The individual automobile is a luxury American society is not soon to abandon. The abnormally long trips between urban centers combined with the independence the individual American feels concerning their own car are two ideological problems in direct opposition to a well-run public transport system.
But researchers at MIT have developed a compromise- an individual car that operates within a public transport system. The “City Car” as it has been dubbed, is designed to be a two-seater electric car, powered by lithium-ion batteries. But the real innovation come in the fact that the car is designed to weight only 1,000 to 1,200 pounds and collapse to fit together like a shopping cart, allowing up to eight of them to park in an individual parking space.
The car’s main focus is to alleviate the crowding of automobiles in urban centers, where travel is mainly centered over small distances. In places where public transportation can be unreliable at best when getting to work on time is a priority. The City Car is designed to work in a public transportation system, but with the benefit of independent travel.
An interesting feature of the City Car is its wheels system. Unlike most other cars where the wheels are attached to a central power source, each wheel on the City Car operates on its own motor and suspension system, allowing maneuvers such as sideways parking and enabling its collapsible feature.
This feature also makes the cars customizable for the area they are in. If the cars were to operate in Boston, they could be modified with lighter batteries for shorter travel, whereas larger cities like Los Angeles could have cars modified with stronger batteries so that drivers could enter onto freeways.
So far the City Car is set to operate like bike-share programs, some of which are already in effect in cities like Montreal. Users pick up and drop off cars in docking stations, using their credit card to pay. An on-board GPS would also be used to keep track of the cars, as well as help identify quicker routes and interesting locations.
At this point only the state of Hawaii has shown a large enough interest in the City Car to consider purchasing them in part to help re-vamp their public transportation system. Hopefully the idea will spread.
I am an junior English major/ Philosophy minor at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Currently I am spending the spring of 2009 studying at the University College Cork in Cork, Ireland.
This car looks a lot like the Smart, which I believe is the perfect city car… lets hope that it can be a reality soon enough for everybody.
I wonder how much a car like that cost does. I’m sure that it would be out of my budget because the parts used on these types of cars can’t be easily found elsewhere. I think that they are importing the parts on other countries.