Customer Stories

Summary
As the family car rumbled along the highway en route to the family vacation destination, a young Tim Miller would see the large trucks and other vehicles and wonder about better, more efficient ways to travel. It took a few years, but Miller has been pursuing that childhood passion for transportation at the company he founded since 2006.

Based in Portland, Oregon, Green Lite Motors has been prototyping a plug-in hybrid vehicle that promises the comfort and safety of a small car, the fuel efficiency and convenience of a motorcycle, and the small environmental footprint of an electric vehicle. Equipped with both a battery- and gas-powered engine, the Green Lite Motors vehicle aims to provide commuters up to 250 miles of range, 100-mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency, and an enclosed environment to keep them warm in winter, cool in summer, and safer all year round.

“Our vehicle is designed for people making frequent commutes in metropolitan areas,” says Miller. “With a steel safety cell, four-point safety harnesses, and air bags, it is much safer than a motorcycle, but you can still take it in the express lane, which saves time on your daily commute, and can park in any small downtown parking spot, all while being much kinder to the environment.”

With software provided through the Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program, Green Lite Motors has moved from using more expensive and time-consuming physical prototypes to using Autodesk® Inventor® software and Autodesk® Showcase® 3D presentation and rendering software, both part of the Autodesk® Product Design Suite Ultimate, to streamline designs, attract investors, and speed the vehicle’s time to market. Early designs took several months and lots of experimentation, where the latest design—a virtual prototype of a simplified, lighter, manufacturing-ready version—took just a few weeks.

The Challenge

The unique design of the Green Lite Motors vehicle centers around the patent-pending front suspension system. The three-wheeled vehicle has two wheels up front and one in the rear. The front-end design means the vehicle leans smoothly into turns, just like a motorcycle. The vehicle also stands up automatically at stops and low speeds, enabling a full enclosure that wraps the driver in comfort and safety. These innovations combine for a smaller carbon footprint and a more stable vehicle, while also adding some modeling challenges to be worked out using Autodesk software.

While Green Lite Motors is currently creating the fourth-generation prototype of its unique vehicle, the company did not fully embrace Digital Prototyping until the third generation, relying on physical prototypes for the first two versions. Peyton McCann, Green Lite Motor’s industrial designer, knew there was a better way of working.

“We had some very basic files of the initial prototype that had been created using other software,” says McCann. “I pulled up the machine assembly to find 200 disconnected parts sort of floating around. I had to go in and constrain every piece of the model to make it work. I learned a lot about the machine, but it was pretty tedious and slow.”

Combining some experience with Autodesk Inventor plus a week of training in the software, McCann knew enough about its benefits to make Miller a proposition: “I told Tim it would make sense for me to re-create the model from the ground up using Inventor,” he says. “That way, we could have full manipulation of the virtual machine as well as all of the great Inventor tools. I used the physical prototype and the basic software model to create a full digital prototype for manufacturing.”

Download the Story

Green Lite Motors Customer Story (pdf - 135Kb)