ARE you feeling the squeeze from the increase in Electronic Road Pricing charges?

Then you probably won't welcome the announcement that Orchard Road malls are raising carpark charges by between 10 and 36per cent either.

Wouldn't it be easier if you didn't have to worry about parking spaces and the cost of maintaining your own car?

This could soon become a reality if scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have their way.

They have designed the futuristic City Car that may even be able to drive itself.

When you reach your destination, the vehicle's computers would, at the press of a button, look for a parking spot behind others like itself, then fold roughly in half so you could stack it there as you would a shopping cart.

"We have reinvented urban mobility," said architecture professor and director of the MIT think tank project Bill Mitchell.

The vehicle hasn't yet been built. But a miniature mock-up version has gone on display at the campus museum, just outside Boston, US. There are plans to build a full-scale model this spring.

The dozen or so engineers and architects on Prof Mitchell's team are confident their computer-generated work is on target.
They feel their golf-cart-sized vehicle could provide a novel solution to the chronic traffic congestion afflicting cities across the US, Europe and Asia - not to mention pollution and energy use, since it would run on a rechargeable battery, the researchers said.

On the drawing board, their two-seater is roughly half the size of a typical compact automobile and a little smaller than the Smart car made by Daimler's Mercedes-Benz.

"It's a virtual computer on wheels," said PhD student Franco Vairani, designer of the vehicle's foldable frame, which he predicts will shrink the car to as little as an eighth the space needed to park the average car.

Hundreds could be stacked around a city and "you would just go and swipe your (credit) card and take the first one available and drive away", said Mr Vairani.

People wouldn't have to worry about where to park their cars in town and cars would take up less urban space, leaving more room for parks and walkways, he added.

Mr Peter Schmitt, a team engineer, said he would like to bring the car to the manufacturing stage within the next three to four years.

But a key consultant for the project, MrChristopher Borroni-Bird, director of the Advanced Technology Vehicle Concepts at US automaker General Motors, said he doesn't think it is quite road-worthy yet.

"What we have is a very intriguing concept," Mr Borroni-Bird told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"It is certainly a very promising idea, but I don't want to say it is ready for production ... there's still a lot of work yet to take it from concept to production."

- Reuters.

This article was first published in The New Paper on Mar 10, 2008.