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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."
So every 18 months they'll come out with a newer model, which folds into half the space and cost less. At the end of 12 years it will be a skateboard. Got news for them, Santa Cruz is already there.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
...a car that collapses like a shopping cart when I'm rear-ended.
from the top of this page:
"but is designed as a system of shared cars with kiosks..."
nobody owns individual cars, you subscribe to the service and grab a car from a kiosk wherever you need one.
You don't own the cars, they are community cars owned by the municipality.
I got to see alot of the models and sketches for this at the Media Lab last January. I look forward to the final product. It could do alot to change urban traffic patterns and pollution in city centers.
Also they have more Lego's than God at the Media Lab...that is orgasmic.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Initialize a new stack. Pop cars from the first stack and push them onto the second stack until you find the car you want. Then, pop cars from the second stack and push them onto the first stack. This has the advantage of maintaining the original order of the stack.
What happens when the all end up at the same place in town on a Friday night
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
we require 10' foot high SUVs modeled on military vehicles that can run over a compact car and not even feel it. the inside must be 500 square feet, of which there will be only one occupant. oh, and the vehicle must get 2 miles to the gallon
i don't understand what the point of this green environmental stuff is, just send more soldiers to iraq. problem solved
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Look, I came here for an argument! Oh, sorry, wrong story..
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
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.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
How long until there's grafiti everywhere, the seats are slashed, and the cars are rendered unusable by the public?
Not that this isn't a great idea. It's just depressing that people will purposefuly ruin things like this.
(Okay, so not exactly "Tragedy of the Commons")
People like owning private property. In fact, they like it so much that given a chance to "borrow" a vehicle, they'll never return it. But if someone follows through on this idea, thefts will probably go down for a week or so when the same people who stole yellow bikes to support their drug habit do the same with the cars, at a much higher profit.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Does this guy look like he's peeing on the car?
The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt.
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.
Don't worry, you'll still have yours parked in front of your mom's basement.
Linux Zealots: Smarter than Mac Zealots, but still zealots.
The problem with this is when you have to return the same car. The car is now in a stack. If you could grab any car at any time then it would work.
Anyways, there is a much more elegant soltution to the "Last Mile Problem" in the form of Personal Rapid Transit. These scholars should devote their energy to the study and advancement of this system.
Tone the cynicism down. Shared car companies already exist. It works pretty well and they make a profit.
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.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
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.
"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,"
Yep, that's a big problem. Walking up to a mile? Unthinkable! I'd get all sweaty and stuff.
Seriously, it's funny how fast food is always blamed for increasing obesity in the western world. I'd say we Europeans on average eat about as much fast food as Americans, but we also travel by train and bus a lot more. But riding the bus just isn't as hip as doing Atkins...
I already see this sort of parking-as-incentive thing where I live (Auckland). The council-owned parking buildings have green-painted spaces, closer to the exit, set aside for drivers of small cars (by weight, I think) and hybrids.
=w=
Although I do commend MIT on their efforts, I can't help but think that this is another vastly impractical academic pipedream (a la those who predicted the Segway would change the world. It's a masterpiece of engineering, but let's be realistic here...).
On the other hand, tiny cars are nothing new. They don't even need to be electric... if you're getting 100MPG with a petrol engine (and in a city car at that), the expense of making the vehicle fully electric seems rather silly. You'd probably also do more damage to the environment by manufacturing the batteries as well...
Like the Segway, the MIT concept looks expensive. Impractically so. You're not going to see these things adopted at all unless they're considerably cheaper than a motorbike. In fact, if you lowered the price down to about what a plain old bicycle costs, you'd be even better.
Such a vehicle actually exists. The Peel P50 made in 1962 sold for about £200, gets 100mpg, and was (and still is) street legal in the UK.
The guys from Top Gear did a hilarious review of the car last week, and proved that you could indeed drive it TO work (in the elevator, down the corridor, and to your desk). It's even got a handle on the back to pick it up with.
Yeah, it's hideously impractical, but then again, so is MIT's proposal.
Still, it's nice to dream.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
So what happens when you hit someone in one of these things? Or run in to another car?
Who's insurance gets to pay for damages?
I have to return some videotapes...
One thing this category of solution doesn't address is that people use their cars for transportation and temporary storage of...stuff. Boring stuff like an extra coat and an umbrella, work-related files or equipment, books, food/drink, maps, groceries, not to mention children.
Rented vehicles of any kind, or small vehicles meant to only carry people and not much else reduce the abilty to carry stuff around. Riding a bike while carrying a briefcase can be a challenge, let alone hauling a network switch or linux server from train to bus, bus to rented folding car, rented folding car to bike, bike to building. The plain fact about public or shared transit is that storage or transfer of even the most trivial item throughout the day becomes a nightmare.
It's easy to treat this as an irrelevant issue but it's a vital part of everyday life and urban planners need to stop ignoring it if they want to find solutions that people can actually live with.
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.
--
make install -not war
You end up with the same problem with renting from Uhaul. Well, we were supposed to have a truck returned, but it hasn't shown up yet. You can wait several hours and hope or drive crosstown where we have one.
I do not see the City Car working in the US. Maybe Japan or Europe. The City Car is a people mover. Zip Car is a different idea that is working (not without complaints) in the US. There are 20 vehicles to choose from. Besides fun cars like convertibles, minis, and BMW, there are a larger vehicles (xB, Element, Escape, supposedly pickups) that would allow you go shopping, maybe pick up some smaller pieces of furniture. I know a couple of people in Chicago without vehicles that occasionally wish they had a vehicle, but can't justify the expense.
It can be more than a mile, pepople can be old, people can be cripple.
But most of us are fit enough to walk up to a mile or so (and longer for that matter) and the world would be a better place if those who can do that also did. There are already electric wheelchairs and similar things for people who can't walk, so if that's what they're trying to solve, they're a bit late.
The transition of parking methods might be painless, but what this technology will do is increase the number of cars on the road. As the cars have to be 'unstacked' to be driven, they will take up the same amount of room (width x following distance) on the road as an ordinary Fiat Punto or similar. So, dumping more cars in the centre of Milan will not be painless in the long term.
The easiest method I can think of would be to require an initial sign up - that would give CC companies time to make sure the subscription is good and the person legit. Maybe snail mail him an activation code to his registered address.
Then simply reverify the card/driver's license on rental.
You don't have to prevent all theft - just enough that you can still make a profit. Given that you'd probably put a number of anti-theft and tracking measures in, and the items wouldn't exactly be 'open market' items, so you'd have to part it out - but most users of those systems would also be corporate types with the vehicles on contract - so the aftermarket value is limited.
And a few cameras. Take a picture when the person presents his ID, take pictures of the vehicle leaving(beginning condition), and pictures of the vehicle returning(ending condition). Something comes up, review the pictures.
I don't read AC A human right