New electric car (alas, not) to be made in Normal, IL
I’m pretty happy Mitsubishi is planning to build their futuristic little car right here in Normal. Couple days ago they were filming a commercial for it downtown:
Did I say “little”? Well not really. The passenger compartment is huge and it looks like there’s plenty of room for luggage.
If you ask anyone to draw a picture of “a car”, you will get a boxy shape with the wheels two feet (or more) from each end with a bigger box in the middle. Something like my old ’67 Dodge Coronet 4-door; eighteen feet of Detroit steel with an enormous cast-iron engine in the front and a heavy cast-iron differential axle in the back. It handled pretty well considering its bulk, thanks to torsion-bar suspension but this car will handle way better.
The major weight of the car is close to the ground and the wheels are as close to the corners of the car as possible. It will be super-easy to park and cheap to operate. Think it’s a little funny-looking? Imagine not caring enough about the price of gas to even look when you drive by a station. Imagine vastly simplified routine maintenance. We’re going to see a lot of cars like this from different manufacturers pretty soon.
One objection to electric cars is that they won’t pay gasoline taxes, which is the major revenue stream for road repair. But most road damage is done by heavy vehicles. Seems like an equitable multiplier could be worked out by the boffins.
Soon to be known as a ‘Normal’ car ?
Finally, a Normal car!
It was not friendly to the environment, but that ’67 Coronet gave us happy moments, eh?
Oh yeah… that engine probably put out twenty times the pollution of my ’88 Honda. But it had room for all the photo equipment you could put in it, was stable as hell on the highway, roomy, comfortable. What a ride. And a death trap, if we’d ever been in a wreck, but we weren’t.
I once went to a wedding in Washington, DC in that car. The valet at the downtown hotel acted like it would give him a disease or something, and then he left the headlights on. (No headlight beepers – or ANY other beepers – in a ’67 Dodge) Battery was dead when I went to pick up the car. I had a set of jumper cables in the trunk. First time they were ever used to start that car; I always used them to help other people. I didn’t tip the guy.
If I find a picture of it, I’ll post it.
“100 vehicles to ship to normal by 2014″. I’m just as hopeful as the next person but there are no current plans to build the vehicle here. the headline is very misleading to say the least. What are the basis for this claim?
“What are the basis for this claim?”
False information, apparently. I based the headline on what one of the ad agency people said where they were filming the commercial. Unfortunately it seems that person was either misinformed or misinforming. But just now I did some further checking and found no supporting references. Sad.
Video ad. creativity-online.com/work/mitsubishi-welcome-to-the-new-normal/24742