Putting Your Car On A Diet

Cars today are complex machines with thousands of parts, including many mandated by requirements for safety, economy, and environment. Rough roads, potholes, and high speeds dictate heavy tires and suspension systems. Safety dictates heavy bumpers, crumple zones, airbags, heavy frames and other structural elements, airbags, safety belts, and a host of other considerations. Engines are marketed for muscular acceleration rather than what is needed for reasonable driving. All these add to weight and inefficiency. So let’s see what we can do to reduce this overhead and optimize for autonomous travel.

Autonomous Vehicles don’t need to have conventional controls, such as steering wheels, pedals, shifting mechanisms, or even the array of instruments, such as speedometers. This doesn’t eliminate much weight but it removes considerable cost, and improves safety. There is currently a debate on whether driverless cars need to retain steering wheel controls – as you will see, we are looking at a future where this debate is irrelevant.

In enclosed A-Ways, Autonomous Vehicles don’t crash into each other, pedestrians, debris, animals, or human-driven vehicles, so we can remove the safety equipment Again this doesn’t save much weight, but saves significant costs.

No crashes means that we can remove bumpers, crumple zones, reduce the heavy frame, and other structural elements. This saves a lot of weight, reduces the size of the vehicle substantially, and further reduces the cost.

The passenger seats are designed for crashes, so we can simplify those, Saving some weight and costs.

Having reduced all that weight, we no longer need the heavy tires and suspension. The lighter vehicle does not require such a large engine.

Now we enter a virtuous cycle, as each component gets lighter, the other components can be reduced as well. We have reduced the overhead weight of the vehicle by a factor of 10, to only a few hundred pounds, thus approaching our goal of the vehicle weighing no more than the design load. We have also reduced the cost of the vehicle by at least a factor of 10, So we are approaching the goal of giving everyone equitable access to transportation.

We have already shown many Autonomous Vehicles much smaller, lighter, and cheaper than even these reduced autonomous cars. So the next question is what shape larger, faster vehicles might take.