Words Gabriela Lee
The inventive minds at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Smart Cities research group, spearheaded by Dr. William Mitchell, has come up with a vehicle that challenges even the basic concept of Henry Ford's mass-manufactured invention. With the threat of air pollution and global warming, as well as the ever-present problem of overpopulation and the decline of urban living, the Smart Cities group met the challenge well with their vehicle design delivered to the desks of General Motors this year.
The stackable car - a concept derived from the idea of shopping carts "stacked" at grocery store aisles - will be a two-passenger shareable electric car conceptualized to use pre-existing mass transit systems available. "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," describes Ryan Chin, an architect and engineer, and a member of Dr. Mitchell's research group.
The car is environmentally friendly: the group has done away with its engine in the final design. Instead, wheel robots, each with its own independent electrical power supply, are attached to the body of the vehicle. "These are self-contained wheel units that have electric motors inside," says 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." Without the engine, the designers are coming up with new and interesting ways to maximize the space, including creating a customizable chassis, with the frame adjustable to the passengers' needs.
Aside from that, extremely thin programmable displays will be attached to the interior and exterior of the car, like chameleon scales. These displays give a whole new meaning to driving signals - instead of the usual hazard lights and right and left signals, these displays can actually have messages scrolling across the car, such as "Turning Left" or "Making a U-Turn." It's also customizable in terms of adjusting to the temperature, turning the body of the car lighter or darker depending on the weather. As for the interior, the same adaptable programmable displays can be used to highlight the items on the dashboard. Chin gives an example: "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."
Safety features are also taken into consideration during the designing stage. Doing away with seatbelts and safety airbags, the seats are designed with safety "fingers" running along the spine of the car seat that holds the passenger in place if the car detects that an accident is inevitable. Even the cabin is designed to withstand collisions - with the new development in fluids that can be magnetized into their solid state within a nanosecond, there's no doubt that these kinds of discoveries will be used by the Smart Cities group in order to build their one-of-a-kind car that will be speeding to a city near you.
