Funny, but then he says really moronic type stuff like "this might be the first purpose built electric car" That is just so comically wrong and stupid that I stand in awe that anyone, let alone a car guy, can be so ignorant and stupid. At one time, EVs outsold combustion cars!! There were hundreds of thousands of them in NYC alone. This was in the first years of the 20th century!!!! This is not esoteric knowledge. Jay Lenno has episodes right here on RU-vid of restored models from the early 20th century.
From the thumbnail, I assumed that it was built on the Pacer chassis; until I realized that it was much smaller. The Pacer was the first American attempt at a minivan. Not that they called it a minivan, but the Pacer ads all tried to sell the vehicle on its large amount of interior space.
To be fair, the motor probably doesn't like spinning at extremely high speeds, so keeping it down would help with heat generation, current loss, and vibration. Hence, the transmission. Why spend R&D getting a DC brushed motor to spin at 10,000 RPM when you could just make it spin at 4,000 with a gearbox?
@@JaredConnell I own a few shirts that are in my wardrobe mainly so when I wear them out, I can find the other people who get the joke. That's the joy of buying merch from enthusiast sites/RU-vid channels/whatever.
The hairdryer thing is astounding. I ran around the house turning on all my hair driers. They all cut out after 30 minutes or so. Using a hairdryer is genius/lunatic cost-saving measure, well it would be if it worked.
The laughter over the hair-dryer window defroster is kinda pure joy. Like a child on Christmas Morning when they realize, "yes Virginia, there *is* a Santa Claus".
Well there is right ? Darn bastard kept eating those cookies we put out . Was told to try leaving him some beer but I just didn’t know about that . . Crazy flying reindeer and alcohol 🍺 . . Just not a good mix . . Then there’s them elves
The VW Fox wasn't introduced until 1987, but there was an *Audi* Fox from 1973 to 1979, so that's probably where the transmission came from. Also it looks like it has Audi Fox wheels, too.
The VW Fox was imported from Brazil, but here it was called the VW Voyage, the sedan version of our Gol. No, not Golf, Gol. It was built from 1981 to 1996.
Doug Demuro is going to be so mad when he finds out you got to review the ultimate quirk and feature of "built in hair dryer window defroster" before he did
The offer always stands if Doug wants to check it out but he would be hard pressed to beat this video! The first thing I thought when I bought this car was “oh, aging wheels is gonna love this”
Even Formula E experimented with gearboxes. One of the early examples of Formula E cars had a 2-speed manual without a clutch (it uses dog box engagement so that works completely fine if you slam the lever hard enough). Turned out it made no difference either way so from there on everyone used single-speed transmission, and notably that now extends to consumer electric cars. The reason to try gearboxes is of course the power band, electric motors have it just like ICEs. But counter-intuitively, electric motor's power band follows the electricity input, it's like it has its own CVT built-in, so making it run efficiently is just a matter of selecting the correct gas pedal position.
@@zerocool6452 I think the first time I saw Robert was the same time I first saw Doug, on Doug's video where he reviews Robert's Trab, so for a while I was extra confused.
"Oh, fiddlesticks. I've left my hairdryer at home!" "Don't worry my love, just stick your head on the dashboard of my Electrek and put the demister on"
I can see the engineers happily rolling the prototype into the main office of Unique Mobility when they had finished building it, and the head engineer saying, "Well, it's nothing like you wanted, but we're ahead of schedule."
To be fair, the Pacer was considered a 'cool' car when it first came out. It wasn't until AMC's corner cutting caught up to them that everyone changed their opinions.
@Barack Obama No EV will ever be cooler than a proper, internal combustion powered car. EVs are nothing but the hopeless pipe-dream of naive eco-freaks.
I really, really want the one that had a brushless motor swapped in. And I want to swap the lead acid batteries for a custom lithium pack. It would be, very likely, a usable car!
TBH when he he said that UM went on being successful I fully expected that was the direction they would have went. Got to say making high end brushless motors for other companies is kind of a step up.
I was 1000% sure that's where the story was headed, and that went up to about 10,000% sure when he said they were still around and successful, especially after that in-house development of brushless motors bit. The true ending blew my dang mind. 🤯
The "more throttle, less hairdryer" is a symptom of very bad voltage droop. The number of batteries powering that car is insufficient to provide full voltage under heavy load. But then, we've always known that the weak point for electric cars (prior to Tesla) was the limited power capacity of the batteries.
Voltage droop is inevitable when you push the battery pack to its discharge rate limit. Lead-acid batteries can deliver 500 amps peak and at 96 volts that's only 48 kilowatts, at that rate the voltage will droop by half. If you pull 200 amps you can expect 20% voltage droop. This becomes progressively less of a problem as you wire more and more batteries in parallel, but then you run the risk of generating millions of amps if you short the pack.
That hairdryer tho… No other car quirk I’ve ever seen had me burst out laughing so hard. And the fact that it gets slower when you push the gas pedal, that’s just too damn good 🤣🤣🤣😂
And not only just a hairdryer, but the original one that came with the car. Someone needs to find the company that made that hairdryer. Still working 50 years later.
@@shawnheidingsfelder8179 "Gillette Supermax pro 1400" - I guess they (the company) still exist 🤔🤓 Today I would not expect any 'pro' model of an electrical tool to exceed 5-10 years 😁
8:40 - Yup, that door latch is straight out of a VW Fox, just like the gearshift. This car brings back (horrible) memories. I owned a VW Fox (or more specifically, a slightly older Audi Fox before Audi decided they wanted to be the "luxury" brand and kicked the Fox over to VW,) and was attempting to convert my aunt's old broken down Alfa Romeo Spyder into a homebuilt EV much along the lines of this car - yes, including using a literal hair dryer for the window defroster.
the audi and vw foxes were completely different cars, tha audi was a rebadged audi 80 while the vw was a vw gol they imported from brazil to have something to compete with the yugo and hyundai excel
My 42 Ford GPW Jeep had vacuum wipers and I'm pretty sure that was standard equipment on those. If it was raining going up hill you had to let up on the gas to get the wiper to work. I seem to remember you just had a variable pull lever and the farther you pulled it out the faster the wiper went till you had to hit the gas and it would stop. Probably most were converted to electric motors and who left the windshield up on a nice day anyway.
Here in Brazil, back in 74, there was already prototypes of electric cars by one of our hydroelectric power plants, the Itaipu Gurgel E400. It was released in 81 and could carry 400kg with an autonomy of 80km.
Watching this, my instinct is to try and work out what a quick change system for the batteries would look like so you could run this at a 24h of Lemons race.
@jakethesnake05 that is an actual thing, since Lemon is slang for an old junky car there is an event where people race cheap shitboxes called "*Lemons*"
They probably wasted the space on purpose, any extra load would likely drop the range to nothing. The battery tunnel seems like a simple solution to carrying a huge pile of lead around, but god help any car you spear in a crash.
This was my first thought. If you put space into a car, it will be used. That "space" available now, was just enough for groceries and short trip to a market. No hauling of cement sacks with this one!
Those windows are just wild. Also the hair dryer was really funny. Liked the editing a lot, cool to mix it with you experiencing the car while you are explaining the things, instead of having two separate blocks where you have to go "In a bit when I will drive the car you will see that and this and that". Nice flow to the video.
I would love to see you either buy one of those non working Electrek uncars and possibly get it running with newer electric car components or build your own out of an AMC Pacer.
Deep within one of research institutes in Zhejiang Province, there exists a Shuanghuan Noble that had been stripped down, had its ICE drivetrain ripped out, metal unibody tossed in the trash, and reborn as a composite monocoque EV testbed (probably made 2010ish). I have seen this creation with my own eyes, and all I have to say is..... *_Carbon Fibre Wheego_*
What an awesome car! For an electric car this old, it seems actually pretty good. Minus the bad use of space, the design is quirky but cute and unique, and the improvised solutions and re-using parts from other cars I can't help but think it's lovely
A hundred mile range and a top speed of actual highway cruising speeds is very impressive for the tech they were working with. Imagine what this same team could do with modern stuff
My father owned a regular Opel Manta back in the 70s. Said it was very nice looking, but was the absolute worst piece of junk he’s ever owned. Caused him to break down in Detroit multiple times, which lead to some interesting stories to say the least.
The real innovation was the motor-controller. Had they used a light pickup truck (not improper!), using the bed to store batteries, it would have been pretty great.
I imagine that in like 50~100 years when 3D printing and batteries will be so good and cheap that people could make one car at their homes like a family project.
@@mohinderkaur6671apparently Gardens don’t exist? Or farms? I guess if your head is so far up your butt that it comes out the other end, the soil looks like sky.
Honestly wasn't much more than that. That's how most car companies start out, either that or conversions - the first Teslas were electric-converted Lotus Elises. A lot of other small-volume niche manufacturers use a lot of off-the-shelf parts.
Speaking of electric car's with a manual transmission, the college I went to (tech school) had an electric car with a 5 speed. It was a conversion from some no-name chinese car a bit like the Weego. I think we just left it in 3rd or something to drive around the school lot, I also remember if you revved the "engine" in neutral the thing vibrated horribly. They also had a Ford Ranger converted to electric (not the official Ranger EV) but it didn't run whenever I went to school. I think it too had a 5 speed (and a bed full of 12v lead acid batteries)
My college mechanical engineering department had a Solectria Force which was an EV converted Geo Metro with solar panels on the roof and hood. It had a manual trans with clutch just like the Electrek, but it shifted just fine. You could free rev the motor as well. I was a research assistant and they said I could use it for errands so I did. It had the performance of a 50cc scooter.
Best video you’ve ever made! I’m not biased at all! It was super awesome to have Robert come out and review this car. When I bought this car my main goal was to make more people aware of it! It’s just so underrated! So glad I could share it with Robert and all of you!
I really like this ugly car. Seems like it would be fun to modify. Replace the batteries with lithium and put in a bldc motor and controller. Pointless but fun. Lol
That was truly unique. Thanks for sharing! That air dryer... you can imagine the engineer who came up with that. Rushing to the closest Sears and coming back to his boss with a "problem solved" large grin :-)
A true engineering solution. Looking at the car it looks like the sort of thing that would win an episode of Scrapheap Challenge / Junkyard Wars. Good to hear that the company went on to more successful things.
An AMC Pacer described badly over the phone, with some windows left out and built from junkyard parts. Perfect. Description. 👏 👏 👏 Mic drop moment right there
All things considered I would guess that about half of them that were sold ended up in Aspen. Only place I can think of with hippies rich enough to go in on a car like this as their 5th car to get groceries in summer.
For some reason my brain thought this video would start with, "This..." Perhaps because it looks like a very unusual car with loads of unique quirks and interesting features
@Author B.L. Alley Hahaha, you beat me to it! Although, I was gonna settle for 22mph, just because, ya know, movie runtimes have to be kept reasonable.
There's a blog out there where a chap in Holland converted his MK1 Reliant Robin to full electric and the car is amazing, abs brilliant workmanship... you could dual power your Reliant or full on leccy conversion with the only major kink in creating an adapter plate to sit between motor and gearbox and mounting a flywheel to the motor to house the clutch if you wanted to use the gearbox.
The Citicar also had a certain modish futurism to its design which suited the early 1970s. I remember as a small child finding them and "bubble cars" exciting and exotic, like something out of (pre-Star Wars) science fiction. You know, the 2001 to Logan's Run era. The Elektrek doesn't tap into that vibe at all.
That’s an interesting thought I’ll have to look into! At first I thought it was the clutch going bad but the clutch works no problem but only in reverse. This would explain some things
@@TVsoup I owned a VW Fox, the VW transmission should shift pretty effortlessly. In the original car the shift lever goes almost directly into the transmission. It's not the ball and lever system used on the VW 020 transmissions. If you replace the transmission fluid I would use either the VW G070 fluid (strong preference) or Redline MTL. The fluid used has a massive influence on shift quality.
I love this channel. I like to come back every few months, and just binge every new video. Then wait another couple months, then binge all those new videos. Gives me hours of entertainment. FOR FREE!
I knew the name Unique Mobility rang a bell! When I first got into my university's solar car program the motor and controller we had were from Unique Mobility. Good motor, but we upgraded to a hubless motor a few years later.
I thought the thing looked rather like something Homer Simpson would design, if he had lasted at Powell Motors...and when you mentioned the price in todays dollars, Uncle Herb's outraged "EIGHTY-TWO-THOUSAND DOLLARS?!?!" came to mind!
Robert, this is some of the best writing and delivery I have ever seen from your channel. I actually laughed out loud several times. Thankfully I'm working in an empty office so I don't have to explain the weird 70s electric car that I'm laughing at.
That brings me back. My dad owned this mail truck, it wasn't a Grumman LLV because it had a 4 speed manual, and one reverse. Though I might be wrong about the gearage as I never shifted beyond 2nd gear in the parking lot. My dad let me drive it around at his printing shop to learn how to shift. Thing was electric though. Couldn't get it faster than 40, but it worked. Been trying to find the name of the vehicle though. I suspect it was made this way because the front of the car was slopped at a 45 degree angle. It did look a lot like a Grumman, but the front was just to stumpy. Funny enough I didn't get the whole "shifting" thing because I didn't feel any real change between first and second. It wasn't till I was allowed to borrow a Mercedes 300D Turbo Diesel (Old company car, freaking 430k miles on it) that I got it. Nothing turbo about that car car either.
