New Clive Sinclair interview on BBC Website
Its quite a short interview and doesn't cover the Spectrum but it may be of interest to a few of you:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8781295.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8781295.stm
Post edited by takapa on
Comments
That was very interesting takapa, thankyou for posting it. Hopefully Sir Clive may be prompted to develop an exciting new product.
I take his point about batteries v steel and how electric vehicles could be so much lighter. My main concern would be that if a car was not made of steel, what happens to safety in terms of impact damage etc? I know steel cars aren't exactly safe, but steel does afford some protection.
Steel is a poor choice for cars but it is cheap. It's heavy, corrodes easily and isn't particularly strong. Look at high performance cars and it isn't used very often if at all. Carbon fibre, various Aluminium alloys and reinforced plastics all offer weight and corrosion advantages and with the correct designs better crash resistance. Ask Mark Webber.
They are however much harder to work with and vastly more expensive in a production environment so price and ease of use makes steel the material of choice of mass market low cost production.
All mass market car production is a compromise between features (including crash resistance) and cost, there isn't a mass production car that couldn't, for example, have far better brakes and tyres but who is going fit very expensive high performance brakes made from exotic materials or self re-inflating / run flat tyres on a 10 grand car?. Those components alone could cost more than the retail cost of the whole car.