Better Than Tesla Cars: The Transparent Car

This document presents the possible technological advances that are better than those currently employed by Tesla cars. The core idea in producing a car that is superior to Tesla cars in technical terms is the Transparent Car. The Transparent Car is constructed out of transparent plastics. The most important of which are those of acrylic and polycarbonate. With the use of plastics, the whole body of the car will be molded in very few pieces and completely transparent forming an exoskeleton. The transparency increases aerodynamic efficiency, solar panel surface area, safety due to the visibility and strength, and ease of repairing because components are visible. The batteries are a mix of fixed and removable. The removeable batteries allow the option to equip the Transparent Car with batteries that are larger than Tesla cars and easy upgrading to the latest battery technologies. To allow high performance and longevity of battery life, a supercapacitor battery will be added to store enough energy to reach a cruising speed such as 100 km/h. To increase symmetry and reduce wire sizes, each wheel will have a permanent magnet brushless outrunner motor directly driving the wheels fed by separate sets of batteries. There will be no gear or steering mechanism. The steering will use vectoring which enables the smallest turning circle while also increasing hull space. The preferred suspension is air suspension because of the need to adjust the height of the vehicle as well as taking advantage of the air compressor to air cool the motors and batteries, while exploiting filed patents to reduce aerodynamic drag and increase collision damage resistance. There will be remote safety drivers to assist the self-driving systems because it will be impossible to provide a perfect autonomous system. The techniques used for self-driving will be primarily cameras and RADAR, like Tesla cars but with options for LIDAR, 3D map and public sourced maps. To test all these technologies, scale modelling will be used. A lot of inspirations for the design of the Transparent Car had come from the scale modelling community.

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