Research

The instruments, the data, and the findings.

Vehicles and modules are what we build. This section is what we learned and the tool we developed on the way, and it is the part of the project meant to outlive it. The vehicles will be superseded. The results, hopefully not.

Tools

Software written because the questions this category asks have no off-the-shelf answers. Unlike the vehicles, these are useful to other teams immediately.

Aerodynamic Shape Optimiser

Given an STL of the volume that must fit inside, search for the enclosure shape that minimises drag area. Chapter 5 argues frontal area and shape dominate energy use above 20–30 km/h; this is how we act on that. This tool is still in development and open to contributions.

Véli Routing Engine

Google maps like but will take into account the specifics of your vehicle. Still in early development

Estimating how many car trips an intermediate vehicle could actually absorb, and what that means in emissions. Turns the claims in Chapter 1 into numbers we can defend.

Datasets

Nothing published yet.

That is the honest state of things, and it is also the most important gap in the project. Our approach argues that what this field lacks is not vehicle designs but real usage data from people who are not us: trip logbooks, GPS traces, and measured substitution rates over weeks and months of daily use.

Producing that data is the point of the whole exercise. When it exists it goes here, in a form other people can re-analyse. We may also integrate the result from other groups when times allow.

Findings