August 22nd, 2005
Doomed to Fail: The Ecomobile Car/Motorcycle Hybrid
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
If you thought the Segway bombed, wait till you read about the “Ecomobilee.” Part motorcycle and part car, this doomed vehicle sports an $80,000 price tag, almost killed the developer in a highways test, and to put the icing on the cake, was described as a Lay-Z-boy on wheels (aka “marketing kiss of death.”)
“It has motorcycle-type handlebars and can be operated by anyone with a motorcycle license. Since it has seat belts, the driver isn’t required to wear a helmet. The driver can’t stick his feet out for balance, so the Eco has retractable wheels that can be operated manually when slowing and stopping. (The wheels also act as safety bars to prevent damage in the event of a fall.)
“It comes with heat, air-conditioning and a radio, stereo, GPS system. And its 1200-cc BMW motorcycle engine gets 50 miles per gallon of gasoline. However, with a price tag of nearly $80,000 — which will induce not just sticker shock but sticker seizures in most people — the Eco would appear to be a tough sell as a mass-market vehicle.
“Hefty price tag or no, Whitfield, a genial man who test-drove and worked on Harley-Davidson motorcycles for years, is a true believer. “The fact they can build this for $80,000 — that is one bargain-basement price,” he says. “Every single component is made by hand.” Plus, the Eco is designed to the personal specifications of each buyer.
“Even though enclosed motorcycles have been around, in some form, since the 1920s, Whitfield says he feels the Eco, developed by a former Swiss airline pilot and aircraft manufacturing entrepreneur named Arnold Wagner, is the one that combines the best elements of a true car-motorcycle hybrid. “I’m a passionate motorcyclist, and this is like skipping into space,” he says. “It’s like taking 1936 technology and jumping into the future.”
“Whitfield’s eyes light up when he tells you about the time Wagner discovered — the hard way — just how safe and durable the Eco was. At a big German motorcycle show last year, Wagner was driving the Eco for a piece being filmed by the Speed Channel. Attempting a U-turn on the rain-slicked Autobahn, the notorious expressway where cars routinely travel at the speed of sound, Wagner’s Eco was creamed by a car. “Knocked (the Eco) skyward and down-range,” says Whitfield. “He was hurt, got a few cuts and bruises. But he made a meeting an hour after the accident.” If the car had hit a regular motorcycle, adds Whitfield, “you’d be on resuscitation, that’s for sure.” Source: Detroit News Also see Steve Johnson’s Blog Biker News Online
Alice Says: I love scooters and odd vehicles, but this is just nuts.
rog says:
$80k for a motorcycle? Wouldn’t a Boxer be as much fun and you could put the leftover $30k towards car insurance?
August 23rd, 2005 at 7:18 am
Lockergnome's Tech News Watch says:
Doomed to Fail: The Ecomobile Car/Motorcycle Hybrid
If you thought the Segway bombed, wait till you read about the “Ecomobile.” Part motorcycle and part car, this doomed vehicle sports an $80,000 price tag, almost killed the developer in a highways test, and to put the icing on the cake, was described…
August 23rd, 2005 at 5:19 pm
Julian Bond says:
Doomed to fail? ~100 units is hardly a failure. As it happens I run a website and mailing lists for machines like this.
http://www.bikeweb.com
http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/feet_forward/
Check it out.
Here’s some more info.
For the last 30 years I’ve been involved with a group of people who follow a particularly left field branch of motorcycling. The basic belief is that motorcycling can still be fun without being quite so damn cold, wet and uncomfortable and that it can be made rather safer. We call the design “Feet Forwards” or “FF”. I’ll try and put it into terms that both motorcyclists and non-motorcyclists can understand. Start with the classic chopper riding position. Feet
forwards, leaning slightly back with arms outstretched but relaxed as if you’re sitting in a sports car. Now add a car seat back so that you’re comfortable and don’t get lower back pain. Then add an aerodynamic fairing and tail to keep the wind and rain off you. There’s some echoes here with the recumbent bicycle movement. There are also echoes in Kaneda’s bike from the Anime, Akira.
Now because many of the followers are engineers and also fast road riders, use the best suspension you can and investigate alternatives to telescopic forks, particularly hub centre steering. Add competition level brakes. So although we started with the chopper riding position, form follows function in a way that is totally at odds with the Chopper aesthetic where form is everything and unction
above 55mph almost completely irrelevant. In fact FFers are pretty scathing of what they term “Motorised Bicycles”. Even though 100 years of R&D has produced some amazingly effective machines, they’ve evolved to be almost completely useless off the race track or custom show circuit.
For a long time if you wanted to ride an FF you had to build one from the ground up. There have been a few attempts to build production machines and the Quasar (30 units), Voyager (7 units), Ecomobile (100 units) and Dan Gurney’s Alligator are good examples. But these are small volumes and most machines so far are one-offs,
either completely custom or built by modifying existing motorcycles.
In the last 10 years the Japanese have started building large scooters such as the Honda Helix, Suzuki Burgman 400 and 650 and the Honda Silver Wing. Here at last are machines that are close enough to the end goal that it’s possible to start thinking in terms of kits that can be used to produce an FF by somebody who can do a bit of DIY but can’t weld.
In the last few weeks, the community has thrown up a prototype that is now really close to being a basis for such a kit. It’s built on the Yamaha T-Max which is not available in the USA but is a 500cc twin with a CVT fully automatic gearbox and a top speed of around 110mph. We know it as the ComfortMax. It has a Volvo car seat back, aerodynamic GRP top box and an extended frame for forward foot boards. The seat back and top box are on a frame that allows these to be moved back and up to expose a passenger seat. What’s particularly interesting about this for Make magazine is that the designs for the metalwork have all been published on the web
as PDFs. This whole project begins to look like Open Source hardware design.
Resources.
ComfortMax builder’s website
http://www.angib.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/tmax/tmax00.htm
Build process description
http://www.angib.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/tmax/tmax01.htm
ComfortMax photos
http://www.bikeweb.com/image/tid/37
Comfortmax PDFs and description
http://www.bikeweb.com/node/856
Bikeweb
http://www.bikeweb.com A Drupal based community forum and image gallery for the
FF community.
Image gallery
http://www.bikeweb.com/image
FF Mailing list
http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/feet_forward/
428 members, 30,000 messages
QuasarWorld
http://www.quasarworld.plus.com/index.htm
Voyagers
http://www.hightech.clara.net/
Ecomobile
http://www.peraves.ch/ndexe.htm
Dan Gurney’s Alligator
http://www.allamericanracers.com/alligator/alligator_home.html
August 25th, 2005 at 6:22 am
Jimmy says:
Why not just buy a convertible?
May 2nd, 2006 at 5:47 am
Steve in Seattle says:
I always love reading the words of the uninformed. Alice, you clearly didn’t do your homework, and you either lied or ignored the details of an Eco accident in your first paragraph! The truth works. Use it!
Arnold DID NOT almost die in an accident during a Speed Channel highway filming event. He did in fact sustained some ugly cuts and bruises after being T-boned by a car, but made a meeting he had scheduled within a few hours of the accident. That’s the truth - and what you should have printed.
Furthermore, not only is the Ecomobile a complete success WITH THE PEOPLE THAT BUY ONE, but it’s also one of the best overall engineered systems for the highway I’ve ever had the privilege of riding in.
Criticize the Eco all you want and don’t buy one. This will guarantee your dissatisfaction with it since you will remain uninformed! But tell the truth. It works for the rest of us.
May 16th, 2006 at 7:31 am
Steve in Seattle says:
I always love reading the words of the uninformed. Alice, you clearly didn’t do your homework, and you either lied or ignored the details of an Eco accident in your first paragraph! The truth works. Use it!
Arnold DID NOT almost die in an accident during a Speed Channel highway filming event. He did in fact sustained some ugly cuts and bruises after being T-boned by a car, but made a meeting he had scheduled within a few hours of the accident. That’s the truth - and what you should have printed.
Furthermore, not only is the Ecomobile a complete success WITH THE PEOPLE THAT BUY ONE, but it’s also one of the best overall engineered systems for the highway I’ve ever had the privilege of riding in.
Criticize the Eco all you want and don’t buy one. This will guarantee your dissatisfaction with it since you will remain uninformed! But tell the truth. It works for the rest of us.
May 16th, 2006 at 7:31 am
phentermine says:
phentermine
declinations!quaff incentives!terrorize roundness Macaulay Kitakyushu.phentermine http://phenterminehclhere.blogspot.com/
May 18th, 2006 at 10:50 am