One of the most amusing sights on our trip overseas last year was seeing a very short smart car parked head-on towards the footpath between cars that were parked normally, that is, parallel parked. The opportunist driver had noticed a gap small enough for his car to get into, and gone into it. The back of the car was only a few centimetres beyond the cars on either side.
This year, two Dunedin (New Zealand) designers, Chris Ebbert, of the Otago Polytechnic, and Prof Thomas Bley, of the University of Otago, have been leading a team to design a car that will go comfortably between other cars, the way motorbikes do.
The car will have only three wheels, yet be as stable as a normal four-wheeled vehicle. It will be no more than 72.5 cm wide, which is a narrow 28 and half inches, or 2' 4”. It will run on a battery, but solar panels could provide it with top-up power. This is another plus in a time when petrol is making such inroads into the average driver's pocket.
The designs published in the Otago Daily Times this week show a vehicle that's slightly longer in the front section than the back. It splits in two, literally, at the dividing point, with the front section tilting forward to allow the driver to get in and out. The front is slanted up from the base to the top, with a kind of "nose" near the ground. There is a front window, naturally, as well as two side windows in the front section, and then two more smaller windows (and a rear window) in the back.
This is, of course, the design as it stands at the moment. The vehicle hasn't yet been built, but it's hoped a prototype will be available by next year, when it may take a world tour to reach the planned Copenhagen Climate Conference.
The project is named "oMoCo" the working title for the Otago Motor Company, and the team are keen to attract commercial partners, with the aim of establishing a potentially lucrative manufacturing centre for the vehicle in Dunedin. Dunedin has just been badly hit with the loss of over 400 jobs over the next several months, as Fisher and Paykel, the white ware manufacturers, winds down its Mosgiel plant, so any new manufacturing work will be most welcome.
The oMoCo is seen as a more sustainable alternative to the motorized rickshaw, a vehicle that's popular in many Asian cities, where it can zip between the congestion of hundreds of cars stuck in traffic jams. It could also be used as a rapid-response ambulance, or a delivery vehicle. Some conservatively-ridden tests with motorcycles in Dunedin's traffic (which is seldom as congested as the traffic in overseas cities) shows that motorcycles could reach their destination 30% faster than a car over a 4.5 km route - that's just under three miles.
Here's hoping we see these vehicles on Dunedin's roads - and plenty of other roads - in the near future!
