They call it the PEV - the Persuasive Electric Vehicle. So it could, say, pick you up from work - or pick up your groceries, without you. Joe's Big Idea Why Nonstop Travel In Personal Pods Has Yet To Take Off So we transform the vehicle to move goods autonomously - packages."
that serves a population appropriately at rush hour, then you have excess vehicles off-peak. and uses very inexpensive sensing and processing, rather than very expensive systems on highway-speed autonomous vehicles," he explained. "We realized that perhaps the ideal urban vehicle is an ultralightweight one-person, three-wheel vehicle that's bikelike, not carlike. It would drive itself - or you - around the city. Larson is currently developing a new self-driving electric vehicle that would be almost constantly in motion, for people who don't own a car. " moved on from a vehicle that folds to save space, to one that doesn't ever need to be parked." "It was actually a great thing, because at that point we had all kinds of new ideas we wanted to explore," he says. He says autonomous vehicles will make the folding feature of the Cit圜ar unnecessary. In fact, it's probably for the best, says team leader Kent Larson, because in the time it took to try to manufacture Hiriko, its technology has already become "obsolete." MIT is a nonprofit institution.īut the inventors are not in mourning. But the building is empty now.Ĭreators of the original Cit圜ar didn't know where to find the Hiriko either and they emphasize that a firewall limits their involvement with the commercial production of their inventions. Several sources told NPR that the Hiriko prototype was kept here, in an industrial park outside the Basque city of Vitoria-Gasteiz. The consortium's parent company, Afypaida, went out of business in 2013. Outside of the abandoned headquarters of Epsilon Euskadi, one of the companies tasked with building the Hiriko car in Spain. The whereabouts of the Hiriko car remain a mystery. Today, the building seems abandoned, a flock of geese nesting at its entrance. Several sources said they had last seen it at a warehouse in an industrial park on the outskirts of the Basque city of Vitoria-Gasteiz. We tried to track down the original, which was based on the MIT design. People involved with the project tell NPR that several prototypes were built in Spain. But a lot of the conventional engineers didn't understand that." "There were problems with a lack of unity in vision, and communication, among all those companies - too many moving parts," he says. Ask GM or any of the big companies, and they'll tell you it takes more than 10 times the budget we had!" he says.įernandez Isoird described a web of seven small engineering firms, including his firm, Denokinn, each tasked with producing a different aspect of the Hiriko car - the exterior body, the robot wheels, etc. "It's expensive to bring a car from design to commercial viability. It was all theater!"īut one of the project's chief engineers, Carlos Fernandez Isoird, told NPR that all of the money did indeed go to the project, and was not embezzled for personal use. "I believe they never had plans to bring these cars to market.
They used this public money to line their own pockets," says Igor Lopez de Munain, a member of the Basque parliament who has been investigating the Hiriko case. "They're politically well-connected businessmen with no prior experience building electric cars. And China, Two Approaches To A Streetcar Unconstrained By Wires And the whole car would fold up - such that seven vehicles could fit into two normal-sized parking spaces.Ĭities Project In D.C.
#Trans 11 automotive drivers
So, when parked front-end-in, drivers and passengers could avoid stepping into traffic. With four wheels that maneuver 120 degrees individually, it could turn on a dime. With zero tailpipe emissions, the idea was that it would not pollute. It's a small, electric two-seat pod, with "robot wheels." It looks like a futuristic Volkswagen Beetle.
Ī few years ago, engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology debuted a design, a decade in the making, for a car that would transform urban transportation. This story is the latest in NPR's Cities Project. At the time, the then-president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, hailed the car as a trans-Atlantic "exchange between the world of science and the world of business." There was a lot of excitement in 2012, when the Hiriko car was unveiled at this event at European Union headquarters in Brussels.
0 kommentar(er)
