Driving the Spira 3-wheel prototype
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
The Spira three-wheeler is a unique vehicle. It’s one of the finalists in the Automotive X-Prize but its frugal fuel consumption and low emissions are only part of the vision of making it a car for the people. The Spira starts with a scooter, uses everything but the frame, and all those parts bolt into a foam composite tub to create a lightweight (137 kg) three-wheeled two-seater with immeasurably greater crash protection for the occupants. Gizmag visited the Spira’s home in Thailand to drive what inventor Lon Ballard hopes will become a machine for the people, and came away mightily impressed.
Lon Ballard has always had an eye for designing safer vehicles and has been sketching safer two and three wheeler designs since his first year studying engineering at the University of Illinois a few decades back.
His original concept was to use a series of external airbags to protect the rider and pillion in the event of an accident and his eureka moment came when he was sculpting a one tenth scale model of a three wheeler he’d designed to incorporate external airbags supported by an aluminium exoskeleton. Lon was shaping the foam model, stood back to get some perspective on his handiwork, and while looking at the model, he realised that it already had airbags – millions of them – and he subsequently embarked on quite a different design journey using foam to build a protective capsule – a poor man’s equivalent to the carbon fibre driver protection tub used in Formula One race cars.
Once he moved to Thailand and witnessed the road carnage across Asia, he began work on his rider protection ideas once more and the vehicle I drove was the first prototype.
The laminated composite “tub” is both the chassis and the bodywork. Start with a scooter, throw away the frame and everything else is then bolted onto the tub, transforming a scooter into a tandem two seater which retains all the good aspects – principally low fuel consumption and ownership costs – maybe quadruples the carrying capacity, and loses the worst aspects of the scooter, being poor rider protection.
Despite its looks, it is incredibly light – at just 302lb (137kg), its performance is very lively for a vehicle with an engine of just 125cc. It has better performance than a small car in the form I drove it and and one of the prototypes is currently being fitted with a Kawasaki Ninja fuel-injected 250 motor as work begins in earnest for the X-prize competition – very few of the X-prize contenders will have performance to match the Spira because of that low weight and hence high power-to-weight ratio.
To fully understand the necessity of a vehicle such as the Spira, it’s important to understand the rate at which people are being killed on the roads in Asia.
If you’ve never driven a car, or perhaps more importantly, ridden a motorcycle in Asia, I can vouch that it is indeed an entirely different ecosystem.
More than 90% of Asia’s road users are motorcycle or scooter mounted, a far cry from not that long ago when bicycles were the mainstream road vehicle, but the big change in recent decades on Asian roads has been the proliferation of the motorcycle and the subsequent rise of the automobile.
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