The City Car
Some of the points from Dr. Mitchell’s address
- Cities are energy-inefficient
- Population in cities are more than 50% and growing
- Solution: Reinvent urban personal transportation
Principles of the City Car
- Shared use, two passenger, electric car, that folds and stacks like shopping carts
- Swipe your card, pick up a car from a stack, and deposit at another stack when finished
- Wheels can turn 360 degrees. To parallel park, turn wheels 90 degrees and move car forward
- Only one lever. No pedals. Push level to move card forward. Pull back to apply brakes
First order efficiencies
- One could park 80 cars around a block; when stacked, 504 City Cars can be parked around a similar block
- In a garage, there is 9-to-1 efficiency
Second order efficiencies
- Effectively utilization of inexpensive, off-peak power, and clean but intermittent power sources, like solar, wind and wave
- Each time a car is parked, it is charged
Third order efficiencies
- Cars know patterns of energy prices and mobility demand, and intelligently play the “energy futures market”
- Cars operate in an environment of fine-grained, highly dynamic road congestion pricing, and intelligently play in the “road space market”
- Cars know parking space availability and dynamically adjusted prices, and intelligently play in the “parking space market”
- Thus cars become Google for the city, efficiently getting you around the city, while taking account of cost and time constraints
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:53 pm
[…] The keynote address was by Dr. William Mitchell of MIT. The idea presented was that of a futuristic city car that MIT is working on. This car is for shared use, and can be used by swiping a credit card at the vending locations. After reaching the intended destination, the driver can return the car to a stack of cars. The car will run on electricity, and will be on charge when returned to the stack. […]