OBSERVED
for a hundred years now and responds to a set of conditions that made
WR PEN B
Pau l Makovsky
OEw .. NERS
MIT Media Lab
c ties me a mIt edu
PRO,JE T
MIT Press
Re nventmg the AutomobIle Personal
Urba1 Mab,lIty for the 21st Centu ry
A Complete
Rethink
William Mitchell and the MIT Media Lab
take on one of urban America's hidden
foes: the car.
When you think about it, the cars we drive
today haven't fundamentally progressed since
the days of the Model T. They're fine for moving
multiple passengers over long distances at high
speeds, but they don't work as effectively in
cities. Moreover, why do most of the cars on the
market today look the same? In their new book,
Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban
Mobility for the 21st Century (MIT Press),
William J. Mitchell, who directs the Smart
Cities research group at MIT's Media Lab,
and two industry experts, General Motors'
Christopher E. Borroni-Bird and Lawrence D.
Burns (formerly ofGM), reimagined the car.
Metropolis's editorial director, Paul Makovsky,
spoke with Mitchell about how to make urban
mobility more sustainable, why the car is a
networked device, and why designers need
to start thinking more holistically.
MEDIA LAB CITYCAR
1.000Ibs.
FORD EXPLORER
3,950Ibs.
48 METROPOLISMAG.COM
"Look, the architecture of the traditional automobile has been around
sen se in the year of Henry Ford but doesn't make sense anymore."
The title of the book is Reinventing the Automobile.
What are some of the big ideas here?
The first one: design an ultralightweight,
battery-electric automobile that's specifically
tuned to the needs of urban life, because most
driver's actually live in cities. We came up with
an automobile that's less than 1,000 pounds,
(Even a Prius is about 3,000 pounds.) When
it's unfolded-the car folds up for parking-it's
slightly shorter than a Smart Car. Andfrom
an energy standpoint, we're talking about the
equivalent of about 200 miles to the gallon,
All this comes from not just clever design but
from rigorously redesigning the problem and
saying, "Look, the architecture of the tradi-
tional automobile has been around for a hundred
years now and responds to a set of conditions
that made sense in the year ofHenry Ford but
doesn't make sense anymore,"
The CityCar's folding capabilities drastically reduce
its footprint, freeing up urban space for other uses.
It also weighs a fraction of other vehicles.
TOYOTA PRIUS
2,932Ibs.
And that 's just the first piece of t he ide!!, correct?
That's the vehicle level. And then the second
idea is to integrate this with l'ethinkl'ng the
electric grid, and particularly the emergence
of smart grids, If you do plug-in cars that use
the traditional grid, you're relying on coal-fired
power plants. You'r'e trying to make a cleaner
and greener planet, but in the end power plants
pump out huge amounts of CO 2 • So a key
concept here is the idea of automatic recharg-
ing in parking spaces. It's like your electric
toothbrush. You never think about it. You put
it back in its holder, and it l·echarges. This is
critical. And it's not the idea of electric charging
that most people are thinking about.
Which is pull the plug and put it in the ~arage .
Yes, 01' battery swapping, which is an even
dumber idea. Our idea is to shift the burden of
recharging out of the moving vehicle and into
fixed infrastructure. It's looking at itfrom an
urban-design perspective rather than a vehicle-
design perspective. This throws an enormous
amount of battery-storage capacity fo r free into
the elec:tr-ic: grid. Our electric auto is JYrog1'ammed
to do energy trading back andforth, and this
enables you to balance the energy flow, which is
an important thing with electric grids.
Why?
A fundamental problem with electric grids is
you have peak and off-peak situations, and you
have to design for them continued on page 50
March 2010
,
OBSERVED
A COMPLETE RETHINK continued from page 48
SIDEWALK IKE/CITYCAR SIDEWALK
The size and foldability of the CityCar has the potential
to dramatically reshape the urban landscape.
accordingly. With smart grids, you can do very
fine-grain dynamic pricing, and if you have
smart consumers driving these smart electric
automobiles, you can buy electricity when the
prices are low and sell it when prices are high.
This is an effective market-based way ofbalanc-
ing the electric grid. It also makes the grid much
friendlier to clean-power sources, such as solm'
and wind. Right now there's a big cost and prac-
tical disadvantage to these sources, because
they don't necessarily produce electricity when
the grid needs it. They can exacerbate the grid-
balancing problem. Here there's a synergy be-
tween the grid and the way you'd want energy
m arkets to work. The vehicles become dual-use
devices. When they're moving they provide
mobility, and when they're parked they're not
sitting around uselessly like a traditional auto-
mobile, but they're producing power for the grid.
Talk about this idea of the car as an intelligently
networked device.
Yes, they're networked robots. Automobiles
have connectivity now-GPS and increasing
amounts of smm·ts-but they're add-ons, and
many of them are incompatible. The standard
power supply in cars today is inadequate for
supporting a lot of intelligence. Our notion is
these lightweight autos that are much more like
consumer-electronics devices than traditional
automobiles. And my guess is they't'e likely to
be made on a large scale by manufacturers who
look mOl'e like consumer-electronics manufac-
turers than traditional automakers. Once you've
got that, you can extend the functionality
of an automobile in all kinds of dimensions.
What kind of dimensions?
This is connected to the idea of mobility-on-
demand systems as an alternative to private
ownership of automobiles. The concept of doing
50 METROPOLISMAG.COM
"Detroit always emphasizes getting into your car and travel ng to
your destination. What they don't mention? You have to pa the
damn thing at both ends. P,-ivate-automobile parking sucks lP an
immense amount ofw-ban real estate. And it's heavily subsi ized."
stacks of electric vehicles at closely spaced con-
venient locations around the city. When you
want to make a trip, you walk to the nearest
stack, identify yourself electronically, pick up
a car, and drive to a nearest drop-offpoint. It's
one-way t·ental. We can demonstrate that under
most conditions, this gets you better door-to-
door times than private-use automobiles.
Why? Because you're not spending so much time
looking for a parking spot?
Detroit always emphasizes getting into your
car and traveling seamlessly to your destina-
tion. What they don't mention? You have to park
the damn thing at both ends. Private-automobile
parking sucks up an immense amount ofvalu-
able urban real estate. It's heavily subsidized,
and the costs are hidden. We discuss that exten-
sively in the book. Traditional automobiles sit
around 80 percent of the time doing nothing.
With mobility-on-demand systems, the
automobile is useful all the time.
Did your team actually design a concept car?
We've designed two concept cars in parallel.
One was based on the Smat·t Cities group at
the MIT Media Lab called the CityCar- a
foldable, lightweight electric automobile. And
then there's the PUMA that my GM colleagues
developed with Segway, which sort of balances
on two wheels.
When you say a "folding mechanism," does the
car actually compress?
It does. For the CityCar, we put everything in
the wheels. There's no engine, no traditional
drivetrain. We have an independent drive
motor, steering motor, and digital suspension
in each wheel. The wheels are independent, so
the car can spin on its own axis. Since there's
no big engine in front, this allows for front
entry, so you can push the nose into the curb,
fold it up, and do this in less space than the
width of a stand-up parking bay. We get
BIKE/CITYCAR SIDEWALK
very high parking density without having
to massively redo our streets.
How does this redefine the urban streett
It's important to recognize that unlike putting
in a new subway, we thought of this as a strat-
egy for inC1'emental transformation. You can
overlay into the existing infrastructure.
The way New York City is adding bike paths?
Yes. You also improve the quality of streets
enormously. These vehicles are silent, so you get
rid of traffic noise, which has huge architectural
implications, because windows no longer have
to be defensive barriers against traffic noise.
We get rid of local tailpipe pollution. There are
all kinds of urban and street-design opportuni-
ties in taking the released space and putting it
to other uses, like trees, seats, cafes. Streets are
now more supportive of these things, 0 they'l'e
much more pleasant places.
Let's talk about Detroit. Do you see any ope
coming out of there in turns of relnven ng the car?
My GM collaborators are very smart and
imaginative and came out of the research-and -
development side of the company, which has
always been good. We have a tremendously
productive working relationship. However,
I don't have a lot of hope for the traditional
automobile companies, because they Ire com-
mitted to their existing business models. There's
tremendous inertia, huge fixed investments in
old ways of doing things. continued on page 52
William J. Mitchell directs the
MIT Media Lab's Smart Cities
research group.
March 2010
 OBSERVED "The design schools drive me Cl'azy: 'W e're a unique culture That's
why I have ajoint appointment ill architecture and the Me ia Lab
and a lot of activity in urban planning. But I do my work in the
A COMPLETE RETHINK continued from page 50 Media Lab because I couldn't do it in the m'chitecture depa tment."

~[[(JI !
',·D ·:'
~
8'2" 4' 11 "
CITYCA R CITYCAR
(unfolded) (fal ded)

24'6" PARKING RATIO; 3.3:1

The parking footprint of ultrasmall vehicles like

the CityCar is significantly smaller than that
of traditional cars. USVs can fold and stac k,
creating efficient urban footprints.

That 's going to make it difficult for them to be

successful players. I think we're going to see
new players.

How do we get away from this dinosaur thinking

that impedes progress?
My designer's bias comes in here, It's important
to get the technology and the policy right, but
in the end, the way you break a logjam is by
engaging people's imagination, people's desire,
by creating things that they never thought of
before, This is something that Apple has led the
way in, So a crucial part of this will be to create
sexy prototypes and convincing small-scale
pilot projects in sympathetic environments.

I think this automobile project represents a real

shift in approach. It's about systems thinking,
about how everything is related to everything else.
How do you get designers-whether they're car
designers or architects or urban planners-to take
this bigger-picture, more holistic approach?
One of the huge problems with design has been
the way that the lines get broken up into these
traditionally defined disciplines. You're an
architect or a graphic designer or a silicon-
chip designer or an interaction designer, blah
blah, blah. The big, important design issues
just don't fall in these categories anymore.
They sprawl in messy ways across them, We
have architects, urban designers, economists,
mechanical engineers, electrical geeks, and we
put them together into an intense multidisci-
plinary design environment. And we do it in
a way that 's different from the way that you'd
organize a multidisciplinary team on an ar-
chitectural project, where everyone has their
role. We say, "Yes, you have expertise that you
bring to the table, but it's everyone's respons i-
bility to contribute to everything and educate
the rest of the group as necessary on the issues
52 METROPOLISMAG.COM
that you know most about." We knew nothing
about battery technology when we started,
but one of the great adventures of MIT is you
can walk down the hall and find the world's
leading expert. Th e strategy is to go out, find
what you need to know, and bring it back to
the design project,
But isn't MIT an exception here? It's generally
perceived as the epicenter of forward thinking.
How do you get the rest of the country to adopt
this model?
There are a lot of good universities, The model
can be generalized, but design schools don't
want to do it. They drive me crazy: "We're
a uniqu e culture," That~s why I have ajoint
appointment in architecture and the Media
Lab and a lot of activity in planning. But I do
my work in the Media Lab because I couldn't
do it in the architecture department.
Why?
Because the identity of the architect is very
important. Personally, I don't care whether we
call it architecture or if they call m e an archi-
tect. I care about doing progressive, socially
effective work. Wherever it takes m e, I'll go.
But we need to change the way we think about
professional education. The standard way of
thinking is: you go to design school f or however
many years, build a stock of intellectu al capital,
and then live off that. They give you a provi -
sional education for the rest of your career. And
it just doesn't work anymore, The fu n damental
professional skill of a designer these days is
strategically investing learning time. You
must be able to say, "OK, there is an immensity
of stuff out there to learn, but this is what's
important to instantly learn for this project,"
You can n ev er say. "w. ll, I'm an architect, ,~o
I don't do battery technology," Youju t can't.
These m"e the directions design schools and
universities have to go in. The exciting thing is,
engineering and business schools are starting
to learn how important design is, how the most
effective way of adding economic valu e is to do
clever design, but they don't have a clue yet how
to do it, []
March 2010