Image Credit: Brooks and Bone
What's wrong with cars today?
When two recent graduates from the Royal College of Art surveyed the cars and trucks swirling about the streets of London, all they could think was "dirty and anti-social."
Car-sharing is a way to access urban transportation without sacrificing the flexibility of a personal vehicle. But car-sharing services simply spread the consequences of dirty, anti-social cars between more people, so the relative cost and waste are reduced.
James Brooks and Richard Bone decided that what the car-sharing industry really needed was a personal car designed specifically for inner-city shared use. And so they designed one.
The Box (above) is a quadracycle powered by a small, flat battery with a 25-mile range and a top speed of 35 mph. The four-passenger Box is similar in size to the Smart Fortwo and is specifically envisioned as a car-sharing vehicle.
To make the Box more social and easier to share, Brooks and Bone did away with the low, sleek design we've come to expect in modern cars. An aerodynamic shape makes almost no difference when you're crawling along in urban traffic, and all those sexy lines actually reduce the amount of space available for passengers and parcels.
Although it has a carbon footprint that's identical to the two-seater smart car, the Box's boxy shape allows 4 passengers, even those with physical disabilities, to ride comfortably.
With an emphasis on utility and efficiency, Brooks and Bone also decided to strip the car of all unecessary electronics, and instead designed the car to interface with the smart phones that almost everyone is carrying in their pockets these days.
According to the designers, these changes mean the Box will be cheaper to produce, maintain, and insure than current shared vehicles. This will in-turn reduce operating costs for car-sharing companies like Zipcar, which has never been profitable primarily due to the cost of conventional cars. Car designed specifically for carsharing could dramatically boost profitability and growth, thus help bring carsharing into the mainstream.
Even though the Box only exists in digital form (Brooks and Bone are constructing a non-working prototype for display at the London Transit Museum starting in September), the concept marks a significant shift in the way people are thinking about the shareable economy.
Instead of trying to make conventional products fit into the sharing model, designers are thinking outside the box by creating products for which sharing is the primary purpose.
And in this case, they're just redesigning the Box altogether.
What do you think--does the Box represent the future of the car-sharing industry?
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Comments
Mark Holmes wrote on 07.21.11, 8:42am:
I think this concept looks great. While Graeme has some valid points, I think we need to remember this isn't a 'car' it's a quadricycle. Yes safety is always a concern, but
I think what this design represents and what we should all be in favour of, is a step in the right direction and a step away from the status obsessed, over engineered, fast and irrelevanly styled cars we see around us today.
It seems short sighted to comment on the minor details.
Battery efficiancy is increasing by the day while charging time is decreasing.
It's important to encourage this sort of thinking.
From reading their website it seems this is the first phase of the design process, so all the best to them and I hope to see the Box on the road one day!
Graeme Smith wrote on 07.21.11, 9:47am:
Quite true, I am not trying to nay-say it.
Quite the opposite. However whether we call it a box, a car, or a quadracycle, really has no bearing on whether it is safe to drive. I just thought the safety and cost aspects needed more work before they move to the next step in design.
Mark Doors wrote on 08.11.11, 8:26am:
Certainly looks interesting. When I first read the article I thought that it was going to be pedal-powered - why is it referred to as a quadracycle? Now THAT would make sense - with four people you wouldn't work up too much of a sweat on the way to work and there would be a drastically lower carbon footprint. At the end of the day, batteries still have to be charged, and that means fossil fuels...
Graeme Smith wrote on 08.17.11, 8:07am:
A freind Ziggy and I have been looking at the idea of hibrid electric vehicles, that combine, pedal power, and electrics. The idea being that not everyone can pedal as enthusiastically as some, and so electrical assist, might have a tendency to increase the number of people who pedal at all, or deal better with the problem of hilly terrain. My GF and I when we have the resources, are hoping to be able to build a tandem electrical bike and I was hoping to put the electrical assist system into it if only because I flag so easily when pedalling these days and she is not much better. The thing is, that if we set it up properly, we could pedal on the bike for a while and charge up the battery before we left on the trip, and then extend the range of the battery by pedalling as we went along. In this case the small battery would be effective, because except for having to stop from time to time and recharge it, the distance would be limited only by the amount of pedalling done.
I like some aspects of this design, but I think that we need to think a bit about some of the assumptions.
There is nothing wrong with having a limited battery, especially if it can be built locally, but 25 miles, may be too small a distance. While it is certainly enough for a single user, that is only working within the local area, the idea is to share the car between a number of users, each of which will want to travel. Suppose we say each will travel an average of 10 miles during their use, then we would be limiting the use of the car to 2.5 people per 24 hour period, (recharge) I think that a vehicle that can service 5 people in the 24 hour period, would be more to the point.
While having the doors on the front and the back, lets you partition the vehicle into the equivalent of a 1/4 ton truck, or a 4 seater, the design does not seem to incorporate bumpers, which would, I assure you be necessary to minimize damage from low speed collisions. This would of course be an insurance factor.
As well, there would be no crumple zone to separate the driver from the impact of a vehicle traveling at higher speeds in the opposite direction. While there does not need to be the extended front end, that includes the motor, that most cars have, a safety crumple zone, in the front, might reduce the personal injury issues.
The gull wing type openings and the bent glass styling suggested would have its own problems probably raising the cost of the glass components significantly, and making the car significantly more dangerous in a "Roll-over" situation, which would be much more likely in a top-heavy "Box" configuration than in a lower profile structure, the weight of the motor, and battery might offset this a bit, but, anyone who has driven a van, will notice that the net effect would be to make the box more tippy, and thus more likely to flip.
A Roll bar, might be required to make up for the failure of the glass to supply enough support for the weight of the box if it rolls.