STYLE / DESIGN : Eclectic Electrics
Students at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena weren’t fazed last year when they were assigned to design a marketable, feasible electric car for the turn of the century. “The real challenge,” senior Robert Laster explains, “was to make it interesting .”
All of the students began the zero-emission project with the same fundamental premise: Limited by their batteries, electric vehicles can’t go very far or very fast. “The most important thing was identifying a market niche that would turn disadvantages to advantages,” says instructor Dave Stollery.
The designs ranged from a luxury car with a motor for each wheel to a three-wheeled sports car that resembles the world’s biggest electric razor. “Some of the ideas weren’t practical. But I liked the vitality, the originality and the creativity that the students demonstrated,” says Paul MacCready, an inventor and alternative-energy visionary who helped judge the designs.
Top marks went to senior Jung Kim’s pod-like 1+1. Instead of designing a big car, Kim hit upon a setting where smaller was better--college campuses. With parking at a premium, a vehicle with a tiny footprint makes sense. To keep his commuter as compact as possible, Kim opted to have the driver slouch at the wheel.
“There are all kinds of applications for something like this,” Stollery says. “It would be a great meter-maid car. It would be a great security-guard vehicle. If a company built one, it would have a real market.”
But Laster didn’t want pragmatic. He wanted speed. To cut weight, he used a single seat. To reduce rolling resistance, he chose a motorcycle. To minimize drag, he repositioned the rider on his back in an enclosed cockpit. Then, to keep the bike from toppling, he added training wheels that deploy at low speeds.
Will we see one anytime soon? Only at the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show, where several models and a videotape will be featured through next Sunday. Still, with GM scaling back production of its electric car, the Impact, we’ve got to start somewhere. As Kim puts it, referring to his pipsqueak of a commuter: “It could be the spark that gets people thinking about preserving the environment.”
