Growth of so-called mega-cities is leading automakers to come up with ever-more inventive ways of propelling us to to our destinations, with General Motors recently showcasing its EN-V concept car model in London.
The US manufacturer is currently exhibiting its three Electric Networked Vehicles – hence EN-V – at the World Expo in Shanghai – but outlined some of its thoughts to the UK press recently.
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2007 was the first time in mankind’s history that the urban population overtook the rural one – with the rise of the mega-cities such as Shanghai and Mumbai for example – creating headaches for town planners.
The car can’t be uninvented and people clearly need to move around, but the recent 100km traffic jam near Beijing that lasted an extraordinary 10 days is a glimpse into the future that GM is trying to avoid.
To that end, its Jiao, Miao and Xiao models are an attempt to address the shift in urban living that last year for example, saw 15m Chinese people move from the country to the city, while Mumbai now has 100,000 inhabitants per square mile.
GM director of advanced technology vehicle concepts Christopher Barroni-Bird outlined how it was working on a way to find “a new DNA for vehicles,” but it needed the input of infrastructure providers to move from concept to reality.
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By GlobalDataEN-Vs are only predicted to have a range of 25 miles and a top speed of 25mph – but that should ensure the majority of urban driving is catered for.
And he proffered the startling fact that simply raising average speeds from 10km/h to 20km/h – some cities barely even reach the lower figure – would slash CO2 emissions by 40%.
But GM isn’t stopping at simply providing yet another small, electric vehicle. Barroni-Bird proposed autonomous parking and retrieval, perhaps using a mobile phone, as well as a hands-free driving experience that could enable users to ‘platoon’ with other cars equipped with the requisite technology or use video-conferencing in the cockpit to communicate, while enjoying collision-free technology.
Fanciful or the vision of things to come? Barroni-Bird readily concedes much of the new thinking is a concept, but transport planners will have to embrace similar ideas if cities are not simply to turn into giant car parks.
As anyone who has crawled from the airport in Moscow to the town centre can readily agree, quality of life would be hugely improved with access to quicker and cleaner transport.
But it will need a concerted effort by all automakers to push this forward – in tandem with regulators and urban planners.
And it might just require consumers to accept what on the face of it is a lowish average speed on paper – but in fact would considerably improve journey times – and quality of city life – considerably.
At the dawn of the motor car age in the UK, drivers used to have someone walking in front of the vehicle with a red flag. Unless, we want to return to those average speeds, some fairly radical thinking will have to be done.
