MIT Present the World's First Carbon-Free, Stackable Rental Car

"We're looking at urban personal mobility in a much more sustainable way than the private automobile provides."

~ William Mitchell, director of Smart Cities research group

MIT researchers are hopeful that their new light, foldable, stackable electric vehicles will cut pollution, ease congestion, and eventually be incorporated into everyday transportation systems. The Smart Cities group at the MIT Media Lab is currently working on the low-cost electric vehicles that they believe could revolutionize a new "green" mass transit.

"We're eliminating the internal combustion engine," said Media Lab research assistant Ryan Chin, studio coordinator for City Cars. He said the four electric motors will enable a more efficient use of power by also dispensing with the transmission and driveline. "We're removing as much hardware from the car as possible."

In its place will be software that allows passenger to customize preferences, such as the color of the cabin, control the dashboard's look and feel, and even directs drivers to parking spaces. "We think of the car as a big mobile computer with wheels on it," Chin said. "This car should have a lot of computational power. It should know where the potholes are."

The MIT group sees the vehicles as part of a strategy to mitigate pollution with electric power, expand limited public space by folding and stacking vehicles like shopping carts, and alleviate congestion by letting people rent and return the vehicles to racks located near transportation hubs, such as train stations, airports, and bus depots.

The group's strategy will efficiently solve the "last mile" problem without losing the virtues of the private automobile, Mitchell says. The last mile is that inconvenient distance between any major transit stop and a person's final destination. While a traditional automobile provides mobility on demand and gets you to your destination, its negative externalities--congestion and pollution--seem intractable.

One of the exciting new features of the vehicle is an omnidirectional robot wheel developed by the MIT team. The wheel encases an electric-drive motor, as well as suspension, steering, and braking systems. With no engine or mechanical parts between the wheels and the driver's controls, the system offers great flexibility in design. The driver can, in fact, fold the car up and stack it. In fact, six to eight folded and stacked City Cars can fit into one conventional parking space.

The wheels also enable incredible maneuverability. Instead of making U-turns, the car can spin on the spot, and when the driver turns each wheel 90 degrees, the car can parallel-park by moving sideways.

"The idea for a wheel motor has been around for a long time," says Peter Schmitt, designer of the wheel. But Schmitt says that the advantage of his design is that the wheel is controlled by software instead of by mechanical coupling.

Next week, the group will unveil a prototype of its foldable electric scooter at the EICMA Motorcycle Show, in Milan. A prototype for the team's foldable electric car, called the City Car, is slated to follow next year. The funding for developing the car came from General Motors.

The MIT team's vision of deploying these cars in a shared-use, personal-mobility system isn't new either. In Lyon, France, a company called Velo'v recently introduced a shared-use bicycle system throughout the city. Based on its initial success, the Velo'v system is being extended to Paris with approximately 2,000 stacks and 20,000 bicycles

Posted by Rebecca Sato

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links:
http://www.boston.com/cars/news/articles/2007/02/18/the_car_20/
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19651/?nlid=641&a=f

Comments

[mercedes parts]

This would be great as in many suburban cities the jobs are all central yet it often takes an transfer from an express bus to a local and all of that fuss and time discourages people entirely. Express bus / train to avoid the freeway and just do 2 miles of city driving in this it would be great.