Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century

by William J. Mitchell, Chris E. Borroni-Bird, Lawrence D. Burns

This book provides a long-overdue vision for a new automobile era. The cars we drive today follow the same underlying design principles as the Model Ts of a hundred years ago and the tail-finned sedans of fifty years ago. In the twenty-first century, cars are still made for twentieth-century purposes. They are inefficient for providing personal mobility within cities -- where most of the world's people now live. In this pathbreaking book, William Mitchell and two industry experts reimagine the automobile, describing vehicles of the near future that are green, smart, connected, and fun to drive. They roll out four big ideas that will make this both feasible and timely. The fundamental reinvention of the automobile won't be easy, but it is an urgent necessity -- to make urban mobility more convenient and sustainable, to make cities more livable, and to help bring the automobile industry out of crisis.

Genres: Design, Technology, Nonfiction

227 pages, Hardcover

First published March 8, 2010

Reviews

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was a very important book. Because the authors are coming from within the auto industry (two GM execs and one MIT prof), they have the cultural standing to level unbelievably harsh critiques of the automobile, much more ferocious than even we're able to do on Streetsblog. The message is clear: if we don't fundamentally start over on the car, from a blank slate, we will have to abandon it for both practical and moral reasons. It doesn't work.

It's also important because it is able to logically disentangle what a car really is, as a step toward rescuing what they think is important about it. I don't agree with them normatively on every step, but analytically, they're very thorough.

Having done that, they walk through cutting-edge technological research and play out how we could start over from scratch on the car. The results are very, very cool. Cars will be automated and networked -- no human error, and possibly no private ownership. They'll have the motors in each wheel, meaning the maneuverability of a Segway (who knew that would turn out to be an important invention). They'll be modular, both in terms of swapping out the seating area on a given body, or in terms of linking small pod cars together if you need something larger for a family trip.

The especially cool thing is how much closer we are to this sci-fi vision than you would think. Buckle in.

[Irmina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Summary

Vehicles that we use today are parked 90% of the time. They do not use sustainable energy sources. They are big and most of the time we don't use the space they provide as we drive alone. They do not allow us to use the time we spend in them productively (working, socialising, sleeping) as they require the driver to concentrate on driving. The authors propose that we take advantage of the twenty-first century technologies and design approaches to enhance our freedom to move about and interact, at the same time making transportation more safe and more sustainable.

They concentrate specifically on:
1. Transforming the design principles of automobiles making them smaller and easier to operate, at the same time switching to more sustainable energy options (electric and hydrogen)
2. Creating Mobility Internet enabling users to stay connected to each other as well as make travelling more safe and effective by sharing data about available infrastructure (collision prevention, easier parking, socialising while driving)
3. Creating energy-efficient buildings and smart utility grids to create responsive energy systems
4. Developing electronically managed, dynamically priced markets for electricity, roads, parking and vehicles

My opinion:
The book was written in 2010. It is great to see that most of the ideas described by the authors have indeed been implemented by car manufacturers (electric and hydrogen vehicles, regenerative breaking, collision prevention systems, self-driving, preconditioning the vehicle, saving driver's preferences etc.)
The challenge seems to be that governments of our countries are not putting enough focus on creating supportive infrastructure that would fully enable us to benefit from new solutions created by designers and technicians (online information about parking availability, traffic jams, charging infrastructure).

Interesting concepts:

Project P.U.M.A. (personal urban mobility and accessibility) - an experimental electrically powered road vehicle created by Segway and General Motors as a two-wheel concept vehicle representing the future of urban transportation.

CityCar - an urban all-electric concept car designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/ci...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_... problem

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of meh. Not real meh, but a little more liteweight than I hoped. Focuses rather heavily on two or three specific concept designs for ultra-small city-cars. I appreciated the author's attention to urban design/planning issues in connection with the potential technological changes to the automotive fleet that they sketch out, but I feel like they left under-examined the really BIG question of how to manage the TRANSITION from now to hopefully-rosy-future. Realizing the technical feasibility of small, lightweight electrically-powered vehicles that collectively are an integral sub-system of a next-generational electrical grid is great, but how do you move through the switch? This book doesn't have much to say about that.

[Quynh Anh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recommend this book to others in my company, as we are in the automobile industry. It gives a lot of imagination to what we are having now with the ICE (internal combustion engine). And the possibilities together with it, coming from the regulators, the complementors,... There are some parts in the book that sound very futuristic. And to be honest, to solve the problem of sustainable development, I think it's better to invest in better public transport. Yet, we don't know. I wonder what if one day we will have the life cycle of cars shortened as smartphone's.
However, it's a very good book to read for ppl who are interested in electric car, personal mobility, especially, when Google is investing and advertising many job now for its project of Self-driving car.

[Brent Barnard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Basically, this outlines a new system of transportation where networks of computers run cars instead of people. I'm excited by this because over the long term, I think computers will be better drivers, whereas humans will constantly be bored by the monotony and continue to text, etc., while driving (resulting in fatalities and more).

[Barry]

This transportation nirvana would come sooner if people could find it in themselves to want it.

[Piotr Smolnicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the starting point for every student who plan to deal with future mobility. I am happy I ordered it to the faculty library.