Clarification for Laser Focus World

Written by Tom Nugent on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

Part of a story today at Laser Focus World about our recent vehicle endurance test is unclear about how high our vehicle climbed:

If LaserMotive’s climber has indeed exceeded the Challenge’s speed and distance requirements, then perhaps it has climbed a vertical distance of more than 1 km, going faster than 5 m/s. (Perhaps the ribbon it climbed was suspended from a large balloon?) Or perhaps the test setup was able to somehow skirt the requirement of an actual 1 km climb.

I’d thought it was clear from the video, but the vehicle ran on our treadmill. Just as people can jog for miles without leaving their basement by using an exercise treadmill, so too can our vehicle climb for many kilometers on our vehicle treadmill without leaving our shop.

To be even clearer, I will state that yes, during the endurance test our system did go much faster than 5m/s (you can hear me say in the video just how fast, but remember this is under battery power), and it did go further than 2 kilometers (on the treadmill).