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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.'"
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/05/2055234
appleguru.org
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.
/. 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.
Seems ingenious. But remember to GET OUT of the car before parking it.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
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.
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.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
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.
There is simply too much glass..
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).
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.
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..
Both the Smart Roadster and the Smart ForFour have been discontinued. They only make the ForTwo now.
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