[HN Gopher] The Dymaxion car: Buckminster Fuller's failed automo...
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The Dymaxion car: Buckminster Fuller's failed automobile
Author : conanxin
Score : 56 points
Date : 2022-08-10 11:49 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (slate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slate.com)
| Animats wrote:
| Car Talk drove a replica.[1] "You've pushed shopping carts with
| broken casters that handle better. ... No one in his or her right
| mind would ever venture above 45 miles per hour because of the
| lousy handling."
|
| [1] https://www.cartalk.com/blogs/jamie-lincoln-kitman/test-
| driv...
| pcrh wrote:
| >Don't drive like my brother!
| westurner wrote:
| Good old Car Talk.
|
| What about with biopolymer superstructure at least, batteries
| in the surfboard floor, an elegant teardrop airfoil,
| regenerative braking with natural branching carbon anodes, and
| an awning?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Those are all solutions to problems the Dymaxion car didn't
| have?
|
| The main complaints of the Car Talk article are the awful
| handling resulting from rear wheel steering (giving a bad
| caster angle resulting in no self-centering-- all modern
| tricycle motor vehicles put the steer tires at the _front,_
| even if it complicates the linkages) and the aerodynamic
| shape that resulted in a large car with surprisingly little
| usable interior room. (a classic Buckminster problem, as this
| is still the big downside of geodesic domes)
|
| All the big compromises of the Dymaxion car came from the
| shape, which let it hit a drag coefficient of 0.25. But
| modern car engineering has simply passed it by: a Prius is
| 0.24 and a Model S is 0.208. There's no reason to accept the
| downsides of a Dymaxion car today, which is why nobody ever
| copied the design.
| westurner wrote:
| Where was the center of gravity - the mass centroid - in
| terms of handling?
| coderintherye wrote:
| "In fact, the project had been undermined by interpersonal
| conflicts, funding shortfalls, and persistent design issues that
| he was unwilling to acknowledge."
|
| That's the real true story of most failed startups.
| balentio wrote:
| I somewhat suspect that most of what is a "failure", to the
| extent it enters the collective conscious, especially in fields
| like engineering, is a later triumph.
| jahewson wrote:
| I have a sneaking suspicion that you didn't read the article :)
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Aptera is a modern attempt at a similar approach. It makes me a
| little sad because the Aptera really makes so much sense but I
| think it will not make inroads in the market, just because it is
| weird.
| jsight wrote:
| TBH, I'm less worried about demand than about supply. It will
| be very difficult to build that machine profitably.
| robga wrote:
| In modern times, the Volkswagen XL1 approached the aesthetic.
| It had an equally low coefficient of drag as the aptera. Not
| many sold - but it was a production car.
|
| https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/volkswagen/xl1/first-dr...
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| I recall reading somewhere that the 3-wheel design meant that the
| vehicle was inherently hard to steer due to typical roadway
| camber (the crown of the road, which means the slope designed to
| route water from the center of the road to the edges). Makes
| sense to me; if the rear wheel is constantly being pulled to the
| edge of the road because that is down hill from the middle of the
| lane.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camber_angle#Road_camber
| asoneth wrote:
| I was most surprised the degree to which Buckminster Fuller lied
| throughout the development of the car and afterwards.
|
| Of course it's heartbreaking that bad engineering killed two
| people, but that is not unheard of in automobile design. An
| honest and forthright engineering team can learn from failures.
|
| According to this article Fuller publicly lied about the testing,
| safety, maximum speed, stability, production capacity, funding
| sources, crash details, and more. I recall that he also implied
| that he was the original inventor of the geodesic dome. These
| kinds of things put his credibility on other claims into question
| as well.
| gambiting wrote:
| Sounds like Elizabeth Holmes of his time. Lies everywhere from
| top to bottom just to get his company off the ground.
| srgpqt wrote:
| So just like every other successful entrepreneur!
| thebigspacefuck wrote:
| A periscope? Now that's an interesting idea
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