Peel P50 and Velorex micro-cars

As an ex-auto engineer, I am always interested in anything about cars. As someone that cares deeply about the environment, I also am interested in small light micro-cars because if they are small enough perhaps battery power might make sense. For now I think we will have liquid fuels for quite a while, so you can imagine my delight when Bruce Robinson, my Nissan engineer buddy, sent this funny YouTube link about the Peel P50 microcar. I sent it around to my friends and Dave Ruigh, never to be outdone in off-the-wall information, sent this wonderful link about the fabric-bodied Velorex. Oh, did I mention that you have to speak Czech in order to understand the video? Maybe Bo Lojek will see this and explain the gist of the video. I have picked up that “benzene” means gasoline.

As an aside, one of the many reasons that the auto industry despises the oil industry is that twenty years ago the oil companies would mix benzene into the gas in winter to make the cars start easier. I was told the benzene was stored in huge tanks and underground caverns in Texas. When spring came the oil companies wanted to finish off the remaining benzene they had stocked up, so they would just dump it all into a week’s production of gasoline. The high benzene content and warmer temperatures would make everybody’s cars start knocking and running like crap. And the customers never blamed the gas stations; they always blamed GM and the auto companies.