Foldable Cars Park (Stack) Like Grocery Carts

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


citystack.jpg

It’s still only an idea. But a fine one from MIT’s The Media Lab‘s Smart Cities. A futuristic electric CityCar that can drive itself and, at the press of a button, look for a parking spot behind others like itself, then fold in half and stack like a shopping cart. Reuters reports that a miniature mock-up version has gone on display at a campus museum, and there are plans to build a full-scale model this spring. Wired’s blog Autotopia explained the car’s premise some time ago:

The GM-backed CityCar prototype is a lightweight electric vehicle that’s cheap to make and could be folded and stacked at transit hubs for rental by commuters under a shared-use model. The trick is to rethink the wheel. In the CityCar, a robotic drive system controls electric motors, steering and braking mechanisms, suspension, and digital controls embedded in each wheel — all integrated into plug-and-play sealed units that can be snapped on and off… Besides its stackability, its omnidirectional wheel configuration enables a turning radius of zero, turning U-turns into O-turns… Other features: push-button start, handlebars where the steering wheel would be, and a body made of Kevlar, carbon fiber, or some other lightweight composite.

Imagine if parking, drive time, congestion, navigation, and your fellow driver was no longer an issue. Imagine what that might do to emotional health, personal time & energy budgets, neighborly love, and the big CO2 footprint in the sky. Imagine if we didn’t need to compete for space but could happily piggyback on each other. Okay, call me an idealist but there are days when the future looks good enough for hope… You’ll have to navigate on your own through the Smart Cities pages to find the City Car. But it’s a really fun ride.

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones’ environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the John Burroughs Medal Award. You can read from her new book, The Fragile Edge, and other writings, here.

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate