Yeah, that’s primarily the design I was thinking of, since I’m more familiar with the mechanics of Bucky fuller’s car than I am a Reliant or a Corbin.
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- Three-wheel cars seem to be more of a Euro thing, and mostly a British thing, that I have seen. The Reliant Robin was very-much an assembly-line-built product, but there is a long history of 3-wheeled kit vehicles in the UK. They can often handle (turn harder) slightly better than 4-wheel cars, because [in aggressive driving in a car with a firm suspension] braking into or accellerating out of a turn, a 4-wheel car will have one wheel off the ground anyway.
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- The GM lean machine was never produced and sold as a consumer product. The practical problem with leaning trikes is that the “leaning” and the “front wheel turning” must be kept mechanically separate (as they were in the Lean Machine), and then operating them manually becomes a hassle. Computer/automatic control is financially feasible now, but the vehicle’s safety is dependent upon the leaning mechanism never failing, so the potential manufacturer liability involved is not attractive. If you mechanically link the left-right motion of the front wheel to the leaning aspect, then the vehicle’s steering loses its dynamic stability.
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These guys sell a number of kits and plans in the US on how to build a three wheeled car.
The Lean Machine always struck me as a rather impractical design, anyway, since it was a single seater, so I doubt that there would be much demand for them, even if they had been mass produced. Even with a motorcycle you can have a passenger.
On the topic of three wheeled cars, what was Sam Lowery (Jonathan Pryce) driving in the movie Brazil?
IIRC, that was a Messerschmitt. Though knowing Terry Gilliam, it could have been something he had made special for the film.
I just looked at some pics. I think you are correct, it does appear to be the same car, but the one in the movie had a little add-on, the thing that kind of looked like a small jet engine.