MIT Reinvents Transportation With Foldable, Stackable Car

alphadogg writes "Parking in a downtown area is one of the least enjoyable elements of driving. MIT researchers may have found a solution: a car you can fold up before parking. The boxy conveyance folds in half, and the plan is for the vehicle to fit eight in one conventional parking spot. 'Franco Vairani, a Ph.D. candidate at MIT and one of the original designers in the City Car project, said his team is taking a vending-machine approach to city travel. In his vision of the future, people would find a stack of electrical-powered City Cars on nearly every block in the city. When a user would want to drive somewhere in town, he would swipe a smart card or cell phone across an electronic reader and take a car out of the stack. When he gets to a business meeting across town, a shopping mall or their doctor's office, the driver simply leaves the car in a stack at his destination. The drivers don't own the cars. They simply rent them. It's fully self-service. The next person takes a car out of the stack, and off he goes.'"

Comments

Who cleans them?

[fantomas]

I don't want to be in a rush for an early morning business meeting, get the next car out of the vending machine and find the previous renters were a bunch of college students on a party mission the night before...

Nice idea and reducing number of vehicles in cities is definitely a great goal, though I think the team would have to pay close attention to lessons learned by other projects that have tried to set up publicly shared but autonomous individual transportation mechanisms - that's where I think it would be won or lost. Urban bicycle schemes like the Amsterdam white bikes or neighbourhood car pool sharing comes to mind.

Re:Who cleans them?

[packeteer]

Urban bicycle schemes like the Amsterdam white bikes or neighborhood car pool sharing comes to mind.

I recently spent a bit of time in Paris and Lyon in France. They both has city wide bicycle rentals that work out really well. I think a bike is better suited to this kind of thing. The main problem i see is that Americans don't want to ride a bike. In France i saw many business men in suits riding the bicycles around with their brief case on the back. Without the social stigma of riding a bike in Europe they can do it. In America people believe if your riding a bike its because you got a DUI or your just broke.

Re:Who cleans them?

[Hijacked Public]

We in America have a cultural bend toward using a car and reducing the reluctance to ride a bike or walk to a couple of bullet points is bound to leave out a lot of important factors.

I once contracted for a company that had an office building and a manufacturing plant about 1/2 mile apart on the same road. They gave me an office but a lot of the work I did was on the machines in their plant. Three or four times a weeks I'd walk down there, carrying a laptop, to do some kind of update.

Other people in the office thought I was insane for walking. They questioned whether my car was broken. They offered me use of a company vehicle. They offered to give me a ride. They told me it might rain. They didn't think it was safe. An litany of reasons why I should drive it. And carrying a laptop the whole way? The message was clear: These people would dismiss the idea of walking a half mile across the well manicured lawns of our corporate neighbors without a second thought.

Most of the people warning me away from the walk were physically capable of making it themselves. Maybe 1/4 of them were too fat or too enfeebled (surprisingly, few of those made the connection between a lack of walking and the condition they were in). The rest of them just flat out did not want to do it. In an office of 300 people I found one or two who were willing to walk there instead of drive.

Problem with America? Too image conscious?

[spineboy]

Too many people are too concerned about what other people think, but then again, Europe is generally much more densely populated than the US and A, and so bike riding is a more feasable option.