How CLEVER can a car get?  A European consortium is working on developing the perfect urban car for two people; a car that is small, lightweight, and will have very low emissions.

CLEVER is short for Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport.  This is a concept car that is being developed by a european consortium, the Technical University of Berlin, Institution of Motor Vehicles, that was formed in 2002, and is funded by the EU (European Union). 

Yes, they did work hard to get that acronym.  Normally, the shortened would have been CLEVUT but that doesn’t spell anything, so substituting a few letters made sense.

Just like the Tango and the Lumeneo Smera, the CLEVER, is approximately three feet wide (one meter) and a little over nine feet long (three meters).  The CLEVER is also expected to have two seats one behind the other as the other small cars do, and is also supposed to ride like a motorcycle.

Unlike the Lumeneo Smera, this three wheeler has one front wheel and two back wheels, more like a tricycle Harley.  The car is expected to lean like a motorcycle as it goes around curves, similar to the Smera, but the CLEVER uses a hydraulic rolling system to achieve the tilt, which can reach 45 degrees. 

The CLEVER will be powered by a single-cylinder 230-cc natural-gas engine that will be able to achieve speeds a little over 62 mph (100 kph).  The car will be able to go from 0 to 37 mph (60 kph) in 7 seconds.  The total emissions will be 60 g/km which is significantly less than most vehicles emit.

The car is expected to be able to travel about 124 miles or 200 km on one tank of natural gas.  The Lumeneo Smera should go 93 miles on a charge and the Tango is expected to go about 200 miles with a fully charged lithium ion battery.  The CLEVER fall in the middle on distance per tank or charge.

Rather than a steel frame, the CLEVER uses a lightweight aluminum frame with a plastic body.  As a three wheel vehicle, the CLEVER is considered a motorcycle and therefore exempt from the safety standards of required of cars in the EU and U.S. 

But the designers of the CLEVER have incorporated many safety features normally found in cars and a few that make this urban car unique.  The driver and passenger have special three-point shoulder-harness seatbelts and the driver has a two stage airbag.  The seats have been constructed to absorb any energy caused by a crash and the frame has special modifications that would allow the driver and passenger to survive a crash with minimal injuries.

The front wheel is designed to buckle and be shoved back into a special housing in the case of an accident from the front.  The dynamics are such that minimal damage would occur to the driver’s legs.  In the case of a rear end collision, the back wheels would crumple in the middle and actually wrap around the rear of the car as an extra buffer zone.  Because of both of these unique features, the vehicles passengers would sustain very little damage.

Since the vehicle would actually be classified as a motorcycle, most of the safety features required in the EU and US are not required but CLEVER has incorporated many safety anyway.

No one knows if or when this car will actually be produced.  Right now the consortium has developed a number of innovations that would be perfect for other three wheel car designers to consider.  The way the designers have built the CLEVER to withstand a wreck is especially impressive.

Over all, the CLEVER does a good job of living up to its name — even if they did have to distort the underlying words a bit to come up with the acronym.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 1:18 am under Auto, Green Technology.

Read more entries by Susan Wilson.
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