MIT Offers City Car for the Masses

MIT's stackable electric car, a project to improve urban transportation will make its debut this week in Milan. "The City Car, a design project under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is envisioned as a two-seater electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries. It would weigh between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds and could collapse, then stack like a shopping cart with six to eight fitting into a typical parking space. It isn't just a car, but is designed as a system of shared cars with kiosks at locations around a city or small community."

Re:It wount be accepted.

[Traxxas]

You don't own the cars, they are community cars owned by the municipality.

Re:Shared Cars = Yellow Bike = Failure

[calebt3]

If one is charged for every day that they keep the car, they would return it pretty quickly. They are not giving the cars away. They are being rented out.

FlexCar

[WrongMonkey]

Tone the cynicism down. Shared car companies already exist. [flexcar.com] It works pretty well and they make a profit.

Overkill solution

[ElGanzoLoco]

The article presents this car as a complement to public transportation (I quote TFA):

"The problem with mass transit is it kind of takes you to where you want to go and at the approximate time you want to get there, but not exactly. Sometimes you have to walk up to a mile from the last train or subway stop," said Franco Vairani, a Ph.D. candidate at MIT's school of architecture.

OK, now, I understand the appeal of light-weight, stackable, "community" cars in some cases (such as sprawling suburban environments) but seriously - in most cities there are simpler, more effective means to do that "last mile". Bicycles come to mind as a pretty simple, cheap, and reliable solution. The Paris municipality recently introduced a close-to-free (29 euros per year, first 30 minutes free, then price increases each half-hour so prevent you from keeping the bike all day long) community rent-a-bike service called Vélib [paris.fr], which consists of over 10,000 bikes located in hundreds of stations scattered around the city. It works well now that the first glitches have been ironed out. A mile on a bike takes about 10 minutes, is good for you, consumes no energy, and is manageable in all but the most extreme weather conditions.

Also, any decent public transportation system should have much less than a mile between two metro/bus/tramway stations - leaving the maximum walking distance to half a mile. That is the case of many European cities.

On a related note, the ever-awesome Dutchs invented the Bike Dispenser [bikedispenser.com], which I have yet to see in real life but which looks absolutely wicked. In my opinion this looks much more manageable than 1,200-pounds electric stackable cars.

Smartcar + streetcar (+ shopping trolleys) =

[momfreeek]

This seems like the natural progression of a couple of existing ideas: http://www.smart.com/ [smart.com] Smart cars are popular in uk (I don't know about elsewhere). Small, efficient and comfortable. Yeah, everyone thought they looked stupid at first but they are immensely practical. http://www.streetcar.co.uk/ [streetcar.co.uk] A similar hire a car by the hour type scheme with no human interaction. This has been running for a few years in uk and appears to be growing steadily.

Re:Shared Cars = Yellow Bike = Failure

[MrPippers]

Yes, the yellow bikes program is a failure. Theft is rampant. I witnessed it in Atlanta with Decatur yellow bikes [dybikes.org]. It doesn't mean that every public transportation rental system will be a failure. We can learn from our mistakes. One needs only look to the successful Velib' [wikipedia.org] bike rentals recently rolled out in Paris.

Under the Velib' system, anyone renting a bike must use a bank card which will lock 150 Euros in their account, as insurance on the bike. If it is stolen, and you report it to the police, the percentage of that you pay is substantially less. The program works great, and even now more Velib' stations are being added throughout the city. I think the system MIT proposes sounds more similar to this than the yellow bikes program.

As another poster mentioned, Flexcar [flexcar.com] is very successful as well.

Re:And then Boston tipped over and slid into the s

[Propaganda13]

You end up with the same problem with renting from Uhaul. Well, we were supposed to have a truck returned, but it hasn't shown up yet. You can wait several hours and hope or drive crosstown where we have one.

I do not see the City Car working in the US. Maybe Japan or Europe. The City Car is a people mover. Zip Car is a different idea that is working (not without complaints) in the US. There are 20 vehicles to choose from. Besides fun cars like convertibles, minis, and BMW, there are a larger vehicles (xB, Element, Escape, supposedly pickups) that would allow you go shopping, maybe pick up some smaller pieces of furniture. I know a couple of people in Chicago without vehicles that occasionally wish they had a vehicle, but can't justify the expense.