Drop a Load in The Zero Emissions Hauler!

The Hauler started as a tangent. An aside. A fun thought experiment for Lorax Motor Works before the real work began.

What would truly zero-emissions transportation look like?

It would probably be electric, but with traditional electric vehicles, there were two options.

1. An oversized electric golf-cart that would be great for running around movie-lots, but not very practical elsewhere.

2. An overpowered electric supercar that would be great for running around the Autobahn but not very affordable or practical elsewhere.

And with both of these products, “zero-emissions” was a misnomer, since the emissions really transferred upstream to power plants and generators. Sure, the car itself emits nothing, and generating electricity is about 25% more efficient than an internal combustion engine, but somewhere, something was burning or a dam was built to fill the battery.

So how to eliminate the emissions? The answer, for Lorax, came by combining human and electric power. Chief Technical Officer Aaron Blake had grown up competing in solar-car races and understood that solar power was not energy dense enough to run a full-size car, but if you attached a solar panel to the top and used an electric motor to supplement leg-power instead of replacing it, it could theoretically operate continually.

And with mountain bike tires and suspension, steel frames and dual drive wheels, it wouldn’t necessarily need paved roads.

Then came the realization that “the number of people aspiring to live a more industrial lifestyle doubles every fifteen years,” said Blake. In five years there will be as many new drivers in Asia as there are in the United States, he said.

The Hauler became Lorax’s main focus.

By putting cheaper, human-electric hybrids in the hands of the developing world, they hope to slip in before these places became hooked on cars. With lifestyles changing in places like China and India, their solar-and-leg-powered Hauler seemed like the perfect fit for moving loads around rural Asia.

“At some point it will become economically impossible to step backward into the internal combustion engine,” Blake said. “Buying gas at $2 a gallon will mean a significant lifestyle sacrifice.”

So the design of the Hauler became tailored to “what would be viable in developing countries,” Blake said. Think a recumbent bike with a flatbed on the back that’s able to haul hundreds of pounds and an electric motor doing the lion’s share of the work.

For those of us in the developed world, Blake envisions the Hauler as a grocery-getter and run-around vehicle, but there are also adventure-travel possibilities. There’s talk of using haulers on the route to Everest base camp and Blake and Tris Tarantino, another company partner, recently returned from a month-long backcountry ski trip in Japan: the No Gas- All Cake World Tour 2009. Their only mode of non-ski transportation? Two Haulers that they shipped to Tokyo.

“It was nice to be able to look to at a mountain and go to it,” Blake said. “Every night you just turn your solar panel to the east and make it a leisurely morning.”

Facts from Lorax:

In the worst conditions, no sunlight, heavy load, hilly terrain, The Hauler has a range of 20 miles with its lead batteries, which are heavier, but more recyclable than the higher-powered lithium-ion batteries found on hybrid cars and laptop computers.

A full battery charge requires 0.8 kwh of electricity from your outlet and takes around 6 hours and costs about 10 cents.

Based on the DOE’s figure for calculating the usable energy content of
gasoline, this works out to be around 900 miles per gallon.

All of these figures assume a lackadaisical attitude towards pedaling
and no solar power – with solar power or more pedaling the mpg and carbon per mile numbers get very big and very small respectively.