David, You have raised some great points. I am the 'owner' of the LUKA project so let me try to address everything. The weight of the LUKA today is 741kg. (1634lbs). This includes the 2 battery packs. The bat pack is split in two for better weight distribution. The overall battery size is 19.2kwh. We have this smaller battery in this 'component testing' vehicle. Will we get there? > We will get somewhere. This is still a project, not a commercial venture. If nothing else, we will leave an 'open source' legacy. Others can leverage from plans, bills of materials etc. We may prove that it is possible to make a car 'street legal' on a budget. We may prove that hub motors can work or maybe add more weight to the argument that they really do not work well enough today. We might serial produce the car, we might mass produce the car. We might sell bits that are hard for people to make as a 'kit'. A small personal aim is that at least I will be driving a LUKA to work every day. This is neither a marketing project nor a fantasy project. We are showing the project 'warts & all' at hackaday. Hence some of the negative comments on the web from people who have not read all the project logs. What is on view at hackaday is a 'component testing' chassis. It has a specific purpose. To see if the body fits, to see where we will put all the components, to test all the components. The 'real' chassis will be similar but have the 'cage' built in, be treated, powder coated & 'altered'. The 'car' you see in the pics & videos is good enough to go for 'type approval'. It might pass. If it does not pass, we will get a list of things we need to change. These will be incorporated into the 'real' car. About Range> 300km is what we expect to achieve from the smaller bat pack. We are not scientists. We are also not going to do range tests the way car companies do them. We will just drive the car down a highway & see how far it goes. We will measure the actual journey on a cell phone app & post the results at hackaday. If our projections are wrong, they are wrong. The reason we think we can get such a good range is because (we think) hub motors will have far less losses than a traditional electric engine. We have regen braking. The car is (as far as we know) very Aerodynamic. The great points you raise are about ownership, budget etc. It never crossed my mind to write these things at hackaday but on reading your post I can see the 'red flag' issue as real. I conceived the idea & I am the financial backer of the project. There are no investors, no creditors (all components are paid for in advance) & no full time employees. I own a company www.mauriceward.com This medium side company was established in 1968 operates in 15 European countries. It has about 1000 employees. The people who have helped me with the project are 4 guys from the IT dept who work this project after hours... If you look at the videos, you will notice that most of the truck in the background are Maurice Ward trucks. The MW Motors logo has the same bi-plane as Maurice ward & co.. There was no intention to hide who we are but this is not a Maurice Ward group project per say, it is me & a few of the guys seeing what we can achieve after hours. The 'budget' I have allocated to this is EUR100K. That has to cover all the tooling, the 'component testing' vehicle & getting 2 x 'real' cars to e car tech Munich in October this year. That will be the official launch of the vehicle. We are well within that budget, even when we count the EUR7K or so we will need to pay for our little 20sqm stand at e car tech. I will be posting a spreadsheet at hackaday showing where & how we spend the money. When we put the project on hackaday a short time ago, we really did not expect it would end up all over the internet. We very much thought a few people from the hacker community might see it.. So, the EUR100K gets us to the end of phase 1. If we stop at the end of phase 1, I will have 3 x very cool electric cars & the world will have a blueprint for how to build cheapish electric cars using hub motors. If it looks like there is a demand for the car, we will look at serial / mass production. Any phase 2 would mean setting up a legal entity & putting more money in.. But, we are in the unique position that we would not need investors, banks, debt etc. The timeline of less than a year is really thanks to the internet. We are not really car experts. We have good experience with FRP. Within a few days of the idea being hatched & us figuring our how to make the body, the serious question 'how are we gonna build a street legal chassis' was raised. Someone said 'just google 'chassis makers". We found MEV http://www.mevltd.co.uk/ in the UK & Stuart (the owner) build the 'rolling chassis' based on our 3D drawing of the body. Stuart is now helping us with the type approval in the UK (he thinks the project is cool so is now like one of the crew, not a supplier). The rest of the build is really about 'supply chain'. Finding good suppliers of good parts that are within our budget. Having different people making the body & chassis saved us a lot of time.. One Czech rally driver (Karel Trojan) http://www.kareltrojan.com/ has given us huge help with the 'driving experience' of the car. We are fortunate that between the 5 people on the team, we know a fair amount about electrics, electronics, control systmes, batteries & 3D design. Stuart & Karel have guided us on all the technical 'car' bits... The staff will not be let go as there are none !. The investors will not get burned as there are none (just me). There are no creditors... About the body shape... The car is loosely based on a prototype from Tatra that was never produced. Back in the day, Tatra were the kings of Aerodynamic design. http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/06/tatra-car-other-aerodynamic-marvels.html ... We will not spend money trying to get a drag coefficient for the LUKA but we hope it is Aerodynamic. In terms of size, the car is L/W/H 4050 x 1620 x 1220 mm..
I hope I have answered all your concerns?. I will post the same info to the hackaday site so there is no confusion.. If I have missed anything, please let me know...... -- View this message in context: http://electric-vehicle-discussion-list.413529.n4.nabble.com/Re-EVLN-Open-Source-Street-Legal-affordable-long-range-EV-4the-masses-tp4675590p4675673.html Sent from the Electric Vehicle Discussion List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
