Quote:
Originally Posted by jadnashuanh
If you want any reasonable operational characteristics, you'd have to engineer, or in the case of the majority of the EV's out there, reengineer the chassis for proper operation to accommodate the weight and its position.
A clean sheet of paper means, you do not have to use any parts or designs from the corporate parts bin...Nissan's design blends in, and after looking at one, the rear is not a friendly place for things like boxes unless they are small enough to fit into that deep cavity. The shape of the rear on the i3 is pretty much conventionally shaped, and square or larger flat items can be fit in there. The Nissan design copies that of many of their mini-vans with the same thinking by likely the same engineers. Now, the shape of the i3 can be controversial, but it certainly has little in the vehicle that draws on existing stock - it was designed and provisioned to bolster the green idea behind the vehicle and augment its function. To some, that will turn them off, to others, wondering why they did things that way they did for so long, the change is a breath of fresh air.
Nissan's clean sheet started with don't make it look that much different than the rest of the cars, be able to make it on the same equipment, rather than how can we make this as good as we can based on the concepts we find important (passenger safety, vehicle size, range, reliability, etc.).
Now, how well the i3 will fare compared to others is still up in the air...it needs some user testing to see if they concur it was worth it and if they agree to the design choices that were made, but it's basis is certainly arrived at differently, like sourcing the fiber at green energy facilities (primarily hydro power), and making parts of the car out of the cuttings of the CFRP pieces removed on some of the bigger pieces where their strength isn't critical, and the renewable materials, and the ability to recycle.
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Ah, so now even though the Leaf is a clean sheet design it's still not like the i3 clean-sheet design because it "copies" other Nissan (minivan) models and was perhaps designed by the same engineers (as the regular Nissan cars I suppose?), so that somehow makes the i3 THAT much different than a Leaf with respect to its clean-sheet design. Oh, and the i3 uses different production tooling (because of the CFRP - duh) than other BMW models, so that means its a totally different EV and worthy of a "class-of-one" status. And steel and aluminum are far more cost effective recyclable materials than is carbon fiber, so whatever "green" may be gained in production is most likely lost in EOL recycling. And EV batteries just kill the whole be-kind-to-the-planet argument anyway.
So the take away is:
EVs are green and save the planet.
i3's are REALLY green and REALLY save the planet, so they are a class of one and the most anticipated vehicle of all time.
Got it!