Hybrid Heaven

John Wayland has been putting together electric vehicles for over two decades; one of his favorites is a converted '72 Datsun 1200 that originally weighed just 1587 pounds, and which in the '70s had the best gas mileage of any car sold in America. John's amped up 1200, it should be noted, does a tire-smoking 0-60 in about 4.7 seconds, and rips through the 1/4-mile in nearly 13 seconds flat (for more info check this out on the Web: www.austinev.org/evalbum/035.html). Wayland still prefers the pure electric car, but he needed a vehicle for those times when he required more range. At his wife's urging he began to consider the new hybrids from Toyota and Honda. He had driven the Toyota Prius back in '97 at EVS14 in Orlando, Florida. It was a Japanese right hand drive early production model; with its bland styling and tepid performance the car didn't impress him. Three years later when Honda introduced the Insight hybrid car and Toyota followed with the American debut of the Prius, he decided to take another look.

The Insight is nearly 1000 pounds lighter than the Prius, which seats four. With a strong emphasis on fun and performance, the futuristic looking Insight made the decision easy; it would be a perfect complement to Wayland's electric cars.

The Honda Insight was the first gasoline/electric car sold in America. Arriving nearly 30 years after Wayland's Datsun, it nonetheless shares some similarities with the 1200. They're both lightweight (the Honda is 1878 lbs.) and offer great gas mileage (70 MPG rating for the 2000 model). The moment he took his first test drive, Wayland felt at home, experiencing that distinctive Datsun 1200 "light and tossable feeling" that he loves so much; and like the 1200, it was a blast to drive. Additionally, it has a ULEV status and is one of the cleanest burning gasoline cars in the world. The Honda hybrid is a rolling technological masterpiece, with both a high-tech three cylinder lean burn "VTEC-E" gasoline engine and a powerful electric motor that gets its juice from the car's compact 144v NiMH battery pack (120 "D" cells), charged from the deceleration and braking energy (that conventional cars waste) when the electric motor converts into a generator. Besides high gas mileage and ultra low emissions, the hybrid power plant endows the Insight with surprising torque and excellent acceleration, with the ability to hit 113 mph in 3rd gear (4th and 5th are both overdrives). With its rear wheels set four inches closer together than the front track and its rear fender skirts, the teardrop shaped Insight has the lowest cd (0.25) of any production car in the world. Though it is officially rated at 70 MPG, Wayland says his Insight is a real fume "sniffer" (the owner's nickname for his vehicle) and gets 90+ MPG easily. The Insight's hybrid design, teardrop aerodynamic aluminum body, standout forward-looking appearance, and limited production status made it obvious to Wayland that it would make an incredible sound-off car, the world's first hybrid sound-off car!

Attaining that title wouldn't have been possible without support from Phoenix Gold, MB Quart, and long-time friends: Frank Van Wagner, a.k.a. "Frank the Metal God" who helped with all of the custom metal work. The Metal God is an artisan who can make anything out of flat metal stock, and his work has been featured in all of Wayland's show vehicles, drag cars, and daily street machines. The two have been a team for the past seven years or so. Another friend, Dave McCausland, helped by providing the car's interior purple paint touches. Wayland first met him through their mutual fondness for the Datsun 1200s. McCausland is the owner of "Halsey Collision Center," one of Portland's premier auto body and paint shops.

Lightweight ChampionA high-tech, ultra lightweight, super-efficient machine with features unique to hybrid and electric vehicles begged for a sound system that would be consistent with those characteristics. Wayland went to great lengths to make sure the project was steered in this direction. For example, instead of using standard car amps with their heavy and bulky heatsinks, he chose fan-cooled, lightweight Phoenix Gold ZX400Ti amps that weigh considerably less than comparably powered amplifiers while still offering extremely low distortion at tremendous output power levels. For the front stage speakers, he used lightweight composite framed MB Quarts. Obviously there would be no monster subwoofers sporting massive magnets and requiring large, bulky and heavy enclosures. Wayland opted for smallish seven pound MB Quart "SBR" type (small box reference) 12" subs that required just .75-1 cubic ft. of air space per driver. Even the materials used for the amp chamber and subwoofer enclosure were chosen with lightness in weight as a priority. The power supply, too, was designed to be compact yet very powerful.

Being that the Insight is a limited production rarity, Wayland would not allow any drilling of holes in the car's body. No chopping, cutting, or any other kind of mutilation of the body, for that matter either. Only items that were removable and replaceable, such as a bracket, a specific part, could be modified.

The finished sound system looks pretty simple at first glance, as it is a basic three-speaker arrangement with just two 6.5" speakers up front and the dual 12" sub in the rear, but on closer inspection, you'll notice the many details. All buttoned up, there are just a couple of clues that hint at what lurks in this unique little car.

Getting WiredThe first thing fellow Insight owners will notice is that the stock blend-in grey plastic perforated grills for the front speakers were replaced by black MB Quart grills with a clean looking satin black plastic trim ring. At first, it looked as though the trim rings would fit right into the recessed circular indentations in the door panels where the stock grills had been, but as it turned out they were too large and were replaced by an older MB Quart version. After modifying the door panel's speaker wells (using a Dremel tool) to make clearance for the magnets/baskets of the beefy MB Quarts, the speakers became a drop-in item. The door panels look better than stock, and the see-through black grills with their classy MB Quart logos make it possible to clearly see the angled titanium tweeter.

Getting the front stage wired had its difficulties. Honda has the doors pre-wired for the factory speakers and this is perfect for the stock speakers or aftermarket speakers run at modest power levels, but the factory wires are only 20 gauge size, hardly robust enough to pass the planned 100+ watts RMS to each front speaker. Also, unlike conventional coaxial speakers that have a simple capacitor mounted to the backside of the speaker frame to serve as the high pass crossover for the tweeter, the MB Quarts are a bi-wired type coaxial speaker, meaning that the tweeter and woofer each have their own pair of leads that need to be connected to an external, more complex, "competition style" crossover. Both doors would need a total of four wires running into each of them, not the usual two. Wayland knew that he would be mounting the crossovers in the rear hatch area, so this dictated that the four-wire cable would have to be run from the hatch area up to the door. He used 15 gauge "Phoenix Gold" quad-wired speaker cable, a thick but flat four-conductor ribbon affair. The job was made more difficult because Wayland had to remove each front fender in order to pass the fat speaker wires through the kick panel.

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