Mega City road test

“I feel like Noddy and Big Ears,” wailed my passenger, hiding behind her handbag as we drove through the Friday night traffic in London’s trendy Clerkenwell. Evidently the Nice Car Company’s Mega City electric vehicle - our carriage for the evening - is not to everyone’s taste. It might look less cartoonish than its main rival, the G-Wiz electric runabout that has become a relatively common sight inside London’s C- zone, but it still exists on the geeky side of gawky. Tall, short, narrow, and adorned with small wheels and big panel gaps, the French-built Mega City will never be mistaken for a German executive sports hatch.

We’ve borrowed the Mega City for the night to assess how practical this green mode of transport might be. It runs entirely on battery power, recharged from the mains. Buy your electricity from a renewable supplier and the Mega City offers CO2-free transport; the company will also offset the emissions released while making the thing by planting trees and hugging them for you.

The Mega City boasts a welded aluminium frame – crash tested to conventional car standards - clad in ABS plastic. A dozen lead-acid batteries beneath the seats power what seems to be a washing machine motor under the stubby bonnet, surprisingly driving the front wheels rather than the rear. This highlights that the electric Mega City is not purpose built but based on an existing microcar aimed at European teenagers. Visit Paris or Rome and you’ll see thousands of the Mega City’s cramped cousins zipping about the boulevards on diesel or petrol power.

According to the manufacturer our plastic chariot will travel about 50 miles on a single charge, at speeds of up to 40mph. A full charge takes eight hours.

Most journeys will be undertaken with the accelerator buried in the carpet, and the dash-mounted speed selector switched to high - a low option helps to preserve power when stuck in traffic jams, apparently.

Even in high-speed mode, the Mega City feels, well, slow. It gets away from a standstill smartly enough, but acceleration soon gives up and goes to bed. It takes a quarter of a minute to hit just 30mph, and the less-than-infinite stretches between traffic lights meant we never found out what flat-out might be. Like most other cars on the road the speedometer is about 10 percent optimistic - an indicated 35mph equated to about 32mph according to our satnav unit. Surprisingly, however, this turned out to be entirely adequate for Central London motoring.

Inside the Mega City looks and feels less like a product of toy-town. The seats are comfortable and the dashboard is neat and modern in shape, made from a squishy plastic that feels more upmarket than it looks. The silver-painted centre console proved a little flimsy - unplugging the satnav almost unplugged the entire fascia panel - but it does at least contain easy-to-use ventilation controls and a conventional slot-in stereo. The non-adjustable steering wheel feels fine - although there's no airbag.

The handbrake and gear selector live between the front seats. Push the gear lever down and forward to engage drive, pull back into neutral and – surprisingly without the need to push down again - you can slot straight back into reverse. Yanking the lever back in a misguided attempt to engage a non-existent second gear is therefore probably not a good idea at speed. Or indeed when going forwards in the Mega City. When engaged at rest, reversing sensors squawk to confirm that you’re about to head backwards.

You may have read that electric cars are quiet, but the Mega City isn’t - its motor makes only a subdued milkfloat whine, but the rest of the car makes enough clamour to raise noise levels to the norm for a small car. Over the rubbish road surfaces typical in cities, the car has all the refinement of a badly loaded spin dryer.

Actually it is quiet – from the outside. More than the usual number of Friday night revellers seemed content to stroll out in front of the Mega City, forcing us to toot its feeble, Noddy-and-Big-Ears horn.

Using the brakes, meanwhile, is a bit like going to the gym. They are completely without the servo assistance most drivers take for granted, demanding a prodigious prod before doing anything about slowing forward progress. Once braced against the seat back, however, it proved perfectly possible to bring the little beggar to a prompt halt.

Steering is likewise down to unaided human muscle and sinew. In common with other non-assisted hatchbacks, the wheel seems to have about 40 turns lock to lock. The turning circle isn’t bad per se - but getting to full lock when parking requires a committed bit of bicep. Fortunately the Mega City is very short and so will fit in normal-size gaps without too much to and fro.

Overall we liked the Mega City a lot; it's fun to drive in a way that almost all modern hatchbacks are not. But we can’t help feeling that the car deserves a beefier powerpack. Lithium-ion power is too costly at present - particularly for a car that already looks very pricey compared to conventional petrol alternatives – but better batteries might mean greater range and, arguably more important for a city car, better acceleration.

Electric power assistance for the brakes wouldn’t be a bad idea either, if the Mega City is to capitalise on the failings of its rivals and persuade prospective buyers that there is a safe route to fully electric motoring.

Small and perfectly formed

In today's edition of the Top Gear TV programme, Jeremy Clarkson folded himself up and slid behind the wheel of a Peel P50, a microcar built on the Isle of Man in the 1960s.

During the programme Clarkson complained of the irony that the dimunitive Peel had to pay the dreaded congestion charge, whereas the much larger Lexus RX400h 4x4 being used as a mobile filming platform would slip inside the C-zone without incurring an £8 levy, due to its hybrid powerplant.

Sadly for Mr Clarkson, he was rather wrong.

At 134cm long and 99cm wide, and boasting just three wheels, the Peel does in fact qualify for exemption from Ken's road tax. As Auto IT has pondered before, you don’t have to pay the C-charge if your car is a tricyle less than a metre wide and less than two metres long.

As we've also mentioned before, it is tough to find many cars that fit within this exemption, leaving us with a slightly bizarre conclusion. When the rule-makers at London City Hall were drafting this three-wheeler exemption - much too narrow for a Reliant Robin, BMW Isetta, Heinkel Trojan, Piaggio Ape or even a Peel Trident, and too short for a Messerschmitt KR200 - they must have had the Peel in mind. Nothing else fits. Well, apart from the slightly longer, slightly narrower, Brütsch Mopetta of 1958. But that's less like a car and more like a patent leather shoe fitted with a 50cc motor.

It's an odd one. Who would draft a law with an exemption that applies to pretty much nothing on the road except a couple of obscure oddities built half a century ago?

But then anything's possible from London's Mayor - and his newts.

Nissan's Pivo 2 drives sideways to the future

Imagine an egg balanced on a roller-skate and you're not far off picturing Nissan's Pivo 2 concept car, set to go on display at the Tokyo Motor Show later this month. It's a development of the first Pivo concept, shown in 2005, and both cars share a party-piece. They can turn around without moving a wheel.

Both Pivo 1 and 2 exploit full drive-by-wire technology to divorce the mechanicals from the controls, removing the need for anything other than an electronic link between the steering wheel and the driven wheels. The result is that the entire passenger compartment can swivel, like a tank's turret, through 360 degrees - while the wheels, motors and other grubby bits stay motionless beneath it. And this of course means that the Pivo drivers don't need to learn how to reverse – going backwards is a case of spinning the cabin and going forwards.

Pivo 2 makes it even more simple to park by featuring individually swivelling wheels with hub motors, allowing the car to make like a crab and scurry sideways into difficult parking places - a trick shown off by Toyota's Fine-X car at the 2005 Tokyo show.

The interior shows just as much innovation.

Driver and two passengers enter via a single large door set into the front of the passenger pod, which like a 1960s bubble car swings opens complete with the steering wheel and instruments. And the pedals too. In a nod to the iPod generation, the brake pedal and accelerator carry stop and fast-forward emblems more normally seen on a stereo or video recorder. We're not sure if the Pivo 2 includes a remote control...

Beyond the labelling silliness is a cute Robotic Agent, which sits in the dashboard like R2-D2 nestled in the back of an X-Wing. Rather than unintelligible bleeps and whistles, this robot offers cogent advice to the driver.

“While drivers are being happy, the accident rate goes drastically lower,” explained Masato Inoue, Nissan's chief designer. “The Pivo 2's Robotic Agent is here for cheering up the driver, and guiding the driver, and sometimes sensing the sleepiness of the driver and warning ... there are so many intimate human communications between driver and the Robotic Agent [that] can be done.”

There's a lot to like here. Will it reach production? Alas – for all those who struggle to park while peering over a shoulder – probably not soon in this format.

Aptera - is the car as good as the web site is bad?

Aptera Motors may have developed one of the world's most efficient road vehicles, but it's also responsible for one of the world's very worst web sites. Visit the firm's site to learn about any of the car's many revolutionary features and you will have to wade through pages of treacly high-bandwidth imagery in the hope of spotting an elusive “Aptericon” that will lead to a tantalising brief nugget of not-very-enlightening data. That is if the site doesn't crash your browser, or indeed crash your brain with its inanity.

The site was developed by Southern California's Saxony Web Design, a firm staffed by some people who really ought to return their fee, step away from their iMacs, and punch themselves hard in the face.

Still, this ultra-aerodynamic car sounds promising, and has progressed at least to the prototype stage. And the company is currently accepting modest deposits from US-based customers, aiming for delivery in late 2008. It is promising two variants: a battery electric vehicle with a range of 120 miles for $26,900; and a plug-in diesel-electric hybrid, where the motor runs a generator rather than driving the wheels, at $29,900.

Both variants promise to come well specified with creature comforts for the two occupants.

Like the Twike, the Aptera looks a bit like an aircraft that has carelessly lost its wings. Unlike the Twike, it doesn't ask you to top up the batteries by pedalling.

IEEE on automotive batteries

Anyone interested in knowing more about the batteries that will power the coming generation of all-electric and hybrid vehicles should zip over to IEEE Spectrum: a publication from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In Lithium Batteries Take to the Road, journalist John Voelcker gives a great account of where batteries are today and where they are heading in the near future. A little knowledge of chemistry will aid the reader, but even those keen to skip descriptions of “lithiation and delithiation” will find the rest of the text informative and accessible.

The article focuses on cutting-edge battery supplier A123Systems, which has been signed up as a supplier by General Motors, but also mentions rival Altair Nano and electric sports car pioneer Tesla Motors.

Three paragraphs particularly leapt out...

On safety:

If a lithium-ion powered minivan carrying a family were to burst into flames, the resulting fiasco could set the industry back a decade. And it’s no use arguing that something like 250,000 gasoline-powered cars catch fire every year in the United States alone. New products are held to a higher standard.

On cell degradation over time, irrespective of charge/discharge cycles:

Cobalt-based cells for portable electronics lose as much as 20 percent of their capacity each year, starting from the day of manufacture. That may be tolerable for cellphones and other portables that are replaced every three or four years, but not for a car, which is expected to last 15 years.

And finally on cost. No wonder the Tesla is expensive:

At the moment, 12V lead-acid batteries cost US $40 to $50 per kWh. Nickel-cadmium and nickel-metal-hydride cells for portable electronics cost $350/kWh; lithium-ion cells for the same market go for $450/kWh. Move to hybrid vehicles, though, and the price for longer-lived, more rugged nickel-metal-hydride batteries shoots up to about $700/kWh.