Yves Behar shows off 'hackable' electric car concept for the developing world
By Paul Miller 
posted February 25th 2010 10:41AM
posted February 25th 2010 10:41AM
posted February 25th 2010 10:41AM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
what are we waiting for? do it.
@Andrew U
Dont hold your breath.
Industrial designers churn out this garbage to put in their portfolios so they can pimp themselves as being "green", and caring about those brown-skin folks, to their fellow losers at design conferences.
99.9% of the drawings they generate, STAY as drawings.
check out his "portfolio" before you comment numbnuts.
sexiest car ever. green cars = sexy ;)
@Punk
My car is green :')
That's less of a car and more of a PowerPoint presentation.
shouldn't it be designed for rough terrain?
@Ioannis Why? Aren't most cars made for roads? And aren't 95% of SUVs only used on roads?
@wetdog2
These are designed for the developing world where the road network can be a lot more rough
The car looks like those cars you used to draw as a kid.
@HikaKao
Agreed... it would go a lot towards making their presentation look more professional if they hired a competent automotive designer. Or pay someone studying to be one $50.
@HikaKao: Exactly what I thought; the design seems the same as those Matchbox Connectable toys that I used to have as a kid where you had assorted different front and rear halves to vehicles.
I think most of the six-year olds in my class had designed these cars at some point.
I wonder if the designers even consulted with people in developing countries to see if they agreed there was a need for these sorts of vehicles before coming up with their egghead ideas. After all, there are plenty of developing countries where it's difficult to get reliable electricity, rendering a vehicle of this ilk rather useless.
Is there any evidence that the developing world wants a hackable anything? Why don't we give them things that already work well.
This is exactly the kind of woozy headed "do-gooder" thinking, the developing world doesn't need. Yves Behar forgets that he is talking about a car not a plastic kiddie laptop (OLPC is an admirable effort no doubt) - cars have legal requirements, safety requirements - modularity and "hackability" are the worst nightmares for cars (ask any auto executive and watch him/her throw up on hearing these 2 buzzwords). If Mr.Behar is looking to do an OLPC for cars, unfortunately he is too late...Tata Nano has already been launched (and looks better than his ppt car!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano
Otherwise if Mr.Behar has his way,...this is what he will end up with:
http://www.dancewithshadows.com/one_lakh_car.asp
Symmetric cars... AMC Cavalier anyone?
That seems like a really bad design for most 3rd world countries that have dont have much of a paved road infrastructure
So a bit like a Landrover Defender then.
so it's cheap trexxa?
It looks like something Mr. Bean would drive, badly.
The more important issue is how this made it as Engadget Breaking News. Not only is this not a gadget, it's not even for real.
Oh Joy!
The character encoding in the title for the gallery is messed up. You're serving the page as "text/html; charset=utf-8", but the é in Yves Béhar is latin-1 encoded.
What people in the third world don't know from ugly?
"Yes, I'm driving a clown car, but because I'm poor, I must be grateful."
C'mon—
I can only guess that Mr. Béhar chose to use his own box of crayons to design this thing.
Or, maybe he made it look so beat so that no one would steal it.
This actually makes a lot of sense, for a few reasons:
~If you're willing to sacrifice range, you can sell an electric car for very little money. The price jumps exponentially with the energy density of the battery pack, so if you can find a market for cars that only go 50 miles to a charge you can sell them for peanuts.
~Very low maintinence makes them a good idea for the developing world. Villages in Nigeria, Uganda, etc. are littered with the wrecks of internal combustion engine vehicles because having them serviced isn't an option. Electric motors are famously durable and long-lived. Only one moving part means the drive train is extremely simple, and there's no fans, timing belts, transmission or dozens of other parts that can break, as in a combustion engine vehicle.
~Plentiful batteries, and experience with using them. In case you're not familiar with how people in third world nations keep their cell phones charged (and yes, a remarkable percentage of them have cell phones) it's typically with lead acid batteries, salvaged from junked cars. They also sometimes salvage the alternators from cars to build pedal/wind generators with, rather than pay to have their batteries charged from the nearest location with a connection to the grid. At any rate they already have the batteries and understand how to build simple charging systems from salvaged automotive parts.
~Lack of paved roads makes the low speed of cheap electric cars a non-issue. If your electric car only needs to go 25mph, you can get away with a much smaller motor, fewer batteries, and a lower price. A simple runabout powered by "recovered" lead acid car batteries, a 1kw DC motor that goes only 25mph could be sold for about what a used gas scooter would cost.
For those in a position to afford powered transportation in the first place, being able to cover 50 miles a day without relying on gas (which is not always in reliable supply and which fluctates frequently in price) or worrying about maintinence would be a godsend.
> Villages in Nigeria, Uganda, etc. are littered with the wrecks of internal combustion engine vehicles because having them serviced isn't an option.
Every village mechanic from Azerbaijan to Bangkok knows how to repair a basic internal combustion engine. The reliability of old gasoline Corollas, diesel Hiluxes, or Honda Cubs is legendary.
> Plentiful batteries
Sorry to let you in on the news, but most countries in Southeast and South Asia, rural residents have easier access to gasoline/diesel than to electricity - internal combustion generators most often power those lead acid batteries that you're so fond of. And you really have no idea how inefficient pedal/wind-powered electric cars is. How many miles do you think a guy would have to pedal on his generator to go a few hundred feet on his electric car?!?
@patiwat
You seem to have confused me for an environut. I don't care that the energy would come from burning gasoline. Hell, if you strapped that generator to a 2-wheeled trailer you'd have a handy range extender for long trips, but you wouldn't need to haul that weight with you on shorter ones. Unlike an automotive engine, the ICE in a generator can run a a constant speed it was optimized for rather than having to throttle up and down frequently, which means vastly better fuel economy. That's why diesel-electric trains actually use electric motors to drive the wheels, and onboard diesel generators to provide the power.
I wasn't aware that ICE mechanics were so plentiful, but is that really better than never needing mechanic in the first place? When you're offering these things in aid packages, you want something robust that never needs servicing. We can argue all day about what the best power source is, but at the end of the day electric motors don't care how you power them. They're fuel-agnostic. If you wanted to be silly, you could even hook up a steam boiler with a trailer full of firewood or something. Fuel cells? Batteries? Generators? Same diff. Divorcing the energy source from the motor makes any vehicle future proof, as it can be adapted to run on whatever you can come up with.