La Bala vs Milanda

I'm not sure how many of you follow these cars but both seem to be aimed at the same market. If you were going to build one which would you do and why?

Thanks for your thoughts.

http://www.midlana.com/

http://www.grabercars.com/

They're both FWD? No comprende.

The second one is prettier, the first one is cooler... which is cheaper which would perform better?

La Bala was, IIRC, originally conceived on these boards...check the archives for a guy whose handle was "sgraber". Definitely Mid engine rear drive.

psteav wrote: La Bala was, IIRC, originally conceived on these boards...check the archives for a guy whose handle was "sgraber". Definitely Mid engine rear drive.

Both of those guys are really active on locostusa.com. Steve also uses 'sgraber' on that forum. The other guy goes by 'KB58'

I spend a lot of time on Locost USA...

mtn wrote: They're both FWD? No comprende.

No, they both use FWD drivetrains moved behind the passengers to create an MR. Much the same as Toyota did with the MR2 (Corolla and Camry drivetrain donors) and GM with the Fiero (Cavalier donor).

KB58 is the fellow who built Kimini - which was on the cover of GRM a few years back. Both interesting, and I think Midlana's builder learned a whole lot about design from Kimini.

Sultan wrote: If you were going to build one which would you do and why?

I'd build the MidLana. Because it's slightly lighter, more purposeful looking, has a full roll cage, and I think it would make for a better track-day toy. It also reminds me of the 'Fang F1', a sports car/kit car by a (sort of) well known, low-volume Australian manufacturer called Nota.

However, before either of those two, I'd prefer to build a Lotus-7 replica.

ReverendDexter wrote:

mtn wrote: They're both FWD? No comprende.

No, they both use FWD drivetrains moved behind the passengers to create an MR. Much the same as Toyota did with the MR2 (Corolla and Camry drivetrain donors) and GM with the Fiero (Cavalier donor).

Ahh.... I knew I was missing something stupid there.

There is also dpcars.net

AWD hayabusa power FTW!

Since completing my Locost in 2007, I have been planning on building a scratch-built mid engine low cost sports car.

What I like about the Midlana is that the simple body work suggests that it would be easy to build and could be built for less money than La bala

What I like about La bala is that it looks more like a "real" sports car.

I decided that I am going to build something of my own design with the following constraints in mind:

a) No fiberglass bodywork (messy and time consuming)

b) Ease of build and low cost as a priority

I have been working on the computer model for a few months now. Here is how it looks so far:

http://picasaweb.google.com/marktsui1975/MarkSMIDIXMidEngineLocost#

Mark