Is Driving One of the Tiniest Cars in the World in Your Future? -
Beyond bike-share, easier than Zipcar, the next new thing in getting around town with a light carbon footprint may be Hiriko, a two-passenger electric vehicle developed by the Changing Places research group at MIT’s Media Lab. A production run of 20 prototypes begins next year at Vitoria Gasteiz, in northern Spain. (Hiriko means “urban” in Basque.) But it may be several years before they see wide use.
Anyway, don’t dream of buying one of your own. The wee cars aren’t meant for private ownership. Instead they will be stationed in fleets, as complements to city transit systems. Likely first locations include Barcelona, Berlin, Malmö, Hong Kong, and San Francisco.
Hirikos measure 100 inches long, compared to a two-door Mini Cooper’s 146. But for parking they collapse to just 60 inches, and nest together like shopping carts. Drivers use them like shared bikes, picking up a car at a Hiriko depot near where they’re coming from, and dropping it at one near their destination. Thus they address the “last mile” problem of mass transit and “might be most useful at the edges of cities where the transit network is sparse,” explains architect Kent Larson, director of the MIT research group. “In an inner city where it’s very walkable to begin with and then you have good trams or subways or buses, you don’t need the vehicles so much. But at the edges you have a desperate need for additional mobility.”