PARIS: City streets are becoming ever more crowded and traffic ever more dense, while car manufacturers see themselves as not the problem, but the solution.
Case in point: Citroen is planning an entirely new kind of mobility that promises to take the pressure off growing cities while keeping citizens mobile (and buying whatever Citroen is making).
With a kind of giant self-driving skateboard that seats a few passengers, the French manufacturer wants to roll out an electric mobility service that will cover a wide range of needs with a modular design.
The project, developed together with other partners, is called Urban Collectif and outlines a vision that, according to the maker, will become reality in 10 to 20 years at the earliest.
Its centrepiece is the so-called Skate, a 2.60 by 1.60 metre platform in which the battery and electronics for autonomous driving are installed.
So it's a car without a roof or doors, you say?
You might think so, but the idea gets interesting when you think about what you might be able to do with a simple self-driving platform like this.
For this standardised Skate, project partners will be able develop so-called pods that can be mounted on top as needed.
That means any basic platform can be modded to become a car, a yoga studio on wheels, a rolling workshop or a food truck, according to initial prototypes demonstrated by Citroen.
Together with a hotel chain, they have also developed a mobile hotel room, as well as a fitness studio to make sitting in rush hour traffic less dull.
Together with a city marketing company, they were able to turn the Skate into a kind of bus stop that can also drive passengers to a destination.
While Citroen hasn't quite elaborated on how congestion problems are to be solved by replacing cars with different kind of cars, the ideas for the Skate's implementation do suggest that car interiors will soon become far less rigid in their purpose.
To make things more futuristic, the Skate is driven by a newfangled set of wheels that look more like balls and can be turned in any direction by the integrated motors. This means the Skate, in theory, would be able to drive diagonally or sideways.
Given that an autopilot is taking care of the driving, the riding speed is limited to 25kph and these cars, for want of a better word, would be limited to certain lanes, Citroen says.
The idea might seem far-fetched, especially given the slow pace at which autonomous driving and electric mobility is arriving, but Citroen boss Vincent Cobee is a firm believer in this concept and says it will be relatively easy to implement.
But he also admits that Citroen alone won't be solving the problem of urban mobility. "If the mayors and the mobility providers don't join in and partners don't set up pods, then this will remain just a vision."
