Robot Car 1

The MIT Smart Cities research team's car. Image: Franco
Vairani/MIT Department of Architecture

It is not every day that a
concept car re-writes the rules of more than 100 years of motoring. In
development for four years by a team of architects and engineers led by William
Mitchell, former head of the school of architecture at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), as part of his Smart Cities research group, a new
MIT car is borne of a complete rethink of people's relationship with their cars
in the ever-expanding cities of the future.

Prof Mitchell expects we will share cars that will be easier to drive in
congested cities, will be pollution-free and can be customised at will.

The city car concept, with styling input by architect Frank Gehry, will be
completed and delivered by MIT to General Motors early next year.

"Primarily we're interested in urban living," says Ryan Chin, an architect
and engineer at MIT's media lab and a member of Prof Mitchell's research group.
"Everything scales down from what we think the city of the future is."

The Smart Cities group focused on how cars could be better adapted to get
round familiar problems of city life, namely congestion, pollution and parking.
Motor companies are well aware of the issue. But the group felt the companies
had missed the point, even with city cars such as the Smart, the iconic
two-passenger cars introduced by Swatch and Mercedes in 1998.

"We have to think of city cars as not just small-footprint vehicles that can
squeeze into tight spaces but ones that can work in unison and also be almost
like a parasite that leeches on to mass-transit systems," says Mr Chin. While
Smart changed the way people think about parking and size, the MIT engineers
felt that, as it had not been widely adopted and congestion and pollution
problems had got no better, its success had been limited.

So the MIT team started from scratch to come up with their own concept: a
stackable, shareable, electric, two-passenger car. "Imagine a shopping cart - a
vehicle that can stack - you can take the first vehicle out of a stack and off
you go," says Mr Chin. "These stacks would be placed throughout the city. A good
place would be outside a subway station or a bus line or an airport, places
where there's a convergence of transportation lines and people."

The precedent for this type of shared personal transport is demonstrated with
bicycle-sharing schemes in European towns and the ZipCar and FlexCar projects on
the east and west coasts of the US respectively.

The MIT concept car is a complete re-think of vehicle technology. For a
start, there is no engine, at least in the traditional sense. The power comes
from devices called wheel robots. "These are self-contained wheel units that
have electric motors inside," says Mr Chin. "The interesting thing is that the
wheel can turn a full 360 degrees so you can have omni-directional wheel
movements. You can rotate the car while you're moving, any direction can be
front or back and you can do things like crabbing or translate sideways. It's
almost like you imagine yourself driving a computer chair."

The wheel robots, complete with their own suspension, remove the need for a
drive shaft and even the engine block, freeing up designers to make new use of
the space in the car.

"Essentially the car will comprise four wheel-robots plus a customisable
chassis," says Chin. "The frame can be built specifically for each
customer."

Add wafer-thin, programmable displays that cover the interior and exterior of
the car like a layer of paint, and you have a vehicle that can be customised at
will. "You can imagine signalling being not just a static signal light but
something more dynamic," says Mr Chin, who suggests the words "reversing" or
"turning left" could roll across the car's body to declare the driver's
intentions. "From a heating and cooling point of view, you might want your car
to be darker or lighter depending on weather. On the interior, you can customise
your dashboard for each person. If I'm an elderly person, I probably want a very
large speedometer so I can see it; if I'm a race-car driver, maybe all I want is
a tachometer."

The close proximity of cars in cities increases the risk of accidents, and
the MIT car has a host of radical ideas to deal with this problem. Chief safety
features include responsive seats that do away with the need for seat belts and
air bags: these are based around a spine at the back of the seat with a number
of "fingers" to embrace a passenger and hold them in place if the car detects
that it is involved in an accident. And the cabin would absorb the impacts of
crashes using new materials. "There is a new development in fluids that can be
magnetised so that they move from liquid to solid state within a nanosecond. You
can imagine using these fluids as a way of absorbing energy in an impact."

Over the next few months the MIT team will complete the final design and
present their results to General Motors, which will build the first prototype.
Beyond that, Mr Chin is already trying to arrange a public test in the Far East.
"We might do this in Hong Kong or in Singapore," he says. "The interest in those
places is that they are very dense, have mass transit and limited range. An
island like Hong Kong would be a perfect place to test this because you have all
those conditions."

Whether the city car concept appears on garage forecourts as designed by the
Smart Cities group or whether the technologies are taken forward individually
remains to be seen. Chin says the group would be happy with either outcome.