EV experience so far - R-pod Owners Forum (2024)

Yeah but no pottie or shower, so my wife would veto it.

I did take her to look at one of these.

https://www.theimportguys.com/product-page/1996-isuzu-elf-camper

At 16 feet its a whole meter longer than the Citroen but still shorter than my Highlander. And, it has a bathroom.

It's an ultra reliable Izuzu N series which is still sold in north America so parts are available unlike that French truck.

2.4 liter 4wd old school diesel churns out a whopping 90hp or so. I could run it on biofuel. All I'd need is some used veggie oil from Mickey D's and I could drive it around being nice and green smelling like french fries....

20 years ago I could probably have talked her into it. But now we're too old to be climbing up and down all night from that overcab bed.

I don't know that mine was the lightest, but it was lighter than all my buds with Long-EZs. It started at a bit over 800 lbs, but after a couple of cross-country trips, I realized that any notion of IFR flying was out of the question. So I removed some "cruff" (go back anf re-read what Burt thought about cruff or excess crap in the plane). Removing the vacuum system and gyros alone got me a little over 35 lbs (vacuum pump, plumbing, and gyros). I resigned myself to day-VFR and used it as a purely pleasure plane, and had way more fun. Flying around the west, day-VFR was very friendly. The 1500 lb gross weight was slightly more than "book", but I had the pre-fab landing gear, and never had an issue. The FAA still has it on the record not far from here, so I think it's doing OK for an experimental that was completed in 1988.

2018 Vista Cruiser 19BFD (2018-
2012 Vibe 6503 (2014-2019)
2009 r-pod 171 (2009-2014)
Middle Tn
2014 Ram 1500 Quad cab

GG, sounds like you did have a super light EZ, and didn't just set the GW at something ridiculous like some O320/360 EZ builders did. Good for you.

In my case here in the East IFR capability greatly increased the utility of my airplane. Id estimate I went from around a 40-50 percent chance of being able to fly a particular mission to 80 plus percent. That's bc most of the bad weather in the west comes in the winter when icing conditions are likely to keep light aircraft grounded anyway, while in the East in the summer most of the time you will have to cross a front at some point on a flight of of any length.

Still, I would think that if you lived on the CA coast filing IFR to VFR on top would be very useful to get above that marine layer. That's usually only a few hundred feet thick so about the most benign IMC possible, even for a plane as light on the controls as an EZ. In the East "California IFR" is considered a bit of a joke.

For me the RV was a great choice. Im not a builder, so an RV being conventional riveted aluminum is much more inspectable pre purchase than a glass aircraft. And there are tens of thousands of them flying with active owner and factory support and parts availability. The thing flies great and climbs like crazy, I get over 1500 feet per minute all the way up to 9k, and that is with 2 on board. A lot of fun and still plenty of panel space for all the cool IFR gizmos. Not a bad instrument platform either, although I do have an autopilot, which I personally consider to be a requirement for IMC flight in any plane. No vacuum systems any more btw, everyone uses EFIS nowadays, cheaper and far lighter.

Its cool with me if the conversation ranges off the original topic, it's more interesting that way and this after all the general discussion category. Airplanes don't have anything to do with EVs either...

I agree with the comments re the throw away economy we live in. Especially irritating to me the overuse of plastics which don't get recycled, ending up in the landfills if we're lucky and the oceans more than likely. We're all eating tiny bits of plastic all the time now, that crap is in everything. Who knows what the long term effects of that will be? Why do we now have all this plastic packaging thats incredibly hard to get open and fills up our garbage cans? We never needed it before...

The solution I think is the kind of thing the EU has done with E-waste, which is probably the worst single waste stream because there's so much of it and a lot of it is hazardous. They have the WEEE and RoHS directives, which make it the responsibility of the manufacturers, importers, distributors, and waste handlers to properly recycle their products so they don't just wind up in the landfills or get dumped in 3rd world countries with no standards.

As mjlrpod says these businesses are the ones profiting from the sale of these products, and they are also the ones who control the designs and materials usage and end of life processing, so are the only ones able to build them to last and be reprocessed when they do eventually become unusable.

Of course the corporations which are in the hot seat because of WEEE don't like it, it cuts into their profits. When I was a design engineer for a solar manufacturer and WEEE was first introduced, I was tasked to evaluate what would be required to comply. It would have been a lot of work in redesign but essenially all the materials in our products could be recovered. The actual product cost would only be a little higher. But even a few pennies is too much for the corporate bottom line...

So unfortunately, and sorry if this steps over the line into politics in some folks view, but for this kind of thing to work it cant be loca It has to be done on the federal level, and our elected representatives take so much money from corporate interests that something like WEEE would never get through Congress. It would just be labelled as government overreach and die in committee.

So whether we want to or not we will continue to to buy the cheap throwaway junk and toss it in the landfill when were done with it until something changes in Washington. Don't hold your breath.

Or we can do without the products. That's what I try to do to small extent, and also because I'm cheap. Im typing this on a 15 year old laptop, apologies for my frequent typos, a lot of my keys are sticky....

To try to put all the different ways in which humans are using and overusing the planets resources in perspective there is an interesting methodology called the ecological footprint, which evaluates human resource use in terms of biocapacity of the cropland, forest land, grazing land, urbanized space, fisheries, fresh water, ability to absorb the CO2, etc of the ppl that live there. This is put in terms of surface area so can be used to compare countries as well as the whole planet.

The last thing I read it looked like humans were now using something like 1.8 earths overall, meaning that we are living on reserve capacity, borrowing from our children and grandchildren by about a factor of two. I'm sure that's not much of a surprise to anyone.

Japan being as crowded as it is needs about 8 Japans, which it supplies by imports. We need about 2.4 Americas. China is about the same as the US, more crowded but less per capita consumption, so far. Europe would need about 2 Europes.

But here's the more scary thing: if everyone was as affluent as Americans, we would need 5 planets! And you better believe most countries would like to have what the highly developed countries have. Who's going to stop them? Resource wars are nothing new, we already fight wars over oil, and the Nazis invaded Poland and Russia for lebensraum.

So unless youre an Elon Musk fanboy and think Mars is gonna solve our problems, we need to get our act together or our descendants will not look upon us very fondly 100 years from now.