in cars. In fact, there is almost too much room up there (imagine that).
I go to roll up the window (standard operating procedure for aerodynamics-conscious EV drivers) but find no button or crank. Windows, when carried, are held in place by Velcro. This will not be so in the production model, I am assured. I am offered a window, but I decline. The power control box is replaced by a circular knob on the vertical dash, rather like the cycle knob on some washing machines. I set the Sunrise to high and hit the road. This accelerator is squishy, too, and seems to be a Solectria trade-mark. However, Sunrise is very well behaved acoustically. Out on Route 128, Sunrise’s aerodynamics provide a smooth ride at all speeds. The car sports a bright yellow futuristic look and has all sorts of racing-style corporate sponsorship stickers on it. I check out other drivers on the highway, expecting to receive admiring gazes. I don’t get so much as a glance. The locals must be used to seeing EVs in their midst.
So might we all, one day.
The Sun Sets
The first press release about the Sunrise hit at the end of 1994, and Solectria said that the cars would first ship in 1997 for under $20,000 each. Unfortunately, the launch of mass sales would never come. In 1998, MIT’s Technology Review, which cited Charging Ahead, gave a list of causes:
But by 1995, when the first Solectria Sunrise rolled, the mandates were being dismantled, Solectria’s partners were getting frustrated with Worden’s controlling management style and the lack of a manufacturing plan, and the big automakers were debuting their own electric cars. Today, Solectria sells Sunrises and electric vans and pickups in low volume, but, to Sherman’s disappointment, the company and the industry still haven’t gotten out of first gear. He blasts the “Big Boys,” the major automakers, for allegedly mounting disinformation campaigns that swayed politicians and the public against the ZEV mandates. But other incidents in the book-such as Worden’s trip to the intensive care unit after bromine vapor from a leaky battery engulfs his race car-make it clear that electric vehicles, and the companies that build them, still have some maturing to do.
Check out this demo video:
Ultimately, Solectria built only a handful of Sunrise cars, and reportedly, the company managed to build only 400 EVs until 2001. Then, the company shifted to selling componentry. In December 2004, Solectria was acquired by Azure Dynamics. Later, the Wordens opened Solectria Renewables and began focusing on solar inverters. That company was scooped up by the American arm of the Yaskawa Electric Corporation in 2014. Today, James Worden is the CEO of the solar boat company Worden Marine.
Sadly, you cannot buy a Solectria Sunrise. I suppose the closest thing to it from that era might be the original Honda Insight, which is an epic car that remains on my bucket list. Otherwise, maybe the next best thing is the Solectria Force I posted above.
The amazing thing about this whole project is that Solectria did manage to build at least a few of these cars and by all accounts, they managed modern-ish EV range with older technology. That’s awesome! I also love how Solectria enthusiasts have kept surviving Sunrises on the road. I wonder what would have happened if California’s ZEV mandate hadn’t been kneecapped, or if Solectria had figured out how to produce the cars, anyway.
I was like I know that car
I was in college, in one of the groups competing against them in the alternative fuel vehicle race
Waterbury Connecticut to Portland Maine over several days(drive 50-60 miles, show off the technology at the next location, charge overnight, repeat)
IIRC they were one of the only actual companies, the bulk of the vehicles were from engineering colleges and such
CCSU(Central Connecticut State University) wouldn’t let me test their converted motorcycle(I even had my gear in my car), our (Naugatuck Valley Technical College) entry was a converted S-10 pickup
I remember seeing the converted Metros frequently around Cambridge back in the ’90s and the Sunrise a couple of times driving around. The Sunrise was cool, though anyone with any sense of the market could tell that was not going to be a big seller, and I was always shocked that they somehow remained in business selling massively overpriced shitboxes with the primitive EV tech of the time. Not surprised to learn of his disregard for aesthetics or lack of understanding about the industry, but thinking about that, if he did understand those things, he likely that he never would have bothered trying and there are cars out there that he built whereas cars of my design do not exist in real form, so good for him!
Anyway, his party-platform boat is probably the best application for an EV pleasure boat, unlike a few I’ve seen from other companies that are built to look like ’20s speedboats, yet can’t go very fast or far being powered by a few batteries and disappointment. They’re apparently located just a few miles away from me. Haven’t seen one, but I might check them out for the hell of it.
At an EV event here a few years ago, a guy showed up with his Solectria Force(the Metro one), he drove it up from South Carolina, he had converted to Lithium.
I was a bit put off by it though as his was a ’99, and my Ranger Electric is a 2000, thus I lost out to having the oldest factory EV at the event, an imaginary award I make up that I always am a shoo-in for at those type of events. I told the organizer I wanted an asterisk on his Solectria, as I still had my original batteries.
Kidding aside, it was really cool to see, and due to the conversion type build of these 90s EVs, upgrading and maintaining is actually something home mechanics that research enough can actually tackle.
I would also say the 200 miles of range on the Sunrise also deserves an asterisk, top speed of 70mph, 0-60 in 17 seconds, no real amenities. Compare to the GM EV1 which they actually made hundreds of, top speed 80mph, 0-60 in 8.5 seconds, and nearly 100 miles of range on lead batteries, nearly 150 miles with the nickel, so comparitively, the Solectria wasn’t too big a win for all the sacrifices.
Like back then you had the SunRaycer going almost 2,000 miles in 5 days, that’s almost as good as the gas powered Autopian taxi is doing, but it had 1 seat, top speed almost 50mph, so no 0-60.
We could keep going on the performance/range chart, a 1922 Detroit Electric could do 70 miles of range, top speed 25 mph, take that apple eating equines!
So this was impressive, and they’re cool and rare, but relative to even other EVs at the time, a bit of a science project, kind of like Aptera seems to be.
“It featured a monocoque unibody made entirely out of composites. That’s right, a composite chassis, not just body! ”
Like a 1957 Lotus Elite.
0.29 drag coefficient, and a very small frontal area.
If its mechanicals weren’t such high-maintenance shit, it would make a great candidate for an EV sportscar that could be daily’d. You’d only need a 25 kWh pack to get 150+ miles highway range while retaining stock weight, and 40-ish miles range driven very spiritedly assuming 250 horsepower on tap, which would be enough to play with some very expensive modern supercars in a track setting.
WatchJRGo, when I used to pay attention to him, managed to find one of those Metro retrofits of the 50-mile variety and while it was interesting, I can’t say that even as a proof-of-concept it didn’t seem very groundbreaking in the sense of “we had this in the 1800s.”
Those later editions seem neat, and I wonder what a current-ish EV driveline in an actually small and aerodynamic car would be like. (“Less safe” is probably the answer, and probably why we’ll never see one.)
Someone please explain why rear fender skirts are not yet mandatory
Depending on the car’s design, they aren’t always of benefit.
See the GAC Eno 146, with a 0.146 drag coefficient, and no wheel skirts.
If I understand correctly, the squaring off of the wheel arches (common from around 2000 onward) took car of most of that issue, at least to the point where most cars didn’t want to look so weird they’d drive people away…or make it hard to change tires, etc.
The low-hanging aero fruit is better elsewhere, which is why you see so many “1-box sedans” now, basically fastbacks, where if you went back again to the year 2000 that was still a futuristic look with only a few earlier exceptions like Taurus, 80s Audis, etc. Also, underbody panels and airflow are another one to tackle before you start worrying about fender fairings.
Don’t make me tap the sign.
The Sign: Customers Won’t Buy Oddball Spacecars of the Future.
When have consumers ever been given the opportunity to buy a practical variant of such oddball, outside of some overpriced, underproduced bespoke offering?
I can think of a small number of them which were a bit more restrained, such as the Citroen DS, or Gen II Toyota Prius, which ended up selling incredibly well. Others that were less practical, like the Gen I Honda Insight, which didn’t sell well. But none of those ever went full oddball, and I can’t think of a case of an affordable, practical car ever made available to consumers that did go full oddball in the pursuit of aero. The benefits of doing so would certainly speak for themselves: we could have V8 musclecars getting 40+ mpg highway and cheap 4-cylinder shitboxes hitting 180+ mph and getting 80+ mpg when cruising 70 mph on the highway.
Consumers have never been given the choice, outside of expensive, hand-built, bespoke offerings that became collectors items and museum pieces, some of them touted among the most beautiful cars ever made(eg. Alfa Romeo BAT7).
The only people who would buy them are a few weirdos (one of them possibly being me) who can afford expensive, boutique cars (oops, not me, then, VW XL1), which is what they’d have to be. Look at what most people buy: 2-box utility vehicles. They used to have a wide range of choices in body types, but this detestable style has nearly killed most of them off from overwhelming popularity. While the Normals might have never had the exact option of a streamliner, what they do choose is good evidence that they wouldn’t buy them (which matters when you’re looking at 9-10 figures to develop a unique car), which means low volume, which means high prices, but the people buying expensive cars tend to want to display a sense of imposing power and an eco-weenie isn’t that. There are people rich enough to have custom coachbuilt cars and, if anything, they’re often unimaginatively retro inspired, not future-focused.
Even if, let’s say a big OEM can justify an offshoot low-volume vehicle at mass market price if it heavily shares a platform with a volume-seller lineup (something like the GR86/BRZ, which I struggle to see how they make much money on even using a platform with its roots in the late-80s and I wonder if a hyper-efficient car could hit its modest sales numbers). The problem is that a hyper-efficient car requires a form that is largely in opposition to the utility packaging that people want to actually buy because they need a vehicle to do far more than maximize energy use and those demands would impose restrictions on the flexibility of the more profitable platform it’s to use. It would be terrible business to compromise the volume seller to accommodate the low-volume one, so the hyper-efficient car either has to be heavily compromised (no longer hyper-efficient, just merely pretty good) or built as a standalone, so it’s back to boutique. Ooh, I feel like I should draw up a flowchart . . . no, what the hell am I thinking, I don’t want to do that . . . this damn heat wave is getting to me!
The 2005 Mercedes Bionic is an example of a 2-box design with a 0.19 drag coefficient. Shrink it slightly, make it a hatchback, and lift it, and you could have an efficient mini-CUV. And it would look every bit as ugly as all the other CUV blobs on the market with all the same styling cues, except with actual functional drag reduction, and not just the appearance of such. And as an EV, AWD would be easy/cheap to implement.
You could have a sub-3,000 lb AWD offroad capable EV, getting 200 miles highway range, on a < 35 kWh pack.
That’s a great example of something nobody will buy, which is a good reason why they didn’t build it.
They made the Mercedes Bionic. It’s called the B-Class. It’s not popular.
The DS was never a big seller. The Prius only became a feature in the marketplace because Toyota stuck with it and the then novel hybrid tech matured enough for the mass market, and it became a virtue signalling car. Now everything is a hybrid the Prius had had to become desirable simply as a car, which it has done. The i3 was always a money loser. The Insight was another economy oddball (that probably never made money, I haven’t looked into it).
The bottom line is there is a point when a car is economical enough for the market and customers won’t make compromises in other areas for an extra couple of mpg.
I think they’d make that compromise if it meant a sub-$20k EV with long range whose battery costs < $5k to replace. The biggest complaint about these cars is typically the purchase price and battery replacement cost, both of which get addressed with a more efficient design that allows a smaller battery for the desired range.
The Dacia Spring could have nearly 50% more highway range on the same pack if drag was reduced by half.
You say that like it’s a work of the moment that’s cheap and easy to do, but it isn’t. And there’s the added cost that has to be built in for the extra development time, better tolerance (if that’s part of the aero count decrease), increased build complexity, etc etc. You know as well as I do there are no engineering free lunches!
The margins on a car that cheap are lucky to be 10%. The math on the volume required just to break even on a generously low $1B development cost is simple to do and it doesn’t work. Even at double the margin, it’s probably still over double the most optimistic total sales numbers one could dream of over a 5-year period and that’s still not turning a profit. Energy is simply far too cheap for the cost savings to exceed all the other things people prioritize (looking at what sells, efficiency is not all that high for most people) and there is a diminishing cost savings benefit as efficiency gets higher. The rare buyer for whom energy efficiency is near the top as a priority already has adequate enough choices on the market that minimize compromises in utility and appearance. A lot of people might love seeing weird cars (at least ones that look cool), but they don’t often want to buy them because, even if they have equal practicality, most people don’t actually want to stand out that much. Whether that’s more a product of social conditioning or nature of the majority is a fun question to ponder, but the reason isn’t relevant here. Ultimately, if there was money in it, someone would have tried it—just look at the dumb, goofy stuff they put out, like 4-door “coupe” utility vehicles.
1.4 million DS’s in 20 years of production isn’t really the definition of “never a big seller.” Most years they sold between 80,000 and 100,000 of them which is pretty darn good for Europe in that era for something that wasn’t a Beetle or a Mini.
How about the inline seating Messerschmitt and other similar designs?
The original Honda Insight is a truly useful efficient car that makes the battery car theory look absurd when compared.
Despite what appears to be shaky engineering that Honda is very tough in real world terms and extremely serviceable, approaching successful race car designs in repair terms.
Tne Insight design only works with the hybrid batteries as designed, and this is its major weakness.
I know someone that bought a pair of one owner Insights with hundreds of thousands of miles on them.
They routinely got 80 mpg in fresher condition.
With the original engine, it’s doing 50 mpg currently, but it outshines most other cars by its other attributes.
It is a very tough car overall.
“we could have V8 musclecars getting 40+ mpg highway”
You CAN for the low, low price of a used C5 and a tune:
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a30170594/chevy-c5-corvette-40-mpg-tune-video/
At least until a bunch of other people have already bought them. People love the idea of novelty and change until they’re actually confronted with the choice to be novel and different. This goes for pretty much all aspects of life/society.
And some customers will only drive what everybody else drives, because they don’t want to be seen as outliers.
There is a concept that better designs are ignored by the masses, until the advantages become overwhelming, not merely obvious.
Surprising number of random detroit area folks have assumed my debadged insight was somehow an EV1. Usually if they just see the rear.
Been followed even once just to get asked if I snuck one off the crusher somehow. Im like, dude its a honda.
Considering an entire Travolta movie was made promoting the car, odd.
Damn that drag is low. A pro-cyclist on a good UCI approved time-trial bike with great position, 80/disc wheel step up, and UCI approved sock length. Basically as aero optimized as possible, in a sport that worships aero-optimization. Would struggle to dip below .175.
Most commercially-available velomobiles don’t even get that low.
The electric velomobile/microcar I built is estimated to be double that Cd figure from coast-down testing, but it also had the penalty of outboard wheels, no wind tunnel or CFD analysis or CAD, and I’m not an aerodynamicist.
Even then, it took until the 1990s for the average cars in the US to get that low, below 0.34 Cd, with all of the tools and talent at the automakers’ collective disposal. There’s something egregiously wrong with that picture.
Thank you Mercedes for doing a deeper dive on this car. I read the book cited in this article, and even learned more things about the development of this car that I didn’t know.
A modern 4-door version, mass produced, RWD with a 300 horsepower drive system, and maybe a 35 kWh battery, lack of tech nonsense, is exactly the type of car America needs. Such a small battery built into a car made of more conventional materials, could open the possibility of a sub-$20k MSRP, sub-3,000 lb curb weight, while passing FMVSS, and it would get maybe 130 miles range city, and 200 miles range highway @ 75 mph. Design it to be repaired with basic tools, with an easily accessed battery pack.
And in exchange for having a de-teched, low-feature penalty box, the driver gets a lightweight, high-performance fun car for dirt cheap entry level costs. THAT will get budget-conscious people to buy EVs, as these EVs would not only give them something unique for their dollar, but also save them money long-term.
And being an economy-focused RWD platform, that also opens the door to an inexpensive two-seater sports car that loses 300+ lbs and can punch well above its weight on the track.
All at the low, low cost of OEM margins on fatter, bigger vehicles whose sales would be cannibalized. But you know what? Screw those greedy bastards.
Mercedes, another little company working on electric cars and one that’s still around that may interest you is AC Propulsion in San Dimas, CA. An old college friend at least used to work for them, not sure they do anymore. https://acpropulsion.com/
David Tracy wrote an excellent article on Alan Cocconi, the founder of AC Propulsion, and the TZero, roughly a year or so after I recommended someone do such in the comments section.
https://www.theautopian.com/tesla-wouldnt-exist-if-it-werent-for-this-man-and-this-car/
80-100 miles range at 60-70 mph highway cruising speeds on a 1,280 lb pack of Optima D750 yellowtop lead acid batteries, integrated as side-impact protection. 0-60 mph in 4.1 seconds with a 200 horsepower drive system at 2,400 lbs.
So cool! Missed seeing that article first time around, even has a pointer to my alma mater. Have to dive into both articles after work. Should also reconnect with that old college friend, see what they’re up to, maybe they’re still doing something related to electric cars. Thanks Toecutter for the heads up!
I’m picturing a warehouse full of Geo Metro engines that were removed and just stored. What in the world would they do with all of them? I guess it’s not a huge volume, but still.
One of these with a modern 70kwh battery would get something in the range of 1,000 miles if hypermiled or about 540 if flogged. That’s insanely cool.
Edit: If you use some of them newfangled solid state batteries at 272 wh per kg, and 393 kg of battery, you get a hypermiled range of over 1,500 miles. Imagine crossing the continental US and stopping to charge once, lmao.
Yeah, light weight does amazing things for efficiency. And also handling. But everyone seems to be going the opposite direction
Edit: except the Chinese, maybe
The aerodynamics matter much more than the weight, at least on the highway where long range actually matters.
Sub-3,000 lb EVs meeting safety standards and getting 150+ miles real world range, with sub-20 minute charge times, offered at a relatively affordable cost, should have and could have been a thing 30 years ago.
It’s very easy to see this in the real world. I own a 2016 BMW i3 REx and a 2019 Kia Niro EV. The i3 weighs 1000lbs less due to being over a foot shorter, having one third the battery capacity, and using CFRP for the structure and body. However, they have a similar frontal area(i3 is 5% less at 2.3m^2 vs 2.4m^2 for the Niro EV) and identical Cd of .29, so on the highway their energy use is nearly identical. The low rolling resistance tires on the i3 might help a little but also seem like a pointless compromise.
Basically, if you don’t live or frequently drive in a congested urban area, the only reason to make an EV with a smaller battery is cost.
Can’t believe Toecutter wasn’t the first one in this comment section – I learned of this car through one of this comments initially.
I’d probably be one of the few people that would be all over something like this since we already have a family SUV and my commute is 110 miles roundtrip mostly at speeds 75mph or greater. I’m pretty much the only one that drives my car so it wouldn’t even need to pass the wife test (which it surely would not). Well, provided the vehicle wasn’t a deathtrap as I’m sure the Sunrise would be by today’s standards.
Busy with work. Just saw this article on my lunch break.
I’ve mentioned it repeatedly on the comments here. When I explain that we had long-range EV technology that could have been mass produced and made available in the 1990s, the Sunrise is a proof of concept of that. The major automakers, with more money and tech at their disposal, could have done even better and actually got something to market, if they wanted to.
Today, batteries you can buy off the shelf are 4x as energy dense by mass as what the Sunrise had. Once we had 50-70 Wh/kg batteries in the 1990s, all we needed was a mass produced car with good aerodynamics and light weight to get 150+ miles range at highway speeds.
The Ovonic NiMH batteries were also capable of sub-20 minute charge times. We only lacked the fast charge infrastructure.
The mass production would get the costs down to ICE-like levels. If the cars end up being slightly more expensive, there’s nothing wrong with enticing the buyer with some muscle: AC Propulsion had a 200 horsepower drive system ready to go back then and Alan Cocconi’s TZero was ripping sub-5-second 0-60 mph times.
The fact is, all of the pieces required for affordable, long-range EVs were there in the 1990s. The problem is that to this day, only the big manufacturers had the money to do so and the major American automakers have refused to put the pieces together, even as the battery tech saw a nearly 5-fold improvement. The USA automakers had the chance to be 3 decades ahead and threw it away, because they wanted us to buy high-margin SUVs and trucks instead. SUVs/CUVs/trucks are the least compatible platforms to make an affordable/practical long-range EV, but SUVs/CUVs/trucks oriented toward the luxury market has remained the focus because of margins, in spite of the fact that average working Americans can’t afford them but desperately want EVs to save at the gas pump and on maintenance costs, AND these new EVs have been deliberately designed to be disposable and unrepairable, to boot, rendering them as nearly useless on the second and third-hand markets where most people buy cars(Tesla’s offerings are halfway to being an exception to the disposable nature of the cars, but they are still too tech laden). The Chinese are going to eat the USA automakers’ collective lunch, and good-riddance.
“…and good-riddance”
If there were ever a cabal of corporations that deserved to die – it would be US Automakers.
(Right after US Medical Insurers and Hedge Funds)
Right now the Chinese OEMs are over producing cars and dumping them in every soft market they can. They are buying influence in the media and it’s beginning to emerge the cars have a lot of corners cut in their design and construction. They also have far too many manufacturers competing against each other with new brands popping up by the week.
On top of being subsidized. I’ve seen videos taken of fields of mass-produced Chinese EVs that no one wants, just rotting away.
But regarding subsidy and corner cutting, the same could be said for most modern vehicles regardless of country of origin. Corners are cut all over in the name of profit maximization. Quality suffers. Vehicle recalls have been steadily increasing over the decades as cars become more complicated and tech-laden, and recalls are today at an all time high in the USA.
A perfect storm of lack of consumer money, increasingly expensive credit, reduction in quality, lack of reparability, proprietary tools for servicing/repair, and possibly even fuel price spikes(given recent geopolitical events) is brewing. Couple this with the environmental impacts of automobile use, and the current disposable nature of the products which ignores all of the embodied energy that goes into their manufacture in spite of all of the claims of being “green”. Eventually, it is going to completely and irreparably wreck the vehicle market if something isn’t fixed, next quarterly earnings report be damned.
IMO, we need a massive reduction of barriers to entry into the mass-produced auto manufacturing industry. We need new, exotic, and disruptive ideas to be given a chance in this industry where conservatism to a fault has been the default modus operandi for almost a century, because the current manufacturers won’t give anyone with such ideas the time of day.
Torch’s article on making a cheap modular electric car with reversible body panels was a good start, flawed as it was.
I thought from the lead pic that this was going to be something about the Olds Aurora concept.
Instead, it enlightened me about how NiMH is so much more expensive than lead acid. I guess the “secret” is those batteries are filled with talking mice and rats. That gets expensive, just ask any snake owner.
But lead acid doesn’t carry even close to the same trauma density that NiMH does.
I saw a slide from former ECD Chairman Robert Stemple from like 1996, showing production volume of cars vs cost for NiMH batteries. Back then, in volume for 20,000 cars per year, the Ovonic NiMH batteries would have been $150/kWh. The Solectria Sunrise used a 26 kWh pack of them, and the cycle life was claimed to be 1,750 cycles to 100% depth of discharge. Do the math on that. Further, ultimate shelf life with gentle use is unknown, as there are still some Toyota RAV4 EVs from the 1990s/early 2000s with the Panasonic EV95 modules still delivering 80-100% of original range.
AND no crazy complicated BMS or thermal management was required in most cases(albeit, some cars did have heating issues driven in Arizona and California deserts on 100F+ days, with no thermal management). These EVs were mostly analogue, as they should be so that you can maximize vehicle longevity and ease of reparability. Get a bad battery? Have Bubba mechanic with a 6th grade education pop a new module in(following a published procedure, of course). The auto industry doesn’t want this, of course… not when they can trap the 1st-hand buyer into their “ecosystem” with proprietary tools/software and render the cars unusable/uneconomically operable to 3rd hand buyers when the car is 10+ years old, turning what should and could easily be a greatly more sustainable transportation solution than ICE cars, into landfill fodder even worse for the environment than ICE cars.
Quite cheap, actually. Little Nippy loves them!
https://i.imgur.com/31rYo2C.jpg
I see you buy your bowls from Wal-Mart just as I do.
I obtained that bowl secondhand, actually. For free.
Retail price was $0.88 when I bought mine, maybe 10 years ago. Works well for a variety of mammals.
I don’t even shop at Walmart. The mice for the ‘lil Nipper were more than that bowl.
He would even let me pet him without rattling or hissing at me.
I’m not surprised. Animals aren’t always the animals humans make them out to be.
And if he REALLY likes you, he’ll give you tongue kisses on the face.
I will take your word for that. At least not without some anti venom on hand, just in case.
Those look like first-gen Acura CL taillights.
I’m trying to place the front markers. They look familiar but I can’t place it.
I think Mitsubishi 3000GT? Those has a kind of blobby front marker.
Is that a Nissan Sentra trunklid?