Tilting 4WD 'Spider Car' Makes Light Work of Bizarre Terrain 80
Zothecula writes: The Swincar Spider is a remarkable tilting 4-wheeler concept that boasts absolutely ridiculous rough terrain capabilities. Each wheel has its own electric hub motor and is independently suspended on a spider-like limb. The result is a vehicle that leans into fast turns like a motorcycle, but can also happily go up or down a 70-percent gradient, ride across a 50-percent gradient that puts the left wheels a couple of feet higher than the right ones, or ride diagonally through ditches that send the wheels going up and down all over the place like a spider doing leg stretches.
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No, you have for reading 4chan.
Slashdot has already surpassed the mantle circa 2012.
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Neat, but not especially novel (Score:3)
The downside of this, which is also the downside of the HMMWV, is that the load carrying capacity is dramatically different than conventional suspensions and drivetrains, so that passengers and cargo have to be packaged weirdly to make it all work.
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Do not get... You will be disappointed. It turns out you can get an actual HMMWV from resellers or from a direct surplus buy.
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I think we should all thank TWX for using an obscure insider term instead of the common term for a Humvee so we all know he is soooooooooooooooooooo much cooler then the rest of us.
Prick.
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Required Snark Snark-Back:
The AM General HMMWV - the military vehicle - is a "Humvee," and not the "hummer" - which, depending on context, can be the civilianized [wimpy, less-capable, uglier, and ego-stroking penis-extender] version of the HMMWV. And it is only the H1 (the original version of the Hummer) that is anything similar to the HMMWV. The H2 is a H1 without an engine, and the H3 is just a Yukon pretending to be tough.
Remember, active duty personnel drive Humvees. People who don't know better want t
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And you forgot all GM civilian models were discontinued 6 years ago.
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HMMVW is an obscure insider term in the same sense that CPU is. The commenter simply assumed that the reader was not completely clueless about military vehicles.
I suppose the next thing you're going to say is that we shouldn't talk about JDAM or TOW to avoid confusing those kids whose dial up can't handle google.
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To be a pendent... (Or a pendant...) HMMWV. I, at least, know what you meant. My MOS was 3505, motor pool - driver, and I drove lots and lots of different vehicles. I was not in the test program but I was one of the first to drive on at Quantico when they appeared. As I mentioned above, they are exactly as fun as they look. They are not speedy and they do not slow down very well. But, given their wide stance, they do corner much better than one might imagine - even on uneven/slippery terrain. They grip quit
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And yet you'd probably go ape-shit if someone called "C++" "C".
Re:Neat, but not especially novel (Score:5, Funny)
This vehicle is going to be Detroit's answer to the deferred highway maintenance problem.
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That is a riot. I watched the video and only opened this to opine that I thought it was too frail for my particular desires and that I had driven an HMMWV as such was included in my MOS so, frankly, I am not the least bit impressed with this EXCEPT as a nifty toy.
Do not get me wrong. I think this COULD be impressive - it is going to need some beef and a heavy diesel but it could be impressive. It is going to need to be a lot larger, wider, and made of much heavier parts if it is to be anything more than a t
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Re:Why use Bizarre when they really mean Difficult (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, try to drive one of those in the sort of lava fields [ferlir.is] we have here, it'd bottom out before it even gets started. ;) Even on less extreme terrain, its clearance looks like a pretty big flaw - it can hardly drive on a flat slope [automobilemag.com] without nearly bottoming out, let alone uneven terrain. They could raise the center, but then they'd also be raising the CG because not on the driver but the batteries are in that center bit, and on an offroader you really want a low CG.
Seems to me the solution is to put the batteries next to the hub motors. Something right next to the hub should never bottom out, and as they're low so the CG will stay low. It also allows you to reduce or eliminate your in-arm power wiring (esp. good given all of the bending that goes on in those swing arms), thus reducing wire mass, wire cost, and wire resistance. If you fully eliminate the in-arm power wiring you'd have to charge the packs individually, but even if you retain it you could reduce it to smaller wires that only need to be able to handle charging currents and inter-pack charge balancing, not peak discharge currents. Having the batteries next to the hub motors, you could upgrade them to pretty much whatever power level you wanted.
Another problem I see is with the use of hub motors. Everyone loves them until they start messing around with them and then the problems start to become clear. One, they're unsprung mass, which reduces your ride quality. Two, they're harder to cool, which limits performance. And three, you shake them to bits even on normal roads, let alone offroad. I'd prefer each wheel being hooked up to a small high power motor, connected to the wheels via a stubby CV joint (which should lose only a fraction of a percent of the energy transmitted). That way you keep your unsprung mass low, your motors are easy to cool, and they're not shaken to bits.
This thing is underpowered, but with some proper design choices there's really no limit to how high powered it could become.
The last issue I see is, if you're making an offroader, do you really want motors and wiring connections somewhere that they're going to get wet? Do you want to have your wheel drop into a deep puddle and suddenly short out? It seems to be that they really should have the motors (and as per above, battery packs) protected by a cowling. For transmitting the power to outside of the cowling I see two options. One is to use a waterproof rotary joint, like submarines use, although those are somewhat lossy. A better option might be to have the rotor simply penetrate the cowling (with only a small clearance around it) and use your pack / battery air-cooling system to maintain sufficient positive pressure inside to resist water influx - around 5-10 PSI should be enough for unbridged river crossings, while only 1-2PSI would be needed if you only want to be able to handle the occasional puddle. The air ingress to the cooling system would need to be located as high as possible, of course, whatever design one chooses.
(Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about for quite a while, I'd love to build my own go-anywhere electric vehicle some day ;) )
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You're forgetting, rivers don't stand still. One can interpret the velocity of the water as relating to the volume of an imaginary water column above the surface, h=v/(2g). So a 10m/s (22mph) flow is equivalent to a 5 meter (197") water column. The force of fast flowing water is a more significant impact than the water depth, at least in a worst case.
I'm not sure what you mean by "at those volumes". Volume is relatively irrelevant in this context, and only really matters for the motor itself anyway (batteri
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Indeed, but it's not the average speed that matters, it's the peak. When water funnels between rocks it can end up moving much faster than the average speed, and it also moves faster below the surface than on it. My personal preference would be more pressure than is necessary rather than too little; the concept of one's vehicle dying in the middle of an unpredictable glacial river is rather scary. Then again, I'm a big chicken when it comes to highland river crossings (had to do a bunch about a month ago**)
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Hmm... More to add, I suppose. Oh well, I was not doing anything better.
With the HMMWV the general safety rule was three of water and fifteen miles per hour. If the water was over a three feet and moving faster than fifteen miles per hour we were not to attempt to ford it unless there was a great and compelling reason to do so. We were to test by finding something that floats and throwing it in the water and then estimating how fast it goes. If it was faster than fifeen mph and deeper than three feet then i
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Your shared picture... I have friends, much more into off-roading than I am - I do get some joy out of going out to extract them however, who would actually attempt to drive over the terrain you have there. I have two friends, in specific, who would consider it a personal slight by mother nature and would feel the need to tackle it post-haste! They are specifically, very specifically, into rock climbing and have heavily modified vehicles for the task. It is not uncommon for them to call me and have me provi
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"In general" is key (and in general people will get *very* mad at you if you offroad on public lands or on private land without permission - me among them). However it's perfectly legal on private land if you have permission. On my land, for example, I sometimes *have* to offroad to haul things around (supplies for fences, trees to plant, manure for soil restoration, etc); I don't have roads that go everywhere, and nor do I want them.
There are three cases on public lands where people won't get mad at you o
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Thank you both - I have been to Iceland and Hawaii but only as a pretty basic tourist in both instances. I live in Maine so we have crappy weather too but I still would want a guide. I watched a very boring (to most) documentary about some lady who hiked all over the place and one of the places she hiked was in Iceland. I sort of want to go back and do that but I am awfully lazy at times. I also want to go check out some of the gyms. There are some giant people there and I want to see how they work out. For
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The very last shots were impressive. Scale it up, harden it, and put a diesel on it and they might have something. An alternative would be scaling it up less, harden it a little less, and turn it into one of the buggies that special forces seems to use. I can see some value in it and, as it is, it is fine. It is fine because, as it is, it is a toy and meant to be a toy. The articulation in the last shot of the video on YouTube is impressive though, credit where it is due. You can get a Jeep to do that, to s
Oh Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh Great! (Score:4, Funny)
No need to worry, it's French. If it ever makes it stateside it's pretty much guaranteed to be in the shop more than in service.
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Settle down there Beavis. There are plenty of tows with long throw suspension already. This is only new because you aren't into motor sports already.
This thing isn't particularly impressive. It doesn't do anything that hasn't been done before other than possibly the suspension angling out to the side like that instead of forward/back or directly verticle, but the end result is that its the same way as every other suspension system on the planet for cars/bikes.
This isn't going to result in a bunch of new
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Settle down there Beavis. There are plenty of tows with long throw suspension already. This is only new because you aren't into motor sports already.
This thing isn't particularly impressive. It doesn't do anything that hasn't been done before other than possibly the suspension angling out to the side like that instead of forward/back or directly verticle, but the end result is that its the same way as every other suspension system on the planet for cars/bikes.
This isn't going to result in a bunch of new people you have to shout 'Get off my lawn!' at because better versions of this are already available, just not very many people actually care about a feature that really only matters on the Mars rovers.
NO! What it means is that we will have powerful devices that can essentially go places with advanced light construction two stroke engine/power gen for the wheel based motors that will make a quad look like a toy BUTT HEAD! No need to use hydraulic wheel drive like logging equipment now every goofass that wants to go see, chase or shoot Yogi (the grizzly bear) and has the bucks will do it! Forget the horses that the bear would love to eat or the dogs, you can go solo and shoot em' up. That is one use that I
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Just what the backroads need something that makes it own. Look out fish spawning in creeks and shallow ponds, ground squirrels, ground nesting avian life, insect colonies here comes another bunch of idiots to tear up your home. ZOOM ZOOM their goes the neighbourhood! Well that is if Mazda brings one out before anyone else like Honda, Polaris and Skidoo/whoever the heck does not corner first. Oh and I am sure that they will be available in two stroke oil injected hot rod models that can tear the shit out tree roots as well.
Just out of curiosity, do you walk everywhere you go? Make your own clothes? Vegan and raise your own crops?
Are you powering that computer you're using by solar panels that you made without disrupting anything in the environment perhaps?
Re:Nothing special... (Score:4, Insightful)
How does it have conventional axle assemblies if there are no axles in the entire thing?
You missed the bit where it said that each wheel had a hub motor in it.
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Wow, nasty much? Along with the half-wit up-votes.
Actually, the OP is correct:
- The term "Axle Assembly" refers to the axle housing as well as as the actual axles.
- And if it doesn't have axles, how come the wheels don't fall off?
- And having hub motors adds essentially nothing to it's off-road ability. It could as well use chains, hydraulics, or more conventional shafts and universals.
It's essentially no different to a conventional 4WD, except that the pivot points are above the center of
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Selective reading. The OP also mentioned 'conventional'.
There is nothing conventional about it's axles.
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You do not understand how traction control systems work, do you? Physics is not too difficult for a layman's understanding. The ability to power each wheel, individually, is not something commonly seen even in many "AWD" vehicles and even less likely in 4WD vehicles. There is a reason we have posi-track and ESC in fancier cars that do, indeed, benefit from being able to power each wheel individually. What's more is that, with some tweaking and actually few additional components, they could apply proportion
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vs dirt bike? (Score:2)
I would like to see a bake-off between this thing and a dirt bike. Which one can cross given terrain fastest?
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Assume an expert driver on both
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... and hardly "extreme".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_F7QrR4Ur8
That rig is bad-ass...
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So, who remembers the spider bike from Dark Reign? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, who remembers the Spider Bike [spiderbike.co.uk] from Dark Reign [wikipedia.org]?
Fast, can handle any terrain ... but lightly armed and armored.
Really, Dark Reign was a pretty good RTS ...
"Bizarre" terrain? (Score:3)
Tilting 4WD 'Spider Car' Makes Light Work of Bizarre Terrain
I'm guessing whoever came up with that headline grew up in a town. A very flat town.
"A bit of a hill with rocks in" is not bizarre terrain.
quad-bike designed a few years ago (Score:2)
this isn't a new concept: there was a quad-bike i saw a few years ago with an amazing 4 wheel double wishbone suspension that could articulate at least 2 feet per wheel, independently. watching the videos of the rider tipping the handlebars side-to-side was particularly interesting, because when they did so all four wheels leaned side-to-side as well (because of the double wishbones). can anyone remember what the company was who did that quad-bike? the demo videos they did of going at about 10mph over 1f
Re:quad-bike designed a few years ago (Score:5, Informative)
ah! here we go - http://thekneeslider.com/wesll... [thekneeslider.com]
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4 wheels is by the very definition of the word, not a bicycle. What you're referring to is a quad.
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The article title is somewhat misleading. If you watch the video on the Swincar, you'll see it's doing a lot more than just tilting. The front and rear "axel" can independently pivot around the roll axis of the car, and looks like each wheel can independently extend its reach. There's a photo of it driving straight forward, aligned straight in a gulch, and still with only its rear left and front right wheel in the gulch while the rear right and front left are on opposing hillsides of the gulch.
Good news! (Score:2)
Like this? (Score:3)
Too many wheels (Score:1)
If you want that type of off road capability, I'd think you'd be better off losing two of the wheels on one side. We could call it a "dirt bike" or something.
Seriously though, it seems like a lot of effort to let you sit on your butt, when a dirt bike can go everywhere this could. An electric two wheel drive dirt bike would be cool.
Waxing poetic.... (Score:5, Funny)
Spider car, spider car,
Goes wherever that spiders are.
Climbs terrain, any type,
At least that's what they say in the hype,
Look out!
Here comes the spider car.