Man, I really hit a nerve with my Audi Fox recollections. Who would have thought that a simple, square-rigged, German two-door would have elicited such emotion? There are more foxy tales to tell, but let’s stay in Syracuse for this week’s post, and the story of a student project that encompassed a significant portion of the 1975-76 academic year in that Central New York city.
The PTV (or Personal Transportation Vehicle) project envisioned a small flywheel-powered urban vehicle in which charging an electric motor/generator would power a flywheel mounted in a vacuum chamber. The spinning flywheel would then power the electric motor driving the vehicle’s front wheels. The rationale for this…unusual approach was outlined by our faculty advisor, Arthur J. Pulos, who was then the chairman of the university’s Department of Design. In a project introduction which appeared in a supporting brochure, he wrote:
“From an earlier preoccupation with exuberant form and extravagant power in personal transportation the average citizen has advanced to a state of mind which demands economy and serviceability in its means of personal transportation.”
As if that weren’t enough to convince readers that the country was on the verge of a transportation apocalypse, he continued:
“The automobile is now being tamed to take its logical place as simply another technological product which serves the needs of human beings. It is now likely that the more complex urban environment may outlaw personal transportation vehicles while suburban and rural communities insist that they be brought under rational control.”
Sidebar: It might not come as a surprise that Professor Pulos drove a safety-orange Volvo 145 station wagon with a brown vinyl interior and a roof rack. I will refrain from commenting on whether the zero-emissions zones now in effect for some European cities or the various congestion-pricing schemes now being tried to disincentivize inner-city vehicle use represent the first stirrings of this four-wheeled Armageddon…
My PTV concept shown above was proof of this quote attributed to GM’s Bill Mitchell: “Doing a small car is like tailoring a dwarf.”
In my defense, Syracuse University wasn’t the only hotbed of flywheel thinking in the mid-to-late 1970s. A few years later, it was revealed that Garrett AiResearch of Torrance, California had developed a prototype flywheel-powered EV with support from the U.S. Department of Energy. Featuring a pair of motor-generators, a CVT transmission, and a pack of lead-acid batteries, the car was claimed by its engineers to be “ready for a Detroit assembly line in about five years,” according to an article in the October 1980 issue of Popular Science magazine.
With a front end apparently inspired by the (cough) bumper crop of 1970s ESVs, styling was not the top priority for Garrett AiResearch’s flywheel car.
The Garrett prototype weighed 3,400 pounds, with its battery pack representing 1,1o0 pounds. It was capable of accelerating from 0-50 MPH in fifteen seconds with the driver and one passenger aboard. Its estimated driving range on the Urban Driving Schedule then used was a lofty 76 miles (the short range was somewhat of a surprise, since one of the concept car’s two motor-generators was chiefly tasked with keeping the flywheel spinning).
Another view of the Garrett vehicle, showing its battery pack occupying the central tunnel. (Source: Popular Science, October 1980)
As impractical as a flywheel-powered personal transportation vehicle might have been in the mid-1970s, it’s nice to know that we weren’t the only ones suggesting (again in Professor Pulos’ words) “an important shift in basic transportation philosophy among young designers – from an emotional to a rational attitude toward those products which must serve the man-made environment.”
The Garrett AiResearch flywheel car’s schematic. After the country’s two energy shocks, lots of alternative-drive ideas briefly surfaced. (Source: Popular Science, October 1980)
Speaking of a rational attitude toward transportation design, while at Syracuse I had learned that Volvo was in the initial planning stages for an auto assembly plant in the U.S., to be located in Chesapeake, Virginia. (Volvo had been assembling cars from CKD kits in Halifax, Nova Scotia, since the early 1960s, making them the first modern North American automotive “transplant.”) With my youthful naivete, I naturally assumed that since the Swedish automaker was going to be producing cars in the U.S., they must surely need some industrial designers. Sending a cover letter and a resume to their Chesapeake operations resulted in the response below:
As the Syracuse winter turned to spring, I tried not to attach too much importance to Mr. Hughes’ reply, but I couldn’t help thinking about the possibilities…
(Featured image from Mike Greenlar/Central Current)
I really like your design – it’s well proportioned and handsome – nice drawing style, too!
Small cars are of necessity, difficult to do, but you pulled it off with this one!
I can’t speak to the technology, but the shape is not far off the Smart (adjusted for modern aesthetics). Nice use of half-tone in the wheels.
My first ride was just like the professor’s – except for the safety orange, roof rack and my brown interior was fabric.
Nice work! The details and highlights on the rims, remind me of the work of famed automotive illustrator Mark Stehrenberger. Loved his work, growing up in the ’70’s and ’80’s.
Ah yes, the flywheel battery. That was considered as perhaps the best solution to the extremely low energy density of lead-acid batteries. But it just never flew.
Its estimated driving range on the Urban Driving Schedule then used was a lofty 76 miles (the short range was somewhat of a surprise, since one of the concept car’s two motor-generators was chiefly tasked with keeping the flywheel spinning).
I’m a bit confused by this line. It’s not quite clear to me from the diagram how these motor/generators interfaced with the flywheel, but given the small and low energy-dense lead acid batteries aboard, there’s no way the motors could have kept the flywheel going for any longer than if they had just been driving the wheels. Typically in a flywheel drivetrain, the flywheel is spun up to extremely high speeds when the vehicle is plugged in, like charging a battery.
In any case, 76 miles was quite ambitious in this era, and would have been generally adequate for city driving/commuting use.
It is designed to be spun up before unplugging.
As far as how it gets the flywheel power to the road, it is exactly like a Ford/Toyota FWD hybrid. With the flywheel spinning MG-A is switched from open circuit mode to generator mode which harvests a portion of the flywheel’s torque. MG-A’s electrical output is sent to MG-B. The action of harvesting some torque via MG-A also forces the rest of the flywheel’s torque to the wheels. Just like in a Prius varying the amount of energy harvested by MG-A creates a CVT. Then when decelerating MG-B is operated in generator mode but instead of putting that power back into the battery it is used to energize MG-A to complete the link to the flywheel and spin it back up.
More details can be found in the article where the diagram came from.
https://books.google.com/books?id=_VEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA8&source=gbs_toc&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false
The PTV sure looks a lot like the Sebring-Vanguard CitiCar EV from the mid-to-late seventies, which was essentially a Club Car electric golf cart with an enclosed body and sliding window doors. Its limited success was due entirely to the OPEC 1973 Oil Crisis.
I was actually rather astonished to discover that 4,444 CitiCars (or subsequent variants) were sold during its short ~5 year life, the most of any electric vehicle since 1945 until 2011 when Tesla began full-scale production.
Flywheels and compressed air are the two favorite power plants of the tinkerer. I first saw compressed air in an early 90s project built by a college in Neosho Missouri. Flywheels have found some niches in large urban vehicles like busses and garbage trucks, and also backup power supplies as an alternative to battery banks.
Your PTV looks very much a mid 70s concept in styling but forward looking in concept. Stick an engine in the back and you would have built a Smart Car 25 years ahead of its time.
The inspiration for the car in the “leader pic drawing”, could be “Wilma Flintstone’s’, shown only once, compact car.
Perhaps I’m missing something but is the kinetic energy from braking also being captured to help spin the flywheel, or just Motor Generator A?
The power plant might have been a dead end, but I like the overall design and concept. I am a big fan of small cars for urban environments and would love it if kei cars were readily available here in Canada. The sliding doors are a great idea. We have a Fiat 500, which has fairly long doors. If I am not careful and park too close to the wall, I can’t open the door wide enough to get my feet in the car easily. Peugeot made the 1007 with sliding doors, but its went toward the back of the car, not the front. I have no idea how well it worked, but the idea seems to have faded away. The steering wheel with a single spoke looks as if it were taken from a Citroen.
It is possible that Prof Pulos had an engineer’s outlook upon matters that are not engineering, and thus the rationality of his propositions was at quite some variance to the reality of the average car consumer, a group of whom, it has been observed in his country, no person ever went broke by a taste underestimation. And for sure, they seek exuberant form and extravagant power to this day (and I may be one of them).
I do like the little jigger you came up with. As others have mentioned, it could pass for a ’70’s Smart. (We shall draw a discreet veil over the somewhat out-of-date observation of the 6’4″ Bill Mitchell, noting only that with great height can sometimes come great dismissiveness of those not in that club: and besides, he was wrong, for, as the designer of things like the original Renault R5 showed, small can be wonderful).
My favorite part is your professor’s statement that localities must “insist that they [cars] be brought under rational control.” This thinking predominates today, but the key question that is not often answered is WHOSE control?
You did a nice job on a difficult assignment.
Given the inexorable and unchecked growth of vehicle size and weight and of trucks as personal transport since the 1980s, it would seem that if “this thinking predominates today” it is highly ineffective.
Vision of the future which will unfortunately never apply in NA . Return to less welcoming cars and in which we mind being stuck in traffic jams, this is the only way still possible to multiply their number, i.e. make them very basic and very small . But
to see all these pick-ups and SUVs today and that the manufacturers only find their monetary salvation in their distribution we didn’t set out to go in this direction. Meanwhile Japan keeps its wonderful kei-cars for its market which requires them to do so.