Christopher Borroni-Bird - Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century
23 February 2010
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Posted by: King's College
Imagine driving around your city or town in one of the vehicles shown on the cover—while connecting to your social network and favorite news and entertainment sources, using your time efficiently, and expending only renewable energy. This book presents four big ideas that will make this possible. It weaves them together into a comprehensive vision for the future of automobiles, personal mobility systems, and the cities they serve.
The first idea is to transform the DNA—that is, the underlying design principles—of vehicles. The DNA of today’s cars and trucks depends on petroleum for energy, on the internal combustion engine for power, and on manual control and independent, stand-alone operation. The new automotive DNA is based on electric-drive and wireless communications. It will allow future vehicles to be lighter and cleaner, drive themselves when necessary, avoid crashes, and be fun and fashionable.
The second idea is the Mobility Internet. This is a logical development from its predecessors—the computer Internet, the cell-phone Internet, and the "Internet of things” enabled by electronic tags and sensors. It will enable vehicles to collect, process, and share enormous amounts of data so that traffic can be managed and travel times can be reduced and made more predictable. It will also permit drivers to remain seamlessly connected to their social networks.
The third idea is to integrate electric-drive vehicles with smart electric grids that use clean, renewable energy sources—particularly solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal—together with dynamic electricity pricing. This not only provides clean energy to vehicles, but also enables grids to operate more efficiently and to make more effective use of renewables. By taking advantage of the electricity storage capacity of electric-drive vehicles and employing price signals to regulate demand and mitigate the effects of the intermittent supply characteristic of many renewable sources, smart grids can keep electricity supply and demand in optimal balance.
The fourth idea is to provide real-time control capabilities for urban mobility and energy systems. This is accomplishedby establishing dynamically priced markets not only for electricity, but also for road space, parkingspace, and in some contexts shared-use vehicles. The wireless connectivity and onboard intelligence of theautomobiles that we propose enables them to respond appropriately to the price signals within these markets.This provides an effective way to balance supply and demand, relieve road and parking space congestion, andincrease the utilization rates of available vehicles.
Why haven’t these ideas been pursued before? Many of their elements, after all, aren’t new. The answer is thatthe enabling technologies not only had to develop, but also had to converge before they could become effective.They have now done so. This creates an opportunity to reinvent automobiles and personal urban mobilitysystems fundamentally (not just improve them incrementally), which is what’s needed to meet the urgent sustainability challenges we face.
The book is available from March 2010. For further information and to purchase a copy, visit The MIT Press website.
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Imagine driving around your city or town in one of the vehicles shown on the cover—while connecting to your social network and favorite news and entertainment sources, using your time efficiently, and expending only renewable energy. This book presents four big ideas that will make this possible. It weaves them together into a comprehensive vision for the future of automobiles, personal mobility systems, and the cities they serve.
y electronic tags and sensors. It will enable vehicles to collect, process, and share enormous amounts of data so that traffic can be managed and travel times can be reduced and made more predictable. It will also permit drivers to remain seamlessly connected to their social networks.
