Slashdot Mirror
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."
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")
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.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
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