Welcome to Gaia Transport!(TM)
|
|
Gaia Transport Corporation is engaged in bringing earth-friendly vehicles to market. We'd like to think they will shake up the vehicle market, making simple, compact, highly-efficient vehicles more desirable than huge gas-guzzlers. Our vehicles will be highly efficient, with a minimum of 100mpg performance under real world average conditions, not just on a test track, or in a computer simulation. These vehicles will handle and accelerate like "real cars" but will emit less than half the greenhouse gases of current very efficient vehicles like the Toyota Prius or Honda Civic Hybrid. As we prepare for the Automotive XPrize competition, we are operating in stealth mode. But in this website, we'll give at least a hint or two regarding our progress. Our news page will present project status updates periodically.
|
Our first vehicle to market, the mc2, is a plug-in hybrid with these specs: - Capacity: 2 people, 6 cu ft cargo
- Fuel efficiency: better than 100 mpg in everyday driving *
- 30 mile range on batteries alone, with 400 mile range on a tank of fuel.
- Acceleration: 0 to 60 mph in about 10 seconds
- Top speed: 90 mph
- Carbon footprint: about half that of a Toyota Prius.
- Handling: Like that of a sports car
- Crashworthiness: the equivalent of a 4 or 5 Star rating for front and side impacts
|
Contact Us:Right now, we are truly a microcompany. Therefore, Ken, the company founder, is also the webmaster, the vehicle design chief, the bottle washer, and the CEO. So no matter what your interest, please email me at the address above. I'll try to respond quickly.
|
* It has become common to inflate the mileage ratings of prototype plug-in hybrids by limiting the trip length to some convenient figure, such as a 30 mile commute. Plug-in Prius conversions generally claim ludicrously high mpg figures (100, 200, even 300) by rigging the test length. For example, if the car drives 20 miles on battery power, and then 5 miles at 45 mpg on gasoline, only 1/9 of a gallon of gas is used to go 25 miles: 225 mpg, the promoters would claim, completely ignoring the electrical contribution. Such a figure has no meaning because: - simply changing the arbitrary trip length changes the calculated figure, and
- the electrical energy used is not accounted for.
Rated this way, electric vehicles would have infinite mpg, which suggests they are far more efficient than they are.
|
|
