Canon EOS 5D
ƒ/5
24 mm
1/50
800
Carbon fiber electric car
– Batmobile
— Aluminum space frame
An interim show room at the back of an R&D hangar at Tesla HQ.
8 responses to “Form and Function”
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I looked into these cars a couple of moths ago. Very impressive. Car makers need to pay close attention to this car!
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Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Future Living, and we’d love to have your photo added to the group.
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Having owned 2 of them, trust me – the space frame is by far the most reliable part of the Elise …
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I must confess the first one (Mark 1) was actually a joy, then I broke it by buying the Lotus approved, Lotus-installed bigger engine upgrade. The problem with that was the bigger engine didn’t actually fit into the cavity with more than 1/2 mm clearance, much erosion ensued due to manufacturing tolerance and vibration.
The second was an early Mark 2, and everything was wrong with it. They marketed a car with leather glued to the dash for aesthetics, but had clearly not done any materials science work on determining the correct adhesive for bonding hide to aluminium. It had the leather stripped and replaced twice before I gave up and just lived with the huge anthrax-like bubbles all over the surface.
It’s a British car – you would expect the designers would understand that it rains over here. But no – it leaked so badly into the boot that the engine management computer flooded and it just died. 3 days later after it had dried out it was fine, but of course all that damp penetration made the anthrax leather effect even worse.
It’s a sports car – you really do want to drive it fast and hard. Yet driving on a motorway, no cornering, at a steady 80, one of the headlights leapt out of its socket and was left dangling out of the car, hammering against the body and scraping away the paint, but mainly scaring the life out of me because it sounded like we’d first been shot and then had an angry goat abrading the paintwork with its horns.
Now – these experiences were during a particular low in the company’s life, they were hugely over-stretched making all the Vauxhall / Opel Vx220s so Elise Quality Assurance went to pot, and it was a new model introduction, but as the driver when bits of your car fall off at speed your faith in the car is significantly reduced. I had it around 5 months and managed to put just 120 miles on the clock due to it being in the shop most of the time, sold it back to the dealer.
But never any problems with the bonded space frame – they are clearly way better at gluing aluminium to aluminium than aluminium to leather.
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