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@projectneodrive

Project Neodrive

Bridging the gap toward sustainable personal mobility

🌍 Project Neodrive

A radical redisign of urban mobility

Project Neodrive is an open, collaborative effort to design a new class of ultra-efficient, human-centered vehicles for urban travel. vehicles that are as easy to use as a bike, as comfortable as a small car, and 10–50× more energy-efficient.

We aim to build vehicles that make switching away from cars not a sacrifice, but an upgrade : cleaner, lighter, cheaper, and more joyful.


🚴‍♂️ What We’re Building

Neodrive is not just one vehicle, it’s a research platform. Our first prototype is a light electric vehicle (LEV) under 50 kg, classified legally as a bike.

  • Pedal-by-wire: The pedals don’t drive the wheels mechanically — they measure input effort, and the motor compensates for system losses to provide a “superhuman” but still bike-like experience.
  • Efficient: Target energy use is less than 10 Wh/km (≈ 150 km range on a 1 kWh battery).
  • Comfortable and practical: Weather protection, upright seating, space for a passenger or cargo.
  • Sustainable materials: Recyclable PET sheets, aluminum/steel, and wood with the goal of being easily repairable.
  • Accessible: Designed to be affordable, open-source, and modular.

The project’s end goal is not just a product it's an experiment to see how to design and think tommorow's vehicle.

🌱 Why We’re Doing It

Transportation is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, congestion, and wasted energy. Cars are overbuilt for most daily trips — often carrying a single person and hundreds of kilograms of steel through short city journeys.

We believe that:

  • The future of cities is lighter, quieter and smarter.
  • Every person should be able to move efficiently, safely, and comfortably without a car.
  • Open, interdisciplinary design accelerates innovation engineers, designers, urbanists, and makers can co-create the next generation of vehicles.

Neodrive exists to prove that sustainable transport can be elegant, exciting, and practical and to share everything we learn.


🧩 Current Repositories

Here’s an overview of what’s currently under the Project Neodrive organization:

Repository Description
efficiency-frontier Compared the efficiency / energy and power need of different class of vehicle
Need 4 Tilt tool to help decide if we need a tilting mechanism and it's impact
Vehicle CAD V1 FreeCAD Implementation the vehicle 3D part
Battery CAD V1 FreeCAD Implementation the Battery pack 3D part

🤝 How to Contribute

Neodrive is open to anyone who shares our curiosity and ambition. You can contribute by:

  • Prototyping and testing components.
  • Modeling, simulation, and optimization.
  • UI/UX design or human–machine interaction.
  • Documenting and communicating results.
  • Bringing interdisciplinary ideas (urban design, psychology, economics…).

🧠 Guiding Principles

  1. Open Source Everything Transparency accelerates progress.
  2. Design for Humans, Not Machines Comfort, safety, and joy first.
  3. Sufficiency Over Excess Minimal energy, maximal utility.
  4. Repair, Reuse, Reimagine Low tech materials and modular design.
  5. Build, Test, Iterate Science, not slogans.

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  1. efficiency-frontier efficiency-frontier Public

    this repo contains script to explore the limit of efficiency of wheeled vehicle and compare them to the current existing one.

    Python 1

  2. need4Tilt need4Tilt Public

    Simulation to evaluate the impact of tilting vs non tilting narrow track vehicle on trips

    HTML 1

  3. neodrive-cad-battery-v1 neodrive-cad-battery-v1 Public

    cad for the battery pack (45 cell 20Ah 3.2V, 15s 3p, LiFePO4, 2.88 Kwh)

  4. neodrive-cad-vehicle-v1 neodrive-cad-vehicle-v1 Public

    mechanical implementation in freecad of the v1 of our vehicle

  5. website website Public

    https://projectneodrive.ch

    HTML

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