In one of the world’s poorest countries, an American expat uses spare parts to build a electric utility vehicle rich in possibility.
This doesn’t seem like the best place to invent a new automobile.
But that’s what Chris Low is doing. The American expat first visited South Sudan (then part of Sudan) in 2008, when he helped build a center for orphans in a town called Yei, and he’s lived there off-and-on since. He’s had a difficult time with cars there.
“I’ve spent a lot of time fixing vehicles for different organizations I’ve worked with, and it is often an exercise in frustration because spare parts can be very difficult to source and proper mechanics are few and far between.” Amid the SUVs, the vehicle he found most useful was a small 150cc motorised tricycle with a utility bed in the back. But it required repeated rebuilds of the clutch, and was tough going on the rutted roads.
So Low reconsidered the problem. “I am a big believer of the idea of irreducible simplicity,” he says. “I wanted to build something that had the absolute minimum number of parts, especially parts that can’t be sourced locally.”
“I love working in local African metal workshops and seeing the way they can build anything from standard steel sections and scrap,” says Low. True to that vision, he began building a prototype out of angle iron scrapped from a fence. He figured that if he hit upon a basic design that could be locally manufactured, it could also be locally serviced and customized for anything from agricultural work to hauling construction materials to taking the sick to the hospital.
His creation is a four-wheeled vehicle on an articulating frame, an idea inspired by PUG off-road vehicles that have been around since the 1960s. A joint in the middle keeps all four wheels on the ground for traction and stability. But where PUGs and their ilk used an internal combustion engine and complicated drive shafts, Low’s chariot is all-electric, with a motor driving each wheel and a bank of solar panels suspended overhead.
An electric approach has other advantages. Though it’s rich in oil, South Sudan has no refineries, and gasoline supplies are limited. Low and his wife, a doctor in a hospital for women and children, were recently at a refugee camp near the Sudanese border, where gasoline prices approached $30 per gallon. “Other more remote places have no access to petrol at all,” says Low. “Fortunately, the sun is much more reliable than the distribution chain here.” Living off the grid because the grid is unreliable means that Low has plenty of experience installing and repairing photovoltaic panels.
Those batteries lithium ion if available, but the weight of lead-acid boxes will help with traction power 650W motors which were ordered from China, shipped to Uganda, and then delivered to Low in a small airplane. The wheels are Chinese and Indian motorcycle parts, which are widely available and have built-in bearings, brakes, and sprockets, and cost only $65 including chain. By using them in an axle-free design, Low notes, “I have much greater ground clearance than on our Land Cruiser.”
Steering is accomplished by varying the speed of the wheels, through a differential motor control system that’s still in development. And like the finest jet aircraft, Low’s vehicle is 100% fly-by-wire, steered by way of an old Nunchuk controller for a Nintendo Wii gaming console. The first prototype actually used a six-channel transmitter for a radio-controlled model airplane. “This offers me a lot of flexibility, is cheap, and I like the idea of remote control for some of the agricultural applications I am thinking of,” he wrote in his build notes on hackaday.oi. “This area still has a lot of unexploded land mines.”
Low estimates the vehicle has cost him about $3,500 to build with solar panels and batteries accounting for about $2,000 of that sum. Once the design is fully vetted, he plans to release step-by-step build instructions, including cut lists and photographic guides to make the vehicle accessible to people without a technical background.
In 130 years of innovation, automotive designers have bested sand pits, boulders, swamps, snow, trenches, ice, mud, and the inscrutable terrain of other planets. The one obstacle none seem to be able to conquer is poverty.
If that’s a hurdle Chris Low can get his passengers over, then he’ll have designed the world’s most useful utility vehicle.
