Aiming to make rental scooters more convenient, an MIT group has unveiled a new low-cost motor scooter that actually folds in half to make it easy to store.
Taking the concept of bicycles on racks that can be rented to a new level, MIT has designed a new foldable electronic scooter. A prototype of the new design was recently unveiled at the Milan Auto Show, demonstrating what a low-cost and foldable scooter design could look like.
"The new design "was all about providing a clean, green, silent electronic scooter that would provide the same kind of urban mobility as motor scooters," said William J. Mitchell of MIT's Smart Cities Group. By putting motors directly inside each of the two wheels, it's possible to design the scooter so that it could be folded up to about half its size, which should make it easier to store in crowded urban environments. "When folded, it can also be easily wheeled along like a trolley suitcase, making it easy to take along on trains or even indoors," Mitchell added.
 | | The MIT-designed electric scooter, shown folded up at left. |
Mitchell and his team envision the scooters being provided in racks at convenience stores, train stations and other convenient city locations as one-way rentals. Users would swipe a credit card to remove a scooter from the rack (in which its batteries would be kept fully charged up), unfold it for the trip and then fold it up again to deposit at another rack at the destination.
"The simplified design could bring down production costs significantly. A typical gas scooter has about 1,000 parts, but ours only has 150," said Mitchell. A one-way-rental business model has been demonstrated in Paris, where a company has recently begun a similar service with 1,000 bicycles.
 | | The low-cost and foldable design of these electric scooters, as shown in this rendering outside the Duomo in Milan, could provide a convenient and efficient mode of transportation in urban environments. |
The team now plans to further develop the prototype to come up with two different production models. One will be a refinement of the folding scooter introduced in Milan, and the other will be an even simpler model without the folding capability, to be produced for regions where low cost is most important and space restrictions are not as crucial.
The whole design project was accomplished in eight months "from a blank sheet to a built concept," Mitchell said. The multi-generational, cross-disciplinary team included a core group of four graduate students along with several others who made contributions, and a group of MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program students.
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