Richard, I agree with many of your observations, but only halfway agree with your conclusions. For example, what's so great about an “actual modern day vehicle”? And what's so bad about a “high school experiment”? I think our differences come from our backgrounds.
I was a high school shop teacher for four years and MAX is designed so it can be built by high school students and other amateur car builders. As I wrote in my first MAX article, “I think any of the big automakers could win the Auto X Prize if they got serious about it,” but it looks like the West Philly Hybrid X Team (high school students) is way ahead of them. The days of inspired high school students (and other amateur experimenters) are not over yet.
Does MAX meet government regulations? You bet! Lucky for us, the government regulations for a car you build yourself are not as involved as the regulations for production cars. MAX is already cleaner than the majority of diesel passenger cars on America's roads today ... most of those are ‘70s and ‘80s cars from Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz and they wouldn't meet 2010 production car emissions regulations either. Mandated air bags? They're not mandated on home-built cars, and they wouldn't be mandated on production cars either if everybody wore five point racing harnesses like those in MAX.
I'd say MAX gets a nod on all safety issues except side impact protection, and we're working on that as part of the streamlined body project. No bumper? It has a fiberglass nose that's cheaper than any bumper of any 2010 car in America, and that's only the first of MAX's “crumple zones.”
You asked what would happen when a pickup truck loses its brakes and rear ends MAX. Well, I doubt it will be a home-built pickup truck, because homebuilders tend to take their maintenance pretty seriously. So far, I've only been rear-ended once and it was by a factory-built passenger car. The driver swore she was only going 30 mph. I was going zero and was stopped behind a van, which was stopped for pedestrians. The fuel tank didn't rupture because (even though the tank is visible) it is protected by a tubular steel structure.
I wouldn't call MAX a modern day vehicle, it's more like a newly built 50-year-old vehicle. I don't think MAX is dangerously slow, I think it's just slow. I don't think any driver behind me has had to touch the brakes, much less be endangered, but I'll admit I wait for big gaps between cars before I pull out in traffic. This sort of conversation usually ends with the other guy, smiling smugly, saying, ‘Well, maybe it's not dangerous for you, but it'd be dangerous the way I drive.’
Then I usually say don’t bother to apply for a job at UPS because their vans are even slower than MAX. And MAX has superb stability, rollover resistance, and braking capability (not just good, but superb) without needing stability control, traction control or antilock brakes to make up for design deficiencies.
I think you're right about what people want in a car, but that's most people, not all people. If 99.9 percent of the U.S. population doesn't want a MAX, that still leaves about 300,000 people who might. Divide that by 1,000 for the people who don't have the money and/or space for another car, the people who don't have the self confidence to tackle this big of a project, and the people who can't convert “want” to “do” unless they have somebody (a car salesman, perhaps?) egging them on. That leaves a 300 person niche market — not enough to attract a major manufacturer, but enough to keep Kinetic Vehicles busy making parts for them. I don't think MAX is going to be a one-off vehicle, we have beta testers making MAX variants right now (one Kubota powered, two electrics, and one with a Geo Metro engine) and depending on their feedback, MAX plans may soon be available for general distribution.
I doubt MAX has Detroit quaking in its boots. MAX might, however, help show some manufacturer (though maybe not a manufacturer in Detroit) that there is indeed a market for a small, efficient, no-frills automobile, conceived that way from the get-go — perhaps a small market, but a market worth serving.
