Consumerism Goes EV: The Electric Shopping Cart Car
Filed Under: green automotive technology, Humor, zoomilife.com on August 15, 2009
by Aaron Turpen, Zoomilife.com
You heard right. It’s an electric shopping cart that’s also a car. Appropriately, it’s named the LOLrioKart. Of course, it was invented by an MIT student (named Charles Guan) in his obviously abundant spare time.
I’ll be honest. I’d drive one of these to the grocery store. It’s pretty damn cool.
So while Guan is normally a battle robot builder (competition-spec, mind you), he apparently got bored with that and decided to try his hand at EV building. My guess is that his school work at MIT is too light and he’s in dire need of distractions to keep him from getting into trouble. MIT is well known as a party school, you know…
He started out with a NiCad battery pack and some parts he scrounged. The batteries didn’t last long, but luckily A123 had donated some li-nanophoshate batteries to MIT for research use. What better research than building a shopping cart car?
I can’t think of any.
So the 33Ah battery pack is wired at 48v and powers a Briggs & Stratton ETEK DC pancake motor, turning a custom-built rear differential and the two rear wheels.
Of course, building it wasn’t good enough, so Guan and his friends had to try it out and, lucky for us, took video. The only thing that would have made this LOLrioKart more funny? If Guan had grown a mustache and wore a hat…
Go to Zoomilife.com and check out the videos of the LOLrioKart in action!
