4 wheels drive urban electric car, partially printable with large 3D rep rap printers

Last crawled date: 1 year, 10 months ago

Most 2 seats electric vehicles are not only ugly but also have impossible small wheels, that limits them to perfect asphalt areas, if there is some cracks that car goes cuckoo and the batteries have to suffer from the repeated shock.

This is a 4X4 vehicle that has four 3 phase engines one in each rim area, cooled by water, totally sealed, that can run in asphalt mode with a low gravity center, or by pressing a button can be lifted in off-road mode gaining ground clearance of some 1 foot more.

All 4 wheels are powered, but also all 4 wheels are servo steering, in 3 different modes.

Max speed is 80 Km/h to qualify it for light electric vehicles drivable with A1 license since age 16, at this speed it steers as any car, front wheels only.

In "maneuver" mode both front and read wheels are steering in contrary mode, thus if front steers right, back steers left, giving the car the possibility to turn around almost like a Tank that blocked one of the belts, in this mode the speed is limited at 40 Kmh for safety, very helpful to enter garages that are behind corner and little space to turn around.

In the "parking mode" the front and rear wheels steer the same direction up to 75 degrees from straight, thus the entire vehicle will move lateral instead of turning, this way can be easily parked by the sidewalks without 10 turning back and forth maneuvers.

I designed this car to occupy the minimum outer space while inside there is the maximum usable room, thus it can take enough forklift batteries to last for 5 hours drive at 80 Km/h speed, that is some 400 Km distance. Using dry batteries the weight might decrease, but you also are losing some range. All batteries supply a 3 phase 380 Volt inverter, 20 Kwh max output, that supplies the 4 engines of 5 Hp each.
The driver in the car is 2 meters tall, thus the car is designed to accommodate NBA basketball players with no problems, but dwarfs can also drive it.

The huge wheels (18 inch rim diameter) I took them from agricultural trailers, that are large enough, tall enough, and cheap enough for the job.

Practically this car can go anywhere a Jeep would go.

It has a triple brakes system, one is electric parking brakes as any car, one is disk brakes that are the last resource in stopping the car, and the most used brake is the induction electric brakes where when touching the pedal all 4 engines turn into generators thus recharging the batteries while stopping the car. This works excellent as ABS too.

Little luggage room, given the big volume of the batteries, no spare tire, no room for it. But with a jack, and a re-inflating kit, any hole can be topped in 2 minutes, than inflate the wheel and go your way without changing the wheels.

The drawings are but a sketch, I spent some 200 hours to give birth to it, for a final job I think another 2 to 3000 hours are needed. Prototyping is easy, most components inside are on the shelf, the chassis is easily build-able with profiled bars on the shelf, suspensions are motorcycle like, and the entire body can be printed with a large 3D REP RAP printer in ABS or sun resisting plastic, one part at the time.

I want this car on the roads, anybody interested to team with me?

In this rar archive there is the Inventor 2012 components (.ipt) and assemble (.iam), plus some other formats like .IGS, .SAT, DWG, DWF, 3D Max, 3 D Tools, 3 D PDF .WRL, Catia V5 easily open-able with various programs.

Participating in the debutantes contest section.