MIT Offers City Car for the Masses

MIT's stackable electric car, a project to improve urban transportation will make its debut this week in Milan. "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."

Comments

FlexCar

[WrongMonkey]

Tone the cynicism down. Shared car companies already exist. It works pretty well and they make a profit.

Overkill solution

[ElGanzoLoco]

The article presents this car as a complement to public transportation (I quote TFA):

"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. OK, now, I understand the appeal of light-weight, stackable, "community" cars in some cases (such as sprawling suburban environments) but seriously - in most cities there are simpler, more effective means to do that "last mile". Bicycles come to mind as a pretty simple, cheap, and reliable solution. The Paris municipality recently introduced a close-to-free (29 euros per year, first 30 minutes free, then price increases each half-hour so prevent you from keeping the bike all day long) community rent-a-bike service called Vélib, which consists of over 10,000 bikes located in hundreds of stations scattered around the city. It works well now that the first glitches have been ironed out. A mile on a bike takes about 10 minutes, is good for you, consumes no energy, and is manageable in all but the most extreme weather conditions.

Also, any decent public transportation system should have much less than a mile between two metro/bus/tramway stations - leaving the maximum walking distance to half a mile. That is the case of many European cities.

On a related note, the ever-awesome Dutchs invented the Bike Dispenser, which I have yet to see in real life but which looks absolutely wicked. In my opinion this looks much more manageable than 1,200-pounds electric stackable cars.

Smartcar + streetcar (+ shopping trolleys) =

[momfreeek]

This seems like the natural progression of a couple of existing ideas: http://www.smart.com/ Smart cars are popular in uk (I don't know about elsewhere). Small, efficient and comfortable. Yeah, everyone thought they looked stupid at first but they are immensely practical. http://www.streetcar.co.uk/ A similar hire a car by the hour type scheme with no human interaction. This has been running for a few years in uk and appears to be growing steadily.