Vehicles

Complete vehicles, as opposed to the modules they are assembled from.

There is one so far. That is the honest state of the project, and this page will say so until it changes.

Each vehicle is a research instrument, not a product. Its job is to answer specifics questions, and it is judged on whether it answered it, not on whether it is finished, pretty, or reliable. We publish what broke, because Chapter 2 commits us to publishing failures and because the failures are where the information is.

SUV1

Foam-cored glass fibre composite frame. Barely rolling, structurally instructive, and the reason several of the modules exist.

Status: built · superseded

What a vehicle page contains

• the question the vehicle was built to answer
• what it is made of, what it weighs, what it cost
• which modules it uses, and at which revision
• what failed, and what we changed as a result
• kilometres driven, and by whom

That last line matters more than the others. Chapter 2 argues that the scarce resource in this field is not vehicle designs but real usage data from people who are not us. Until a vehicle here has logged kilometres from an outside rider, the project has not yet done the thing it says is most valuable.

Why building instead of buying

You might ask: why not purchase existing véli to gather usage data?

Production vélis cost 10,000+ CHF. Our first prototype cost less than a third of that. If we had enough to buy a few commercially available véli, it would be done already. Plus, there is more to learn by doing it ourselves.