Haiku 2

Our Earth cries for help.
Don't just silence it; bring change!
Let the Wiki win.

A Gesture

After the the big smoosh, things at WikiSpeed went into overdrive!


Joe continued to pull multiple all-nighters in a row. Our engineer offered a brain dump before flying off to Mexico. Friends descended on the garage to build axles, create the plug for the mold for the body, attach X PRIZE-required gadgets, etc. They drove in. They flew in. They flew their friends in.


The family was even recruited. Luckily, Joe happens to have in his immediate family alone a project manager, several attorneys, an accountant, a long-distance driver, and multiple geeks who can build gadgets.


Within a couple, days all of us were showing fatigue, even though none of us had put in the effort that Joe had.


But, you see, Joe has a secret weapon.


I (The Voice of WikiSpeed) called Joe the day of the crash. He had been awake for days, driving in the rain. The vital parts of the car were covered by a plastic tarp. He was exposed to the cold and wind. Nineteen miles short of our goal, he crashed. You could hear it in his voice: He was tired. He was scratched up. I think his heart was tired. All I could say was, "What can I do to help?" It wasn't much---just a gesture, really, since I was thousands of miles away, sipping my coffee, reading my e-mail, about to road-trip home to Colorado, while he was in the garage in Seattle.


But that simple gesture counted. He paused. He choked up a little, and he said, "Just hearing you say that makes all the difference."


Soon the deluge of help flooded in. They were working in the garage all day and logging progress and researching late into the night. The lights kept going off in the garage every hour. It was cold and greasy in there. Now, taking Joe's lead, the volunteers were pushing their own limits.


But then my sister-in-law offered another simple gesture. She sent cookies. Homemade. Lemon. Cookies.When I called Joe to ask how it was going, all he could say was, "We have cookies! Jak sent lemon cookies!" The hope and vitality was back in his voice.


Joe's secret weapon is a large group of volunteers who offer whatever they can in support. It may be small---like baking cookies---or big---like taking a week off work and flying in to build.


We believe. We believe in WikiSpeed.


If you want to see what we have been up to, friend us on Facebook or follow us on the Team Site. The link is at the top of the page.

Haiku 1

Our sister Ruth is the haiku goddess of the family. Please enjoy her poetry.


100 miles . . .
Long distance on one gallon?
Can YOUR car do this?

We Did It! PIAXP in Detroit, Here WikiSpeed Comes!

This just in:

Joe and WIKISPEED Team – you did it . . .

Congratulations!

On behalf of the Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE, I would like to welcome you and your vehicle to the upcoming Shakedown event at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, MI.

After careful consideration of your submitted materials, the Technical Team has accepted your 3rd Technical Deliverable. Your scorecard from TD3 is attached . . . Thank you for the additional information . . . Well done!

You will be regularly receiving, and should have received, some additional information regarding Shakedown in the last day. This information will cover the inspection checklist and a list of items to bring to registration.

We are almost there . . . See you at MIS for Shakedown!!

Warm Regards,

Julie

Julie Zona | Director, Team Development & Relations, Progressive Automotive X PRIZE

Smooosh

I remember growing up watching the Wide Wide World of Sports. The announcer would boom out "The thrill of victory . . ." and then he would growl, ". . . and the agony of defeat!"


WikiSpeed hit a wall today. Literally. We have hit several figurative walls in the past few weeks. We had a broken axle, wiring weirdness, and an overheated engine, but this was different. This was spectacular. And just like the skier on the Wide Wide World of Sports, it made us all cringe.


This is what Joe wrote:

WikiSpeed and I were introduced to a course cement wall. All people involved are fine, no injuries (just a scratch on my head, maybe a bruise). Wiki's crush zones worked exactly as calculated, which is reassuring. I do need to figure how to get a few hard-to-obtain parts here same day---I'll be making parts and reassembling tomorrow.


So what happened? I was going wide on a turn to clear some track debris (some screws sticking up out of a broken hinge/board that I thought could puncture Wiki's tires) and realized I was going too wide and headed for the wall. I panic stopped---stomped on the clutch and brake. Well, in Wiki, due to a late-night wiring incident, the accelerator is were the clutch would be. I stomped on the gas and the brake. The gas won, and I accelerated into the wall. The front-right wheel and bumper took the load, crushing neatly and in order of aluminum grade---softest bumper first, then intermediary post, and barely a deformation on the final absorption barrier before communicating load to the much more rigid frame/passenger cell. The tie-rod end flexed beautifully---with a yield strength about half its ultimate strength---preventing the steering rack from banging my legs. The expensive Skunk2 ProC custom damper package was also a casualty, unfortunately, and I'm not quite sure where or how I'll get one of those by tomorrow, but I'm definitely gonna try.

I think the thing that strikes me most about this is that Joe seems to always hear one voice in his head. It is always about "The thrill of victory!" It is victory for good gas mileage, victory for living green, victory for crush zones. It is victory for the average consumer. It may even be victory in the X PRIZE.


So go, Joe, go! Bring on the 100 mpg supercar. WikiSpeed for the win!

FAQ

We have been getting some great questions from the press. Popular Mechanics contacted us and asked for some information, so I thought that I would include the answers here!


Who is Team WIKISPEED's primary sponsor?
Alibre Design (CAD), AmpsTech (FEA/CFD), and Skunk2 Racing are primary sponsors. The car is primarily funded by Joe, with a Wikipedia-like army of volunteers. His wife and he were saving for a house in Seattle and decided together that instead they would fund this vehicle company and attempt to level up the environmental friendliness of automotive transportion.


Approximately how much does the car weigh?
1300 lbs dry. When done, we hope it will be the lightest four-person vehicle ever to be fully road legal and mass-produced. We still have some sound deadening to do and other creature comforts to add in, so the for-public-sale version (unless people option for a type-R ultralight version) will likely weigh 1500lbs dry.


What type of chassis is used?
We use an aluminum extrusion chassis with a hot-swappable power-train module. With three grades of aluminum used, we can optimize material properties by part location. We hope for this to be the lightest chassis ever to pass all federally mandated impact/crash scenarios, from offset frontal impact to roof crush.


If someone wanted to buy the SGT01, how much would it cost?
We have a target of $17,995.00 USD. We are trying to price compete with existing economy vehicles, with an even lower total cost of onwership.


What is the car's best tested MPGe to date?
Currently all mpg's are simulated. UDDS (city) models show us 104 mpg, HWFET (highway) models show us 114 mpg. Test data is coming in now, and we may have useful test data for you in May, depending on your article timeline.


How fast does the car accelerate from 0-6 mph?
The car can achieve 60 mph in the five-second range, but that uses quite a bit of fuel. At 100+ MPGe running, 0-60 comes in less than fifteen seconds.


What is the car's top speed?
The calculated top speed is 149 mph.

Welcome to the Wonderful World of WikiSpeed! This project truly has taken on a life of its own. Let me explain.

My brother, Joe Justice, is just an average Joe. He has a lovely wife, two cats, a great job doing techy stuff. 

But there is another side to Joe that we, his family, knew about . . . but tried to ignore. Joe loves SPEED. In college he bought a civic, then a different civic, then a del sol, with which he did super shifty things on the way from Laramie, Wyoming, to Boulder, Colorado, for Kung Fu class. On his honeymoon, he rented high-performance cars just to see how they would handle on the winding roads of Oahu. When visiting his wife's family in Japan, he scheduled a side trip to the Honda manufacturing lines for the NSX and insight, to take pictures of suspensions, and to eat in their gourmet restaurants.


I kid you not. He loves this stuff.


So in 2006 Joe decided to build a high-performance car for under $17,000 in his garage.


Then it happened . . .


He heard about the Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE, a competition to create a 100mpg car for mass production. As he reviewed the criteria, the pieces began to fall in line.

1. His existing design met the preliminary criteria.
2. His agile programing skills could be put to use here. He could evaluate and change the design at regular intervals to meet competition deadlines and performance criteria.
3. With a background in lean/agile project management and modular engineering, he could split the big work into smaller tasks and have volunteers all over the country (and a few abroad) work on pieces of the big picture.
4. The prize money was nothing to sneeze at.
5. His family are green freaks! (His mom and step-dad raise worms, for Pete's sake!)

And so the process began, in secret, in his garage.