Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
/. 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.
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.
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).
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..
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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.