Britain has a brand new light-weight sports activities automotive, the Mika Meon, and it has given me new hope in regards to the potential of electrification inside this explicit micro-corner of the market.
Robin Corridor and his workforce opened up the Mika workplace and workshop premises once I visited to check the Meon not too long ago. Corridor is a design engineer by commerce. His firm, Corridor Engineering and Design, has been constructed on computer-aided design, which he does for all method of purchasers.
He has a 3D printer in his workplace kitchen for producing prototype components and a 3D scanner for the reverse engineering of present ones. So there’s nothing antiquated, backwards and even notably abnormal about this clean-sheet electrical seashore buggy design.
“Usually, the makers of area of interest sports activities vehicles like ours depend on plenty of components bin parts,” Corridor advised me.
“We’ve taken some off the shelf for the Meon, the place that is smart [ball joints, bushings and minor cabin components, for example]. However the place we are able to get a bonus by designing our personal components – making them ourselves too, typically – we are going to. That manner, we needn’t adapt one half as a way to squeeze in one other; we get precisely what we wish.”
The Meon’s brake calipers, as an illustration, are of Corridor’s personal design, machined from billet on web site. Its entrance hub carriers are likewise proprietary, giving Corridor final management of attachment factors and front-axle geometry (he beforehand designed the entrance hubs for the R50-generation Mini hatchback).
Corridor is the type of one who takes Henry Royce’s outdated maxim of “take the very best that exists and make it higher; if it doesn’t exist, design it” reasonably significantly.
Mika’s chief technician, Dave Watt, confirmed me how the Meon’s chassis and axles come collectively. Lengths of tube- and box-section metal are available one door, completed chassis ultimately exit of one other and plenty of reducing, bending, bolting and welding of steel – a lot of it completed by hand – goes on in between.