The world is facing pressing challenges including population growth, water and food shortages, global warming, and resource depletion. To address these challenges, we must fundamentally rethink the problem of personal transportation. On alternative is to develop highly efficient shared transportation systems as a replacement for private car ownership. In this system, drivers would choose vehicles from a shared pool, and pay per use. The cost structure would encourage drivers to select the most efficient vehicle for each trip. In most cases, this might be a single-seat, short-range urban vehicle.

The basic requirements of a personal transportation system are to transport people and their cargo from one place to another conveniently, comfortably, safely, efficiently and inexpensively. We can further refine the requirements for a single-seat urban vehicle in terms of seating capacity, performance, range and required payload. This paper outlines the target specifications of such a vehicle.

According to prevailing business-as-usual thinking, vehicles of this type are seen as impractical and little effort is being made to design them. Western’s Sunstang solar car team has decided to design and build a practical battery electric single-seat 3-wheel vehicle. It has a planned weight of about 250 kg, with a top speed of 135 km/h and a range of 200 km. Surprisingly, there are no established design competitions for vehicles of this type. This paper suggests that this might be a good direction for other solar car teams, and proposes a new competition to promote this idea.

read more