Mitchell Joachim was challenged to design a car that’s more environmentally friendly. He responded by helping to literally reinvent the wheel.
What he did was to put the whole car in the wheel – drive train, motoring suspension, breaking – and more importantly, intelligence, inside the wheel package.
These “smart” wheels could radically transform driving in the city since the wheels would be able to “talk” to one another by being connected to a municipal grid.
According to Joachim, since the wheels can talk to one another within the vehicle, they can also branch out and talk to vehicles nearby or constantly reconnect on a municipal grid. So vehicles would be networked and talking to one another and move in flocks or herds.
Joachim said these “herds” of future cars could make driving more efficient and consume less energy. Plus, the wheels could even help keep streets in good repair. For example, if it runs over a pothole, it would tell the vehicles next to it there’s a pothole so they would avoid it, and it would also send it to a municipal grid that would say, ‘come and repair that.’
*Our thanks to:*
Mitchell Joachim is on the faculty at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design. He has been awarded the Moshe Safdie Research Fellowship, and the Martin Family Society Fellow for Sustainability at MIT. He won the History Channel and Infiniti Design Excellence Award for the City of the Future, and Time Magazine Best Invention of the Year 2007, Compacted Car with MIT Smart Cities. He was selected by Wired magazine for “The 2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To”. Rolling Stone magazine honored Mitchell as an agent of change in “The 100 People Who Are Changing America”.
Photo Credit: Franco Vairani/MIT Smart Cities
Dodging pot holes could put you into on coming cars,and what happens when you get a grid failure
Increasing centralization will result in one thing. Massive, perhaps total failure of the system. Our automobiles are rather efficient and convenient right now. Trying to turn us into ants, going where and when we “supposed” to sound more like a nightmare than a dream to me.
Perhaps folks in the city can adapt to such a system. Where I live, it wouldn’t help much. It is 30 miles to a small city, 12 miles to the bar, three miles to the post office and 70 miles to Hosuton. I go where and when I wish. I will keep that mobility as long as I can.
In my profession, I drive a truck nationwide. I seldom load or unload at the same places and run rather irregular routes. Without the rather irregular truck routes, food, clothing,video games, gasoline, electricty and everthing esle we consider normal life would cease to exist.
losers
these little cars look so cute and cudly!!!!!!!