The Elipse has been the first project we have developed for a possible mass production. This has leaded us to be much more careful with the quality of the finish, with the costs and with the assembly and manufacturing processes. We have also undertaken all the EU directives.
Other of the big challenges of this project has been the enormous amount of plastic parts we have had to design (almost 40 components in ABS, PP, PMMA, etc.). When designing them, we had to take into account numerous factors besides making beautiful and functional parts. Among them, we had to control the thickness, draft angles and demolding directions. We had to take into consideration that all parts remained rigidly joined between them and to the chassis. We had to design the fairing to make it easier to assemble and disassemble it but without making it easily stolen. We have tried minimizing noises with vibrations and also reducing the number of bolts that you can see from outside the fairing.
We have made numerous iterations until we arrived to the first prototype and there still remain some more iterations to get to a preproduction model. In some areas there is still room for improvement. On the one hand, we have the assembly: the manufacturing tolerances of the chassis and those of the fairing aren’t the same and we have had some problems when assembling the plastics to one of the frames. On the other hand, we have the cost reduction: the chassis can be simplified, especially in the area around the steering head and if necessary, we can replace the trailing link front suspension system with a cheaper conventional telescopic fork. We could also replace the headlight, the front turn signals and the speedometer with something that could be already available on the market and that might not require an investment for its manufacturing.
