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

Dupe, dupe, dupe!

[appleguru]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/05/2055234

Re:Dupe, dupe, dupe!

[Rogerborg]

Further evidence that "Slashdot editors" are neither editors, nor do they even read Slashdot. The only reason that I believe that they haven't been replaced with very small shell scripts is that I find it hard to believe that a script could do such a bad job.

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.

/. invents stackable stories

[kooky45]

/. invents identical stackable stories. Take one, and the next identical one is available in line. The idea was copied from MIT as reported on /. some days ago.

A car that folds up *before* parking eh?

[mrjb]

Seems ingenious. But remember to GET OUT of the car before parking it.

Re:A car that folds up *before* parking eh?

[Triv]

But remember to GET OUT of the car before parking it.

Who is driving? Oh my god Bear is driving HOW CAN THAT BE?

Re:less dupes please

[MillionthMonkey]

This is a foldable dupe so it doesn't take as much room on the front page. You can fit six more dupes about this story in the same space that a regular article would take.

It'll never work

[Bloke down the pub]

I had an idea for these things like a car but bigger, with maybe 20 or even 40 seats. The plan is that they'd circulate around or maybe go backwards and forwards between two points. You get on, pay some money, and then get off when it's close to where you're going.

Re:It'll never work

[Bloke down the pub]

OK. How about you have this kind of shared car but - here's the clever bit - it comes with a driver, supplied as part of the service. You get in, the driver takes you exactly where you want to go, you pay for the time or maybe distance, then the deal's done. No need to worry about parking. The car (with its driver) is free to go off and take someone else where he wants to go.

Sorta like

[xx01dk]

those rentable carts you see at the mall or the airport. It's an interesting idea but I think this will go the way of the Seguay... It's a neat idea in theory and on paper (and it works with the aforementioned carts) but IMHO people are going to reject such contrivances on a mass scale in our individualistic society. As I said, IMHO mind you, I'm not about to give up the option of picking up my girl/kid with my throaty V-8 coupe at the airport/bar/school/work/etc over some envirocentric/socialist's wet dream of public/personal transport. I can see this in an amusement park ride ala Ebcot center maybe, but as an every-day contrivance? Nah, sorry, pass.

Re:Cool stuff but what about safety?

[aussie_a]

I couldn't find any pics, but by your description Europe is filled with such cars. Sometimes the European "cars" even have bike handles used to steer them with. I don't know how safe they are, but they're certainly prevalent in Europe where space is at a premium (I'm sure they have a nice price tag that doesn't hurt either).

silly solutions to simple problems

[azgard]

Great! Another silly solution to a simple problem. You americans are really crazy - instead of making good and cheap public transport system, you are inventing things as carpool lanes and foldable cars. I am from Prague, and we have quite good subway here, which transports one Prague's population per day. It's like with those electronic voting machines (we use traditional ballots, and usually get the results in 6 hours after closing the polls) or healthcare system (we have socialized one with not much problems for patients, but efforts to dismantle it are unfortunately underway).

Re:The American educational system;

[aussie_a]

You're post while hyperbolic, isn't too far off the mark. You talk about dishwashers and the idea of sharing them with other people, but what about laundromats? Isn't that basically your idea except with clothing instead of dishes? Some ideas that don't work when it comes to sharing: * Houses - most people like to be in a house at roughly the same time (i.e. at night when they're sleeping) so they're going to all need to be "unfolded" (or inhabited for a more realistic option) by everyone at a particular time of day. * Dishwashers - Most people will use these at the same time of day (around 7:00-8:00 pm). Some ideas they do work with: * Laundries - There's no set time that most people will use these. * Toilets - In ancient London (i.e. 1940s) these were communal and shared by a block of flats. Although most people would prefer to pay more and get a clean toilet (males will know why. Is it so hard to piss into the bowl?!?!?!?) A more realistic option with cars would be to take away the foldable part and simply have car pick-up places spread throughout cities with cars able to be driven from one point to any point in America (you simply have to say how long you plan on taking it for and pay for it. There'd be a grace period and you'd also have the ability to phone ahead). Each car would be cleaned before the next person used it so if you left anything behind they'd put it aside for you. There'd also be a complimentary bus to take you to and from your home. If you drove a LOT within a typical day this would be more expensive, but for many it would turn out to be cheaper (there'd be a threshold where one hour you break even, the next its more expensive). I believe there is another idea with some communities that do have communal cars, but from the lack of widespread news on them I'm guessing the idea hasn't caught on. Personally the idea of communal cars doesn't exactly excite me. Considering how clean trains and movie theatres are, I'd rather stick with a car I own.

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.

Re:Cool stuff but what about safety?

[!coward]

Link to pictures here. (from the original post here on slashdot)

I don't know which cars you're talking about.. Being an European myself, the only car I can think of that closely resembles the MIT's prototype is the Smart. And even then, only the basic model, the Smart Roadster, for example, has more of a buggy look to it.

Anyway, while I've certainly seen plenty of them around, there even seems to be a tuning cult around them (Smart with a Lamborghini Diablo engine beating a Ferrari), I've yet to see a single one with a bike handle instead of a driving wheel.

But the City Car concept reminds me of the city bike system many European cities have adopted. The idea is basically the same: you have some sort of a sign-up procedure, community card or something like that. With plenty of bike "parks" spread across the city, all you need to do is pick one up from a park near the start point, cycle to the bike park closest to your destination and drop it off.. And it works! The number of people using them in Lyon, for example, really blew my mind. It also raised some issues when, at about 3am, I saw a couple of teenagers driving them while obviously intoxicated.. But I suppose they're bound to get into a lot less trouble than if they were driving a car.

As far as safety is concerned, they were meant to be driven within a city, ie, I seriously doubt they were built for speed, what with those pesky speed limits being the lowest and all. Overall, I've seen some vehicles (a couple of models specially designed for the handicapped come to mind) that seemed way more unsafe/weak than the MIT's prototype.

It might be a really good idea, as long as people don't treat them like crap just because it's not theirs..

Re:Cool stuff but what about safety?

[jawtheshark]

Both the Smart Roadster and the Smart ForFour have been discontinued. They only make the ForTwo now.

Re:It won't sell very well here in the US

[xaxa]

In England a lot of people from the south-east (around London) travel by train to London every day (over a million people travel to London from outside the urban area, the urban area is 40 miles across). If you live in a town the fast trains (that only stop at big towns) are fine. If you live in a small village, the train to London is likely to stop at several villages between the two nearest towns, then miss out all the small villages after that (there will be a different service that stops at these stations). The only time this is annoying is if you want to go from one small village to another some distance away, since you'll probably have to change trains.

Re:I should preview

[xaxa]

There are some car-sharing schemes (like this one) in London, every so often someone gives me a flier in the street. I don't know if they're clean (I don't drive!).

The trains here are generally clean (they're cleaned at least every day, probably more often). The mess is usually just the free newspapers.

Wow, Zonk is popular

[FoolsGold]

You know you're doing well as a Slashdot editor when your article's tags are:

zonkcantread, zonkisanidiot, zonksucks

So much love!

Re:Cool stuff but what about safety?

[owlstead]

Bikes? Cars as well:

http://new.greenwheels.nl/

Quite popular in Amsterdam, as I've been told. I've seen quite a few around.

Pry my car from..

[nurb432]

My cold dead hands.

No thanks, car ownership is part of the independence of the American way.

Re:Cool stuff but what about safety?

[PyroMosh]

They do have this in the U.S. too. Philadelphia at least.

Philly Car Share

Interesting program, never tried it myself, but I did live a block away from one of the car parks at one point, so I was curious enough to look into it.

Re:The American educational system;

[Culture20]

Known: Women hover over toilets
Hypothesis: Men could use this special hovering power by riding women over a line of toilets...
Testable? No, at least not by slashdotters.

Re:52 other states

[Dare nMc]

with all our military action and spending, you would think we could have 2-3 more by now.

Re:Cool stuff but what about safety?

[pclminion]

The "car" looks like four-wheel motorbikes. It seems convenient but I have to have about its security concerns if accident happens. Maybe we should allocate special lanes for these "cars".

What about banning "normal" cars within the city core?