“Proximity car” could be its nickname. Proximity because we still use cars in the decades but for small distance uses. For four years, architects and engineers of the Smart Cities research group have been working on what should be ‘the’ car of future major cities.
Elbowing major car makers out their way, the MIT research group started from scratch. The car size wasn’t their critical variable but its usability. They tackled the problem more with a urbanism and a sociology point of view rather than just the usual consumer-centered marketing approach. They finally concluded their research. For the design, they just called… Frank Gehry ― aka the father of Bilbao, Spain Guggenheim Museum (see Wikipedia).
Smart Cities’ concept car mainly promotes interoperability. Its main features are:
1. It’s stackable as shopping carts could be. It’s a last-in-first-out technique (LIFO) best known by computer geeks. Cars will be queued near railroad stations or subways. Every driver switches from car to car. The MIT team borrowed the idea from bicycle-sharing schemes of European cities such as Lyon, France.
2. Big engine will vanish into small tires. The four wheels ― or at least two, I guess ― become self-pulsed with their own electrical engine. Meaning: You get more room for your legs. This is going to be the next trend. Mistubishi has already buried the motor of its i-minicar.
3. Highly customizable chassis and car cabin. No more need to shape the chassis to conform with the specific motor as it’ll go into the wheels. And as every body wants to be original, the proximity car shows wafer-thin layers which then can be programmable to switch inside and outside colors.
4. More security. Emphasis was part of the Smart Cities group research orientation. Of course, as materials science comes with new techniques, new “intelligent” materials will be available for designers. This includes for example “fluids that could be magnetized to move from liquid to solid state within a nanosecond,” explained Ryan Chin, an architect and engineer at the MIT’s Media Lab. But also a clever seat with a set of fingers that eventually embrace a passenger in a car crash.
The research team will expose their results to General Motors. No prototype has ever been build so far. Beyond that, Mr Chin is already trying to arrange a public test in the Far East where human population densities are among the highest in the world.
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[…] Proximity car. The big tech university has been working on the project for more than four years. Among other features, the chassis of this electrical car is foldable, enabling it to be stacked […]