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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."
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.
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
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")
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.
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!
Well, just because it doesn't work in America, doesn't mean it's failure in other countries. I remember when I was in Sweden, they had a truly amazing bike share program. Basically, at a bunch of depots throughout a city, there will be a bunch of bikes you can grab to get where you're going. And it's not a bunch of crappy bikes either, they're very stylish, customized, have intricate patterns, mods, you name it. The way it works is you just go up to one you like, break it's connector (you can use a rock or whatever) and ride wherever you need to go, and just drop it at the nearest depot when you're done.
The locals are also very concerned for your safety. Whenever I rode off in one, people would run after me, yelling frantically about something. I ignored them of course, because my Swedish is pretty weak.
So really, it just depends on the culture.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
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.
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
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
1. You have access to a car anytime you want/need it, without the hassle and expense of owning a car. Could save a lot of money if you live close enough to work to walk or bike and only occasionally need a car.
2. Unlike trains, the "stations" could be at every corner, since all that would be needed is a few square feet and a card reader. Also, unlike trains, a station at every corner doesn't mean you have to stop at every corner all the way to your destination.
3. No unexpected huge repair bills -- maintenance and repairs are just part of the fee.
4. More space in your garage, since you don't have to own a car.
5. Parking is easy to find -- just go to a kiosk.
6. You don't have to pay for parking. Imagine driving one of these to the airport.
7. Drive into town, go out drinking, cab it back home without having to go back to retrieve your car the next day.
8. Any given car is in use a higher percentage of the time, so if everyone (or a large fraction of everyone) did this, we wouldn't have to devote nearly as much land to parking lots.
9. Need exercise? Walk to the grocery store, buy a cart full of groceries, drive back home. This also reduces gas usage/environmental impact by 50% compared to driving both ways.
10. Drive to work on a rainy morning. When the weather clears in the afternoon, walk back home.
11. If you get a flat tire, just call maintenance, then grab another car and keep going.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?