A Homemade Electric Car – Youtube Video

Reading Time: 3 minutes
On one side of the Channel, you have people like Colin Furze building fun machines that have the fatal flaw of having an internal combustion engine. On the other side of the Channel, you have people like Marc Gyver building an electric car with easily bought components. The video below shows the construction process without talking, and without music.

For about 2000 Euros, with bike parts, and the right skills, you can build your own cars. You have four powered bike wheels to power the car, two solar panels on the roof to generate 200W and a charge time of two and a half hours for a range of 20 kilometers and a top speed of 50 km/h. The range is perfect for when you need to do things within a short distance.

Four young people riding the electric car.

Within the video, you see quite a few shots of four people sitting in the car at once. I especially like this because it illustrates that young people are not limited to protests, skipping school and more. With the right skills, they build their own electric car to get around, even if it is on private property where it's legal.

The project discussed above was uploaded seven months ago and since then he has made a car with a body, indicator lights, a windscreen and more. It looks like the cars you see in old films and cartoons. (Some of the cartoons are old). It is slowly getting closer to being road legal.

What I love about these homemade projects is that they show that self-driven cars still have a future. With electric cars, we can still do small journeys without ecologists being mad with us for combusting fossil fuels.

Electric Car Adventures

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4ulkuEIDA8

If we go off on a tangent of electric cars then you have electric cars like the one above. It's designed so that you get the pleasure of driving a car, but without the internal combustion engine. There is an entirely new niche of projects to be thought up and programs like The Grand Tour and others could play with these devices.

For years I thought that Top Gear, Motortrend TV, and The Grand Tour were outdated and old fashioned, bound for the video archives of culture. With electric bike technology plenty of new opportunities are being created for electric cars, and in the process for our pleasure.

An interview with the creator.

I love this concept. I love the concept of young people, rather than owning conventional cars like my generation have used, owning or renting devices as we see in the video below. Too often we watch news and current affairs programs about environmentalists and the future and we think we'll be trapped on trains and in buses with no scheduling freedom. With these machines we preserve the freedom that we've been used to for years, but with technology that is sustainable.

"Where we're going, we don't need rails"

The future of exploration is on foot, by bike and for those who want to cover different distances by Swincar. Cycling and walking are great when you're not in the middle of a heatwave like we've experienced for two or three summers. In a heatwave, vehicles like this are nicer. As you're rolling over earth, grass or stones you're cooler than if you were on the tarmac. Because you're outside you have the breeze. I would like to play with one of these.

The Negative side

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zWpyiLOutk

There are a few concerns with these machines. The first is that they still need to be parked somewhere and these take up as much space as a car. The second concern is that these vehicles can go anywhere but this doesn't mean that they should. If they go on hiking paths, if they go on slopes, on skip pistes, and in other places then they're going to come in conflict with other users of the same area.

We see a shot where these vehicles are beside horses, but if you have cycled near horses you'll be told by the rider to make noise so that horses know you are there.

Off-Roading without the Carbon Footprint.

I enjoyed watching Dirt Every Day and programs like it but I never saw myself as ever trying offroading because of the carbon footprint. I'd rather hike, cycle or climb. I am tempted to play with the electric version. No need to worry about planting a forest after each outing.