The City Car, a design project under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is envisioned as a two-seater electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries. It would weigh between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds and could collapse, then stack like a shopping cart with six to eight fitting into a typical parking space. It isn’t just a car, but is designed as a system of shared cars with kiosks at locations around a city or small community.
Admitting the problem, unlike many urban planners and transit advocates, leads to a potential solution:
“The problem with mass transit is it kind of takes you to where you want to go and at the approximate time you want to get there, but not exactly. Sometimes you have to walk up to a mile from the last train or subway stop,” said Franco Vairani, a Ph.D. candidate at MIT’s school of architecture. The City Car is his thesis, though it’s now a group effort involving many others at the school.
This isn’t intended as an individual vehicle, though I don’t see why it couldn’t be:
The City Car business model is akin to a shopping cart or a bike-share program where you return the item to a convenient location when you’re done with it. City Car users would be required to swipe their credit card as a form of deposit. The cars could also be tracked using GPS. To protect privacy, the GPS info could then be deleted once the car is safely returned to a kiosk.
It also is put together fundamentally different:
Unlike a regular car–or even another type of electric car–that has a central power system distributed to its wheels, the City Car is envisioned as a modular system. Each wheel base has its own motor, steering, braking, and suspension system. It then taps into a central system for power, computer control, and some mechanical linkage. These “electric robot wheels” as they are called, would allow the City Car to be collapsible, stackable, and spin on a dime for sideways movement and easier parking, according to Lark. “So you really treat this like a Lego brick you snap onto a cabin,” said Lark.
I like Lego’s.
H/T: Instapundit
