LocostUSA.com

Lets imagine for a moment that gas gets up to $6 a gallon. Would you consider building a locost style car just to get better mileage? My Dad's VW Golf tdi gets 50MPG and it weighs over 2500lbs. If you put that type of drivetrain in a locost style lotus clone you would probably get over 60mpg and still be very fast. Those engines are very strong and would make a lightweight car very fun. OR you could pay over $20000 for a hybrid that gets similar mileage.

Maybe I'll build two. One as a daily driver and one as a Sunday racer.

We have a thing called winter for 8 months of the year so its a no go for a yearly daily driver. I'd drive it the summer though.

It's almost the opposite down here. Summer time sometimes gets too hot to drive with no A/C. You're driving down the road when a puff of wind hits you and it feels like someone opened up the oven door. Wintertime temps are mostly 40-50F. I ride the bike in the winter with ridng pants and jacket. On the downside, anything that falls from the sky will be wet and not much fun to ride in.

A heater should be low weight add-on. Even with no top, a heater with a good blower can work wonders.

-Andy

Thats why i ride a motorcycle, I get 50 mpg, a good comuter bike can be had for less than $1k and can usually be ridden right away.

I'm strongly considering a removable aluminum hard-top, which would be incorporated into the build. That (in theory) would extend my driving season by at least a couple of months. I did something similar in college with a motorcycle - I'd ride to class any day there wasn't snow on the ground, regardless of temperature. Saved a lot of time and money parking that way. With a hard top and a heater, I think the vehicle would only be in storage from mid-November till Feb.

Gas prices are also driving the project. I've been building Hummer/Humvee look-alikes for other people for the past few years, and was planning to build my own next. At $3.00 a gallon, a vehicle which will get 12-15 mpg just doesn't look great anymore. Time to change directions 180 degrees, and make something small, fast, and economical!

I convert ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles over to electric powered vehicles (EVs). So my interest in the Locost is to actually build a car from scratch that is meant to be electric powered from the beginning.

With that said, Yes I would build "my style" of Locost to get better mileage (that is electric mileage vs. gas mileage, not to mention the cost difference).



This is a good observation. As some of you may be aware, EVs tend to have low mileage ranges (depending on the motor, batteries, and the driver) anywhere from 30 miles to 110 miles on a single charge. So an EV is best for a "quick spin around the block" or for commuting around the city.

I would be interested in building a Locost with an ICE for those times that an EV just wouldn't cut it. If I were to, finding out what drivetrains typically give the best gas mileage would be a great thing to know.

Where I live we do have some harsh winters at times and others are mild. I am looking into designing my Locost(s) to have a hard top-look similar to :



(the back area on my Locost is where the crap load of batteries needs to go in the EV). If I were to build a Locost with an ICE I may opt for a similar look.

Sounds like you should be building something like this:

http://www.electric7.com/

If I could afford fancy batteries like those I might consider it. At the moment the additional $10k in batteries buys a lot of gas even at double todays prices.

Thank you for the link. I will add that to my growing collection of EV Locost links.



The kind of batteries that person used is NiMH batteris, which is some of the most expensive types out there now . . . well, they are not really "out there" since they are so expensive the only real users of that type of battery are big name car makers.

I am going to probably use a cheaper Li-ion battery setup that will still give good range and the space that I need to squeeze them into the Locost frame.