Zoomi Life

Kim Gu-Han of Universitat Dulsburg-Essen, Germany, wants to build a solar-powered car that can not only recharge itself while sitting, but also run your house with its extra juice. The car concept, which he calls the Helios, is a four-wheeled, off-road vehicle that looks basically like a dune buggy. It’s open cockpit design, prominent roll bar, and four large wheels and tires make it look like it has “off road” written all over it.

Then it unfurls. When parked, the four wheels turn counter to one another (which, if spinning, would let the car turn in place) for stability and the wings unfurl up and outward. Creating a half-moon shape, the wings house the massive solar array that the car uses to recharge itself. It has the option of being plugged into your home or RV to power that too.

The idea is a good one except for one glaring problem. One that someone like me, who lives in Wyoming, can appreciate: wind. A good wind would pick this thing up and send it flying across the landscape on its solar wings like a grocery sack.

Otherwise, this is a great concept and I expect that something similar could become the kind of thing you’ll see on the market some day. Sort of a reverse of Honda’s Hydrogen Home concept.

Who Killed the Electric Car? General Motors, of course, that’s what the movie said. Right? Well, those GM EV1s are now quite the collector’s item. Most of them were returned to General Motors and destroyed, since they were leased (not owned) and at the end of the lease, they were still GM’s property. Because the car was a financial failure and because the oil crunch of the 80s was very much over, there wasn’t much call to continue making an electric car. So GM discontinued the series.

Fast-forward thirteen years or so to today and you see a model that’s been garaged for several years posted on a website for sale. This one, apparently, is one of those rare models that was not leased, but purchased, and as such, is a collector’s item. GM, of course, has contacted the person owning it several times to retrieve the car, one of the few left in existence, but the person wasn’t interested.

Instead, they offered it for sale to collector’s only, to be screened and approved before sale. The initial starting price was $75k, but that quickly started going up with the final purchaser paying a whopping $465,000! Those were Canadian dollars, though, so that translates to like a billion American I think. I’m not up on current exchange rates.

Being one of the first electric cars made as the first mass-produced, consumer electric vehicle made by a major auto company, it’s not surprising that these rare items go for so much money. The only other existing models known to exist are in museums and in the hands of one or two collectors. Sure, it’d be cool to have one, but I think I’ll hang onto my half a million and spend it on something else. Like maybe ethanol futures: the USG seems to think those are worthwhile…

This Post via Treehugger