Some of you guys mentioned the Sinclair C5. Right now this is what’s just down from the top of the Toronto Star’s front page and the C5 came to mind right away when I saw the picture there. It looks like one of the local auto parts magnates is getting ready to try out the same concept all over again:
I can understand the logic but I still don’t see it taking off now, just as it didn’t then.
Driving that looks as much of an attempt a vehicular suicide as 'driving' a C5 did. I personally do not fancy being in a lightweight plastic/GRP vehicle with no energy absorbing crumple zones or strong rigid central cell - i.e. a vehicle that ignores everything about making vehicle occupancy survivable in a crash. I can't see any seatbelts either, and the outward visibility looks pretty poor. At least the whole vehicle isn't below every other drivers line of sight like the C5 was.
If it could be used in the cycle lanes that are springing up all over the place, then, the risk taken when using one is no different is it not to riding a bike?
So you want to add enraged cyclists with axes to the list of risks faced by the drivers do you?
I was just aboot to post that a few minutes of Googling revealed
that is in fact his primary intent. That said... I expect it will not likely survive the funding stage, as just before the whole COVID thing, one of the "emergent concerns" of many municipalities, and I would expect will soon be the target of explicit litigation, is the advent of Li-Ion powered electric motorcycles (and bicycles) that can actually attain highway speeds. I was reading aboot this on some of the e-Bike forums when I was building my fatBike.
While this may not sound like a big deal, a huge number of the morons who buy them (because you can mail order them with no licensing or proof of insurance, etc required)
insist on riding them on the sidewalks and bicycle lanes, where they are a clear and obvious threat to personal safety of pedestrians/cyclists who actually belong there. I expect that
very soon this will again be a topic in the local and state legislatures, (along with morons riding Jazzy-type scooters into pedestrians) and these vehicles will be caught up in that charlie-foxtrot, and ultimately only be salable as Meter-Maid transports as I joked aboot earlier.
Which
may actually be part of Stronach's plan... get the funding, then have that market as a backup to ensure he can actually sell at least enough of them to stay out of jail.
I mean, if I were going to do this, that would be
my strategy.
EDIT:
The problem is that to not be a real and present danger to mainstream motorists, these things will need to be licensed, registered and insured like any other motor vehicle, as their primary intent is as motor vehicles which share roads with insured motorists. If that comes to pass, then municipalities will have to add a bureaucracy for a whole new class of vehicle, or may simply outlaw them as too much assache.
If they don't, then you're going to have them operating unlicensed, where they immediately become an increased insurance risk to automobiles, cyclists and pedestrians, and the ensuing outcry over something else raising insurance rates for the mainstream.mnem