If you live in a suburban or country lifestyle the form factor of the car may be fine, if anything the average car might be too small, however those of us who live in a city (I know a lot of the GoGeeks readers are from the San Francisco Bay Area), the car is way too big and driving tends to be a huge hassel thanks to the large amounts of traffic, the lack of parking spots, etc. Well luckily for us, MIT Media Lab has been thinking about that exact problem!
In the video above you see a half size model of the new vehicle they’ve been working on! The beauty of this car is that it’s extremely good for the environment and it helps with parking! How might it help with parking? Well since most of the time when you’re driving in the city, by the time you come across a spot, it’s typically incredibly small, well this car will actually fold closed when you’re about to park, reducing its perimeter in half.
We’ve actually seen similar designed cars before, but the difference is that this car will only be in its small form factor, when it’s parked.
Now I personally live in a city, and typically when I need to go places I just walk, it’s rare where I need to drive, so honestly owning a car doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Well it turns out that when designing this car, it’s actually designed to be a shared car, so you simply just drive it (for a fee of course) whenever you need it and just drop it off when your done–it doesn’t have to be dropped off in the same location. So if priced well, this could be a game changer for the way we all live in cities!
If you want more specifics on the car hardware, check out the video below.
The first model of this car should be out sometime next year and it should be going into production by 2013.
Q4U: If you live in a city, do you think you’d prefer something small like this, or would you still prefer your standard sized car?
