Onwards and outwards

A good evening of pulling stuff out the car.

The joy of unscrewing a car aerial.

The long and snakey washer fluid tube.

Top tip don't go near airbags unless you absolutely know what you're doing. Our advise is just don't do it. Get a professional to do it.

A series of things were removed from the roof lining in order to remove the roof lining. You know the kind of things up there, sun glasses holders, handles, lights, sun visors. There was nothing that couldn't be removed with your basic tools, screwdriver, hammer, secateurs, spoons, scissors etc.

Bingo! Out it goes. Such a large thing that weighs so incredibly little it turns out.

After much heated debate the light unit is going back for now. The classic trade-off of being able to see versus having a car as light as possible.

Windscreen wiper on the floor. The kind of thing we've come to expect.

Weight savings

Car aerial and miscellaneous screws/bits 175g

Above the door handles 220g

Single interior light 64g

Double interior light unit 194g

More miscellaneous bits (mostly wiper related) 90g

Sun visor 347g

Other sun visor 350g

Windscreen wiper 570g

Roof lining 2200g

Sub-total: 4.21kg

Added to the previous 117kg

Total: 121.1kg

This is the weight of an adult Tiger, the biggest of the big cats. If that is difficult to comprehend we won't hold it against you, they are really heavy. You can also think of it as the weight of two average human people.

Comments

Tailgate trial

Our quest to 'lightweight' the car continues. In our world ''lightweight' is a verb. This time it's the tailgate. Time to get this trim off. No screws to be seen so where do we start? There are a couple of caps we can pop off to hopefully reveal some screws that'll get us started. Nope. So there's this other cover that's going to pop off and hopefully show us how to undo this thing. Turn's out it's just access to the lock/latch. Interesting but not helpful. Time to get brave. Turns out that if you prise the trim away from the metal it will come off, it's a bunch of poppers like the door card and you have to work your way around. But it's really unpleasant pulling it off because it takes a lot of effort or leverage to pull it apart and flexes and feels as though it's going to break. In this case it came apart with a series of loud cracks but miraculously nothing was damaged. There are actually two parts to this. The thinner...

An adventure is born

One year on from a chance conversation sparked all this into life. But we never took the time to explain, what exactly is this? LeafGT is now officially a thing, and not only a thing, but a thing that is already resulting in more things, as well as future potential things. It is probably about time we explained what LeafGT is. By far and away the most common asked question I get asked about our blog is "what is this/what is the goal of this?" The answer is simple. Firstly, LeafGT is the name given to our affordable zero emission motorsport adventure, and our goal is to find great ways to explore that journey and have fun along the way. Why a Leaf? As far as EVs go, right now and in all likeliness for the foreseeable future, Nissan Leafs and in particular used Leafs are affordable, reliable and abundant. But can we make them fast? The follow up question we usually get asked is "what is the end goal?". So the short and not very satisfying answer is there isn't one...

LeafGT

Search This Blog