Solar powered tricycles, and where they might lead

A few years ago at Burning Man, I met Bob. Bob rolled into our camp in his solar-panel-and-windmill-powered RV with a fiery-crested stained glass bust of a horse at the prow. Bob's RV was neat and orderly on the inside, with a design aesthetic inspired by a small ocean going sailboat. His controls were a joystick on a cord that was long enough for him to be able to drive from anywhere in the vehicle. When driving into the wind, a properly timed jet of flame from the horse's crest would be caught by the windmill and split into a triple helix.

The next year, I ran into Bob again, and he was driving a giant tricycle that looked sort of like a praying mantis on a hang glider and hallucinogens.


(Photo by Waldemar Horwat)

I stopped in to chat with him one day while wandering around the playa. We snacked on guacamole and chips that the previous visitors had left, and Bob told about his life as a technician and engineer building devices at Stanford Medical School. We talked, among other things, of the future of transportation. Bob was convinced that the Lithium-ion battery was going to power the first successful electric car. His observation was that battery technology is increasingly driven by consumer electronics, and the threshold weight to cost to power density ratio to make a reasonable car is pretty much where we are now. These cell phones and laptops that we all can't live without now suck up a fair amount of juice, and one of the biggest factors in making them sell is making the batteries small and lightweight, while still being powerful and long lasting. These are also, of course key features of a battery that would power an electric vehicle, since in addition to moving the fat ass of the driver, it must move the batteries. In previous eras, the market impetus to make such batteries was a lot less significant than it is now at a time when 300 million Indians have mobile phones.

So anyway, at around the same time that Bob and I were eating guacamole, some folks in Silicon Valley (including the head of SpaceX) were starting a company to follow up exactly this idea. Their car is quite close to production, and it looks and sounds pretty damn sweet. The concept of the Tesla Roadster is to make a high end sports car (it is very similar in design to the Lotus Elise) that uses ability of an electric motor to blow the pants off of similarly designed gas powered cars. Now, these are stupidly expensive toys, but there are plenty of people who want to buy these stupidly expensive toys, and Tesla's plan is to make the money they make off of the Roadsters finance the development of a more practical version, and eventually get the price and models more in line with what the rest of everyone is interested in, car-wise. (The Tesla apparently does 0-60 in 4 seconds, has a 200 mile range and recharges in three hours from a wall outlet, and there are plans to sell it with a solar panel that will provide about 50 miles per day of charge.)

I personally still prefer the bicycle for an advanced technology, high fuel mileage, low emissions vehicle, and with products like the Stokemonkey coming out, it increases its usefulness and car replacing ability. I'm certainly not one of the people who disagree with technology like Tesla on the grounds that it is still a car. That sort of idealism doesn't allow for much compromise. The Tesla is a really neat next step, and I hope that they succeed. Tucker and DeLorean may have been knocked out of the car business by the big establisheds, but things really are different in today's market. Mostly because of the internet, distribution of information is much faster and wider. Also, this is a new product in a way that the Tucker and the DeLorean really weren't.

And since I mentioned the Stokemonkey, so I should say a little about how cool I think it is (cooler than the Tesla in many ways, but less likely to grab the attention). I've not actually seen one, much less ridden a bike with one, but I can still be excited about them. The Stokemonkey makes a bicycle into a human/electric hybrid vehicle. They are powered by NiCads instead of Lithium-ion (Lithium-ion is not the only battery technology that's being advanced by the consumer electronics market), and a compact electric motor provides a power assist, basically helping you pedal like the stoker on a tandem, putting out a good deal more power per pound than Lance Armstrong (of course, Lance eats sandwiches, not burning coal). Hybrid electric bikes aren't all that new, but this little device is the coolest implementation of the idea that I've seen. My favorite application that I've seen a picture of is this Sycip from the North American Handmade Bike Show. It is that little red thing.


(Photo by Alex)

Speaking of the NAHBS and of projects like Bob's praying mantis tricycle and fire-shooting horsehead chariot and the Tesla cars, I have to say that it makes me really happy that all of these smart and creative engineers and builders are working on projects like this and figuring out how to get people and their stuff from A to B more stylishly and more efficiently instead of getting jobs at Los Alamos and Sandia or Lockheed or Raytheon and figuring out how to be more efficient and stylish while killing people, or even just at GM, figuring out how to make cup holders more stylish and not giving a crap about efficiency. Of course, there are plenty of people doing the latter sorts of things, but my hope is that the bike builders and rocket scientists are enough cooler and more inspiring that the pendulum will continue to swing in this direction.

Clearly, a big part of the change that is happening is due to the new sexiness/practicality/popularity that environmentalism is finally acquiring in the US. Since perhaps the largest export of the US is desire, many of the changes in this regard that happen in the US eventually make it out into the rest of the world. The foreign money that is pouring into India in the form of outsourcing jobs is often spent on toys. As was recently commented on in an editorial over here, India's wealthy should really take a look at their own logs before demanding the right to growth at any cost because India consumes so much fewer resources compared to the West. The carbon sink of India's rich is India's poor. (In addition, I'm interested how these ecological footprint numbers are calculated, because there's a hell of a lot of polluting that goes on at the local level here because of nonexistent or unenforced laws that I'm not sure makes it into these guilt trip numbers that tell us how many times over we use up the planet. I just took one those tests with the data from my life here and my life in Seattle, and I apparently use 1.5 hectares here, and 26 in Seattle. There are supposedly 1.8 per person for the world. But I sure do like breathing the air and being outside better in the US than I do here, except when I'm up in the Himalayas...)

It is true that 80% of Mumbai uses public transportation, but that figure is falling, and that still means that at least 5 million don't. The local trains are famous for being crowded (over 6 million riders per day), but a good part of that is because the system hasn't been updated for decades. On the other hand, there is a growing number of SUVs on the roads here. I was talking about this to one of the other guys who lives in my apartment building last night, and he observed that (1) even a poor American probably has a car, and (2) Indians are comparatively less likely to make any sacrifices in terms of providing material goods for their family. (This guy has lived outside of India while he was a student, and he strikes me as an intelligent, open minded, somewhat conservative person. He is married and has a one year old son. His wife almost never talks to me, and if I am on the roof and she comes up there with her son but not her husband, she leaves immediately.)

Anyway, my point is that many people in urban India have bought or at least coevolved some significant parts of the 1950s era American Dream as far as consumption is concerned. But while there are many things that I wish people would do differently in India, most of them having to do with attitudes towards the environment in one way or another, one of India's main problems has been outsiders telling them how to run things for the last 300 years, and the last thing they need is another idealistic white guy who thinks certain attitudes should be reevaluated...