ROADS REPORT Tomorrow today The days of dreaming about three-wheeled electric cars, million-mile trucks and robots in wooden shoes are over An affair to remember the car’s front wheels, giving the ZAP enough A Wisconsin man’s 1991 truck zip to go from 0 to 60 mph in just 5.7 sec- has gone through four radia- onds, even faster than a Porsche Boxster. tors, three gas tanks, fi ve trans- The Alias is expected to be in production missions, six water pumps and next year and will cost around $30,000. more than 300 Now sure, three-wheeled tune-ups. But electric cars are great, but what it’s no lemon. All about those rugged individual- that work adds ists who need a vehicle they can BY DAVID up to a very im- The developer of drive over the fallen trees and MATTHEWS pressive fi gure: 1 the TankPitstop landslide debris in their subur- million miles. figured that if ro- ban culs-de-sac? Frank Oresnik bots can milk cows, Not surprisingly, Hummer of Catawba, Wis., they ought to be has the solution. At the Detroit bought his 1991 able to pump gas. Auto Show in January, GM in- Chevrolet Silvera- troduced the Hummer HX, a do in 1996 with two-door Hummer convertible 41,000 miles on that runs on E85 ethanol. the odometer. He began using it for his Of course, the HX is just a con- work as a seafood delivery man, racking cept design, much like last year’s up an average of 85,000 miles a year. Hummer O2 that would have supposedly run After nearly 12 years of faithful service, the truck on algae. Unfortunately, the closest GM ever passed the million-mile mark in February on a delivery got to manufacturing the O2 was its super-ef- trip to Chicago. fi cient 14-mpg Hummer H3. To put this achievement in perspective, 1 million miles is the equivalent of 40 trips around the world, or three Fill ’er up round-trips to the moon. For the time being, if your vehicle can’t be What’s even more impressive is that through all those effi cient, maybe your gas station can. miles, the Chevy’s engine has never been replaced. Dutch engineers have created a gas station Oresnik attributes the truck’s longevity to a little luck robot that allows motorists to refuel without and a lot of maintenance. He also advocates good driving having to get out of their car—or having to habits, like easing on and off the gas, and always giving disturb the teenage attendant napping in the the engine a chance to warm up, even in summer. service center. Oresnik plans on retiring the truck now that he’s hit They call it the TankPitstop (or in Dutch, the milestone. He hopes that General Motors will buy the De TankPitstop) and developers hope to have truck back from him and replace it with a new Chevy. models installed at gas stations throughout Short of that, he fi gures that with all the zeros on the the Netherlands by spring. odometer, he can try to resell it as a low-mileage classic. The robot is essentially a robotic arm at- tached to a fuel pump. It uses multiple sen- Following the green brick road sors and a car database to accurately identify Students at the University of South Australia have a vehicle, home in on and open the gas fl ap, spent the past several years developing what they believe unscrew the cap and fi ll up the tank with gas. is the ideal commuter vehicle. They call it the Trev. The developer of the TankPitstop said 1 The Trev is a three-wheeled electric car that uses /5 the that he was inspired by a robotic cow- energy of a conventional car. It weighs less than 600 lb milking device he observed on a farm. He and can travel 93 miles before needing to be recharged. fi gured that if robots can milk cows, they Not to be outdone, American car maker ZAP (Zero ought to be able to pump gas. After all, the Air Pollution) is putting the fi nishing touches on the ZAP requirements are quite similar: locate the Alias, another three-wheeled electric car. This one, how- right target, squeeze gently and, most im- ever, features two electric motors, one powering each of portant, avoid scratches. 10 • MARCH 2008 • ROADS & BRIDGES WWW.ROADSBRIDGES.COM.