Lane Electric Vehicle Association

By Mark Murphy

In case you haven't noticed, we have entered an age of transition. Looming over us are profound changes that will forever change the way we live on this planet. If we survive we may thrive, but in a culture nothing like the one we grew up in. One of the obvious clues is the rising cost of energy. This situation comes as a nasty surprise to the naive, now stubbornly bankrupting themselves to fill the tank of their shiny new gussler.

We really can't blame them for sucking on the gas pump, for over fifty years we have become conditioned to live our life around the car. Cheap gas allowed us to travel excessively, spontaneously and up until recently, without consequence. Today, the comparatively modest cost of fuel is driving a growing panic that threatens our economy and life stye. Many will see this as a loss, a retreat from a higher standard of living and the "good old days". They will resist and resent the price they pay to retain their V8, and imagine insidious conspiracies rather than blame their own indulgence. They have simply not been paying attention. What will they do when gas doubles again in a few more years?

Mark Murphy/Blue Sky Design

I decided to develop the BugE as a street legal version of my Aerocoupe electric racer kits (ElectrathonAmerica.org) I’ve sold to schools around the country. These electrathon class racers have introduced hundreds of students to the efficient use of electric power. Perhaps I could do the same thing with the general public...

The key feature needed to be a suspension system, something the racers could not afford due to weight. Drawing inspiration from Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion car of the 1930’s, I designed a simple scissor action system that used one shock absorber to suspend the entire vehicle. It also provided the lateral stability so critical to a three-wheeled vehicle.

The design allows the front axle and wheels to support the vehicle upright, yet move vertically suspended by the shock absorber at the bottom. The rear single wheel along with the chassis rides over bumps and is suspended by the shock absorber from the top. This allows the shock to respond to either the rear wheel or the front wheels, or all of them together.

A few weeks before the parade, Mark and I began talking about gathering together the people we knew who had electric vehicles to make an entry in the Eugene Celebration parade. When I made out the application, I arbitrarily called us the "Lane Electric Vehicle Association," simply because the app asked for an organization's name and I wanted to become associated with other EVA's, perhaps even link to the national EVA in the future. I wanted us to continue after the parade, and come back even stronger next year.

At first, we were just talking one-to-one on the phone or e-mail, then we had a meeting of six people on my front lawn on Sept. 2, the week before the parade. We were brainstorming ideas for the banner slogan and decoration, making a list of who was coming, deciding how to do e-mail, and nailing down details about insurance certification, our assembly time and place.

During the next week, Mark attempted to get a single giant balloon, and we had to settle on 50 balloons which Scotty stuffed into his pickup canopy on his way home from work on Friday. I got paper banners printed on flourescent yellow paper (cheap!), from huge PDF files I created in Photoshop. I also set up the Yahoo group, and Joshua got to work right away on creating our cool web site.