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| Arbet" World's Smallest Hand-Built Micro Car Length 88.75 in, Height 38.5 in, 40 in wide |
Made over a period of 11 years of extensive hand fabrication, making thousands of parts bespoke, Arliss Sluder combined his name with his wife's name (Beth) to create "Arbet" the title or name for the vehicle, which was street legal as of 1956 when it was complete and in operation on public roads.
Easier to park, easier to wash, easier to fit in small garages with motorcycles and bicycles or e-bikes parked alongside. A smaller car means less fuel, less space, less road wear, less materials, lower emissions and not a new idea.
SUV's & Trucks are all the rage with new car buyers in 2024 America
How much vehicle do you need to move you to and from work and back?
America is car crazy because we have a vehicle culture
Vehicle Needs vs Wants: Synthetic Desires
Can a small car like the Toyota IQ or a Smart Fortwo cover your daily commute?
If people can use an E-bike in fair weather to get to and from work, why do you need more?
You could be saving many thousands per year on gasoline
Fuel Efficient Motor Scooters
Our 2013 Honda PCX-150 can cruise at 50 MPH with Meg and I riding together, has a large under seat trunk storage area, comfortable seating, and gets 83 to 105 miles per gallon on 87 regular gasoline so about 100-mile range given the 1.1-gallon tank, so less than $5 to fill up at the gas station. Liquid cooled, fuel injected, with catalytic converter cleaner exhaust, the 153cc single makes about 13 hp and 11 lb. ft. of torque, transmitted to the rear wheel for acceleration via the belt CVT and rear axle hub gearing. Top speed best cast downhill, ducking, with a tailwind, 70 MPH, given the aftermarket variator I got from Taiwan, in the CVT gearbox housing. This scooter actually a Kimco Elite in Taiwan, with a Honda designed motor and branding, sold elsewhere in the world as a 125cc model, they bored and stroked it for America where highway performance almost needed to make it sell well.
E-Bikes for Commuting
Our 2023 Lectric XP3.0 e-bike can easily cruise at 25 MPH for up to 50 miles on a charge with pedal assist and makes climbing steep hills at least two times easier than on a human powered bicycle standing on the pedal cranking full out Lance Armstrong Tour De France style that only really physically fit people can actually do for a daily commute on steep mountain hills.
Smaller Cars
The idea of a microcar goes way back and echos of Kei cars of Japan. Smaller, lighter, motorcycle engines, with less metal, smaller wheels and tires, and a much lower environmental footprint, or lower lifecycle impacts, with a smaller material footprint and less energy required to make it and operate it or maintain it.
Less oil during oil changes, less fuel when filling up the gas tank, possibly very low emissions on modern versions equipped with 3 way catalytic converts and O2 sensor exhaust gas temperature feeding voltage data to the engine control computer modulating the spark timing and fuel injection timing and duration to vary the fuel air mix with other data from the MAF or mass air flow sensor, crank angle sensor, knock sensor and other sensors.
Automotive Safety Improved with Time
A larger heavier vehicle with better passenger protection makes sense, but if you consider the 1940 and 1950s, there were no airbags, no seat belts, and carbureted engines with a dash choke required to start. Further back it was hand crank to start cars. These earlier vehicles had low powered engines. The post "Arbet" micro car had an air-cooled Onan engines of 13 hp mated to a 3-speed transmission with centrifugal clutch like a chainsaw or gas-powered weed whacker.
Toxic Tailpipe Emissions Reduced by 95%
Most of a gasoline fueled vehicles exhaust made of water vapor and carbon dioxide, nontoxic and already parts of earth's atmosphere and what people breathe out when we exhale a mixture of water vapor and carbon dioxide emitted from lung gas exchange membranes generated by cellular respiration or human metabolism processes that make body energy from foods we eat and beverages we drink into cell fuel using oxygen we breathe in from the air to enable oxidative phosphorylation as part of the cellular energy citric acid or TCA cycle making ATP from ADP in the cell mitochondria organelle #biology #medicine #science. Engines are air breathers just like people, using the oxygen in air entering the engine to oxidize the vehicles food, fuel namely gasoline and diesel, or propane or CNG in special vehicles.
Fuel injection, catalytic converters, exhaust air injection, the automobile not only became larger and more powerful and faster, but also safer, cleaner and better in a lot of ways right until the 1990s when automobile quality peaked.
Quality Reduced with Plastic Engine Parts
By the early 2000's automobile manufactures started making drivetrain parts that were always made of metal before, out of plastics, and everyone knows that plastics dry out and crack and break apart when heated hot and cold over and over or sitting in the sunlight and weathering outside for many years. A vehicles engine bay can vary in temperature from below freezing cold when such are parked at a ski resort all day in sub-freezing weather. When driven in hot deserts in hot summer weather, the engine bay can get to over 200 degrees.
This hot and cold cycling more extreme in aircraft, but this means that plastic water pumps, plastic intake manifolds, plastic oil pans, and plastic oil pumps wear out a lot faster, belt wear out faster, hoses wear out faster, and those are softer reinforced vulcanized rubber parts, but the hard plastics used in engines extensively after 2003 are at least %500 less durable than the aluminum or steel parts they replaced, or 20X less long lasting if the vehicle stored in a museum in similar carefully controlled indoor climate storage.
Not that polymers or glass fiber reinforced plastic are all bad. The intake manifold of the 2ZR-FXE in our 2022 Corolla Hybrid made of such polymers to improve thermal efficiency of the engine vs the aluminum intake manifold in the 2010 Prius III that has the same 2ZR-FXE engine. Prius III gets about 48 MPG average fuel economy while the Corolla Hybrid gets 55+ MPG.
Toyota claims the polymer intake improves engine thermal efficiency by 0.5% vs aluminum, because the plastic insulates and does not take heat away from the head or block where the aluminum acts like a large heat sink with high thermal conductivity that passively sucks heat out of the head and block. So in some engine parts like the intake, a strong fiber reinforced polymer of high temperature resistant polymer can actually be superior to a cast aluminum part.
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