Sure, we know you love actually owning a car, but let's be honest -- in large cities with condensed layouts, your H3 doesn't make a lot of sense. A group of researchers at
MIT have been hard at work developing a solution that's kind on the planet
and your scrawny legs. A team called Smart Cities have designed a small, two-seat, electric vehicle -- which they call the City Car -- that can be "stacked" in convenient locations (say, just outside a subway stop), and then taken on short trips around urban areas. The cars -- which are based around an omnidirectional "robot wheel" that encases an electric motor, suspension, and steering -- can be "folded" and attached to a group of other cars for charging. The lineups of rentable vehicles would be accessible from various points around a city, with six or eight cars occupying just a single "regular" car space. Of course, you'll have to forgo your 24-inch rims... but that's life.
[Via
Technology Review]
posted November 2nd 2007 11:51AM
weren't these the same things shown in one of the episodes of 2057 on the discovery channel?
I'm not sure that toyota will like this... MIT watch out !!
http://www.jama.ca/photos/auto2003/tokyo/gallery.asp?pic=38
The best part is they transform into a casket upon impact.
My suggestion for the cars is have a GPS (complete with local traffic laws etc..) and a computer that can drive the car back (lets say the Car has a max range of 100 miles) on a single charge, you can let the customer drive to a specified location up to 49 miles (give an extra mile for stopping accelerating etc...) than the customer gets out of the car and it drives itself back to get charged.
Only two people who suggest bicycles? this really looks like the same project that's being used in paris now, only there they use bicycles in stead of cars. just to keep it green, quiet and safe. And i have to say, it works perfectly. Key to this sort of system is the amount of places where you can drop the vehicle off.
Oh, and one other thing: who the flying fuck takes a leak in a car? My overall picture of the states is getting more and more tarnished by the day.
Clearly none of these MIT nerds has taken the time to get out of the lab and actually seen the size of potholes in Boston.
A hopeful possibility. I'd prefer to see government money spent on this type of innovative, practical research than wasted on stupid, wasteful projects.
Who would be permitted to drive these things - would you need a license? If an important part of a tranpsport system can't be used by under-eighteens it needs to be demoted.
As long as the basic problem of 'Too Many Cars' is addressed, measures like this will do little to assuage the problem. And the problem of 'Too Many Cars' won't be addressed until we solve the problem of people who think we need to produce and consume allwe can.