Massachusetts Institute of Technology Smart Car

Smart City, Smart Car

Franco Vairani is a PhD candidate in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nothing odd about that. He’s an extremely intelligent person who just happens to love buildings. But somehow or other, he’s found himself designing a car that’s gaining quite a bit of attention.

“I wasn’t so much interested in a car per se, as I was interested in the idea of urban mobility,” says Vairani. “The car grew out of that.”

Vairani’s adviser is Bill Mitchell, who heads the Smart Cities research group at the MIT Media Lab. Mitchell wanted to design a concept car. He wasn’t sure what type of car he wanted to design, but one thing he did know was that he wanted people with little or no automotive design experience to work on the project. Enter Vairani.

A New Approach to an Old Problem

Vairani and the other students, mostly architects and industrial designers, had no formal automotive training. Mitchell wanted his team to step outside of traditional automotive thought and approach the design from a different angle and not be constrained by the various external considerations that typical automotive designers face.

“We wanted to approach the problem from an urban design standpoint,” says Vairani. “Instead of the city adapting to the car, what if the car had to adapt to the city as it exists?”

Vairani and the rest of the Smart Cities team were initially concerned with how to make better use of the limited space in overcrowded urban centers like Boston. “You’ve got a ton of cars doing nothing for long periods of time,” Vairani says. “They’re simply taking up space. A lot of space. We wanted to find a better way to utilize what was available.”

In an effort to solve the space issue, the team explored ideas, peeling away issues like the layer of an onion. Discussions about parking came back to space and eliminating the space between vehicles. To increase mobility, they designed the four wheels of the vehicle to move independently of one another. And then Vairani went grocery shopping.

Inspiration from the Everyday

Amidst the tortellini, tomatoes, and Twinkies (Franco doesn’t really eat Twinkies), it hit him. Shopping carts. The best way to eliminate space is to stack the cars like shopping carts, and the best way to stack cars is to make the frame collapsible. The idea for the City Car was born. Vairani and colleague Will Lark Jr. brainstormed and quickly developed the first iteration of what would become the City Car. This kind of thinking was exactly why Mitchell didn’t want folks with traditional automotive design experience working on this project.

The stacking idea—504 City Cars can fit in the same space as 82 regular vehicles—then led to a discussion on how to best utilize the existing infrastructure of the urban spaces. To keep the vehicles small, collapsible, and stackable, they developed the idea for a system of coupling recharging stations on the street where the cars would be stacked with fuel cells situated atop adjacent buildings. The vehicles would be shared by city residents and returned to a recharging station, much like a shopping cart, when not in use.

The result would be fewer cars on the road, less pollution in the air, more space around the city, enormous battery capacity thrown back into the electrical grid, and the effective utilization of inexpensive, off-peak power.

The City Car has generated quite a buzz and has attracted attention from the likes of General Motors, sponsor of the MIT Media Lab, as well as college campuses and resort islands that see enormous potential for the vehicle in their environments.

Beauty and Brains

With that kind of interest in the idea, presentation became critical. Vairani used Autodesk® AliasStudio™ for modeling and 3D printing, and Autodesk® 3ds Max® for visualization. “The only way we could’ve done it was to use these tools,” says Vairani. “Max was crucial for the kinetic part—putting the functionality right into the visualization.”

Vairani is especially proud of the sustainable nature of the City Car. “Sustainability has always been a factor in whatever design I’ve worked on,” he says. “It’s as essential a component as anything else, like structural integrity.” And he looks forward to the day when a project isn’t called out as being “green” or “sustainable.” He looks forward to the day when those things are simply inherent to everything we do. Who knows exactly when that will be, but at least with the City Car, Vairani’s got us moving in the right direction.