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

Re:It wount be accepted.

[DFDumont]

You clearly missed the point. This is not about YOUR car; its about a public transit system where you use a community car to get where your going, then plug it into a recharge/rental kiosk at your destination. They're trying to solve the issue of bus and train lines getting close to your destination, but not that close.

The issue I see is how has this solved the problem they're trying to address? If you have to deposit the vehicle at a kiosk to get your deposit back, then unless there's a kiosk on every corner you'll have the same issue of walking every time you take a one-way trip. If you used it like a commuter service, then you'd have to set up large parking lots tied to stations of the vehicles. They didn't mention this in the article so I don't tink they were trying to fix commuting.

I suppose if you HAD a kiosk on EVERY corner in say New York, NY, then it would be okay. But isn't that an awfully large adoption ratio to assume? I suppose you could augment existing train service with kiosks at every stop, but again they didn't mention that in the article.

I think its interesting, and certainly worth pursuing as a technology, but I think someone with a little marketing savvy needs to take a look at how this fundamental change in how we think about vehicles can be adapted into our various psyches.

No Thanks....

[robkill]

From the article:

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. Law enforcement would fight tooth and nail to keep the GPS data from being deleted. The legitimate use would be to track someone who stole a vehicle (using a stolen credit card, probably), or used it as a getaway car for some other crime. Once stored, it's too tempting to use for other purposes. Of course this is essentially already the case with rental cars.

Complexity

[mechsoph]

Let's create a vehicle twice as complex as anything out there. Oh, and while we're at it, let's change the whole social structure of car ownership. Now, if this actually goes anywhere, super and good for them, but how many of these radical concept cars do we hear about once and never again?

Personally, I think simplicity is an important feature in machines; it means they cost less to make and cost less to fix. A beautiful example of this is in the form of some motorcyles, elegant minimalism. If you would add a cabin to one of these for foul weather, it should achieve 90% of what the technical side of this project hopes.

Re:Because what I want is...

[DigitalReverend]

If you look at the pictures that accompany TFA, it would see "collapse" like a shopping car isn't quite what they mean but rather configure to take up a smaller footprint. From the looks of it it appears the rear wheel assembly ride along tracks along the bottom of the passenger compartment. When you park the vehicle and put it into compact mode, the rear wheels probably lock, and the front wheels push back towards the rear wheels causing the passenger compartment to rotate and slide along the track until the front wheels are near touching the rear wheels. I would bet in operational mode, that even if hit from behind with enough force to release whatever locking mechanism they have for the rear bumper assembly that the rear of the vehicle would slide harmlessly under the passenger compartment absorbing most of the energy.

Anyway this is how it appears to me from the pictures. I am not an engineer nor physicist, but it seems to me that this might actually have potential for conventional vehicles as well. If the rear bumper and wheels were able to slide harmlessly under the passenger area it could actually save lives.

Re:Tragedy of the Commons?

[MichaelSmith]

How long until there's grafiti everywhere, the seats are slashed, and the cars are rendered unusable by the public?

Depends on where you live. Here in Melbourne, Australia the ticket machines on train stations have about fourteen different anti-vandalisation features. At Incheon, South Korea where I was working last week the ticket machines are little computers with no attempt at protection. They are cleaner, too.

Packet Switched Subways

[Doc Ruby]

I'd love MIT to demo a car like that which rides on NYC subway rails, rolls out of buffers (stocked by trend analysis) on demand, is routed point to point the best route, links up with other cars through their common pathways for increased mutual efficiency, and overall acts like a timeshared private car with autopilot.

In short, convert circuit-switched subways to packet switched rail networks. With better supply fit to actual demand, better energy and routing efficiency strategies, better redundancy, and less room for crooks to hide in unobserved.

The NYC subway switching and signaling systems were last really overhauled in 1937, and still retain major incompatibilities between what was once 3 independent, competing subway companies (and their different tracks/routes/stations). The whole thing should be renovated for the 21st Century, including the update to packet-switching as modern as was the circuit-switching back in the early 20th Century when it transformed New York life into unprecedented convenience, safety and efficiency.