Metropolis Mag looks at automobile of the future

So, this clip from Metropolis Mag isn't exactly Detroit specific but it's something that could be our future, especially since we're the Motor City. A bunch of people at MIT -- yep, where all those smart kids go -- have reinvented the car, sort of. They thought about it, and the future, put the two together and came up with something very different than what we have now. Take a read, it could be our future.

Excerpt from Metropolis Mag:

The title of the book is Reinventing the Automobile. What are some of the big ideas here?

The first one: design an ultralightweight, battery-electric automobile that's specifically tuned to the needs of urban life, because most drivers actually live in cities. We came up with an automobile that's less than 1,000 pounds. (Even a Prius is about 3,000 pounds.) When it's unfolded—the car folds up for parking—it's slightly shorter than a Smart Car. And from an energy standpoint, we're talking about the equivalent of about 200 miles to the gallon.

All this comes from not just clever design but from rigorously redesigning the problem and saying, "Look, the architecture of the traditional automobile has been around for a hundred years now and responds to a set of conditions that made sense in the year of Henry Ford but doesn't make sense anymore."

And that's just the first piece of the idea, correct?

That's the vehicle level. And then the second idea is to integrate this with rethinking the electric grid, and particularly the emergence of smart grids. If you do plug-in cars that use the traditional grid, you're relying on coal-fired power plants. You're trying to make a cleaner and greener planet, but in the end power plants pump out huge amounts of CO2. So a key concept here is the idea of automatic recharging in parking spaces. It's like your electric toothbrush. You never think about it. You put it back in its holder, and it recharges. This is critical. And it's not the idea of electric charging that most people are thinking about.

Read the entire article here.