MIT reinvents the wheel with foldable, stackable electric car

By Sharon Gaudin

November 7, 2007 12:00 PM ET

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Electric-powered City Cars could be stacked on nearly every block in the city. (Photo courtesy of Franco Vairani/MIT Smart Cities)

He also said having so much of the technology in the robotic wheels frees up a lot of space throughout the rest of the vehicle, allowing the team to make it collapsible. Vairani noted that there is a hinge in the frame beneath the passenger cabin. The cabin itself does not fold, but the frame that supports the cabin folds in half, pushing the cabin into a nearly vertical position.

While the vehicles are in the stack, waiting to be rented out, their lithium-ion batteries would be charging off the city's power grid. But the project is designed to give power back to the city, too. Solar panels erected on nearby buildings would feed energy into the charging stations and when the cars' batteries were full, the excess power would flow into the city's grid.

"It's definitely not going to solve all the problems," said Vairani, who added that a professor supervises the design team, which includes five students who work full-time on the project and 10 who work on it part-time. "It's about presenting an alternative to how we think about cars right now. The goal was to increase the efficiency of the whole transportation system. It's not going to be as efficient as mass transit, but it combines the advantages of personal mobility with ... the ability to take people exactly where they're interested in going. ... It's about how people move in the city."

Read more about hardware in Computerworld's Hardware Knowledge Center.

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