How about just picking up that car from the corner of the office room, taking it out, unfolding it and driving it back home? The new sports car is almost like a toy car coming to life.
A sports car that can be folded into half is the most innovative creation of a young 22-year-old British designer, Daniel Bailey. He states that his creation has been inspired by the Peugeot 908 and Lamborghini Murcielago.
According to Bailey, this sexy, sleek and mean looking car goes up on its nose, allowing the back wheels to slide under the car on two rollers. This way, it becomes half its size and makes parking easy. Obviously, people will have to get out of the car before it can be folded.
Bailey says that this car will run on hydrogen fuel or electricity and he came up with the concept of a folding car, in order to take care of the two main problems that most modern cities face; that of pollution and population. The lack of parking space in major cities due to the large number of cars is a big issue and the ability to fold a car up to 50% of its original size when parking, alleviates the need for creating even more parking space.
This design has been submitted by Bailey in a competition held by Peugeot to create a concept car that is designed to evolve perfectly in the cities of the future with large population and huge number of cars; while including aspects such as environmental awareness, economic efficiency, social harmony and interactive mobility.
A similar prototype of a lightweight electric folding car model is said to be under creation by scientists led by Bill Mitchell, professor of architecture, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT.) This stackable and foldable car is named, “City Car.” MIT says this car can be mass produced and rented by commuters following a business model of shared-use. It can be folded and stacked just like grocery carts either at subway stations or other sites. The key to this concept is said to lie in the wheels design.
It is interesting to note that the concept of a foldable car is not really new. History is witness to several such wonderful and highly talented designing capabilities. It was as early as the 1950s, S.N.C.A.N., the French aircraft builders began working on an auto-scooter using the aeronautical designing principles. It was named “Inter” and was introduced in 1953 at a Paris Show. The only difference is that it folded forward unlike David Bailey’s creation where the back wheels are folded. Records of that car reveal that the front wheels were mounted on outriggers and folded forward under the car, to help parking in narrow spaces. For some reason, it has been said that this feature has been eliminated from the cars made later.
Experts say that electric cars if ever they are truly capable of being mass produced can certainly come cheap, since there is nothing very expensive or complicated to them, excepting the batteries. They say that a shared use model alleviates the need for the drivers to buy batteries, and it would bring the per mile cost down, much lower than the per mile cost of gasoline. The lead-acid batteries are inexpensive, so replacing a battery will not be a problem too. Even if the battery is on the expensive side, it would be much longer lasting.
This ingenious thinking and creativity is wonderful and certainly would reduce parking space requirement and reduce pollution. A question that comes to the minds of the non-tech savvy amongst us is about the foldable car that is non-stackable. If everyone parks their folded cars next to each other, how does one go about getting the car out? Will it have some sort of a handle that can be used to pull it into the street?
Experts are keeping their eyes open on the Peugeot design competition to see what innovative concepts will show up. The flying car may not be far away, going by the advancements being made in the area of flying human beings, which calls for a different story-telling session altogether.