[Treeve]

Gents,

It's not all doom and gloom; there are ways and means of making things happen when your car is legally built to the standards. Unfortunately, what is becoming more evident is that the RTA are asking for full proof of a standard being met (unlike the federal government who have made allowances for low volume manufacturers). Unfortunately, the federal government information is a) incomplete online and b) getting on a bit - i.e. not current.

where the 'unfairness' come in is that the RTA themselves have not published what they will accept, and hence when the engineer comes up with a suitable cost effective method for demonstrating equivalence to an ADR (such as FEA) it is rejected. I am fully aware of the limitations of FEA for crash modelling, and why it doesn't immediately add up to me to use it for impact testing, however, to demonstrate chassis rigidity, and suitability of members it seems to make sense. Also for the clubby community, we have the advantage of Caterham Cars, who have crash tested a 7 to allow them to sell in the US; the chassis design is similar, and the column meets ADR 10/02, however since the RTA have come up with a minimum wheel size of 315mm, it is not possible to fit the required wheel to maintain legality to the ADR.

It's not perfect, but we have a small head start there. With the cobra side of things, well, there's plenty of cobras out there too, and most are high quality, well engineered bits of gear. This issue is not the shape of the car, rather the expectations / requirements (and hence costs) put onto home builders.

If we keep cool heads about it we can get things to go our way, but we need to agree on what our way is, and present it in a combined fashion.

Treeve