Will you be folding up your car when you get to work next year? It might seem unlikely but a new type of vehicle called micro EVs could be the solution to some of our current motoring woes.
The idea with these small, collapsible cars is that you take them on your commute to work or on your city shopping trip while you leave your main car behind. They are electric powered and they could be on our roads in time for next summer according to some reports.
The main target market at the moment is cited as being the commuters who don’t live within walking distance of any public transport option. If you are in this situation then you will know that you don’t currently have many choices other than to take your car all the way to work.
Rent and Drive
What we could see in the near future is the arrival of groups of these light electric cars at renting stations near cities in the UK and other European countries. The hope is that they will help keep traffic congestion to a minimum, ease inner city parking problems and also help the environment.
Elizabeth Deakin is a city planning and transport expert from the University of California and she said that problem of commuters who live far from train station and other public transport methods has been “growing steadily” in the last half century.
Other ideas such as car sharing, bike sharing and city centre congestion charges have achieved varying degrees of success in recent years but the idea of the folding electric vehicle could be the one which finally solves the commuting problem.
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab in Massachusetts have been working on this vehicle for more than 10 years and it appears that we could see the results soon.
Of coursde you could manage spatial and economic planning to have poeple living withing walking distance of the places they work, and failing that building housing next to rail routes … (Oh but I forgot the land here is so valuable (because it has access to a rail route)) and we can get greenfield sites in the middle of nowhere really cheap, which are viable because society is not paying the true cost of private car use….
Very Interesting. Would be a great, how much would they fold down, similar to chaining up a bike?