The Vehicle

A lot of thought has and will go into this vehicle. We don’t have the budget of a billion dollar auto manufacturer and we haven’t taken in millions either. The giant presses needed for forming unibody car bodies are just to expensive for a start up, so that leaves an alternate form of construction, the tube chassis.

Being that an autocycle is a relatively small vehicle compared most everything else on the road and trying to make the safest vehicle possible, we look to the vehicles that race fans know a little about that routinely prove themselves by protecting the driver. The Race Car. Weather it is a NASCAR, an NHRA top fuel dragster or a desert truck they all chose one design for ultimate protection, the tube chassis. In addition to being remarkably safe and durable they also have the added benefit of making the vehicle easier to work on and easy to repair when damaged. As one of my good friends that has worked in NASCAR told me, there are a lot of really smart people building those cars and if there were a better construction method, they would have found it.

The tube chassis also lends itself to ease of manufacture, its perfect for the small scale. With the use of modern CNC tube cutting and bending machines, frames can be produced relatively quickly as compared to years ago when chassis builders cut tubes by hand with basic power tools until the parts properly fit into jigs. The modern CNC tube cutting and bending machines offer incredible accuracy and repeatability, things that are key to turning out a good product in an efficient manor.

For body panels we can look to materials like fiberglass, carbon fiber, Kydex, other molded and thermoformed plastics as well as good old fashioned sheet metal. Our goal in this department is to select and use materials in sizes and forming methods that lend themselves to the home builder or the owner with a little know how giving them the ability to perform repairs that will look good and hold up.

The interior will be no different. Ease of maintence, esthetics and ergonimics will be factored in. Keeping thing simple, clean and looking nice will be the idea. The interior lends istelf to lots of oppertunities for “Makers” to really personalize things.

When parts are not sourced from other automotive supply chains, a good bit of the vehicle will have extensive cad drawings, scans and 3d models for the owner. This will allow for reference, maintenance and so owners can make their own custom or replacement parts. The members section of the web site will have a repository of manufacturer CAD files as well as a “makers” section where makers can share their own designs. The vehicle is being designed with a lot of community input. It is important to that we listen to the community as ultimately the community will be the ones buying the vehicles.

We will be having regular conference calls and meetings that will be published on the site to keep you in the loop and get your input. One of the things I have been racking my brain over is a method of getting input from as many of you as possible and picking out important ideas and data. Easily done when its a dozen people, but a thousand or more is a different story.

One important thing to keep in mind is the way this is being planned out for manufacturing, it scales up very easily. The plan is to start small and keep building and adding capacity. We will constantly look at the process and see what we can upgrade and improve to make the process better. I am a big fan of LEAN and TPS. It is still very early in the process and there will be things that change many times for one reason or another.