Gizmag is one of my favorite new tech news sources precisely because of their affinity for new vehicles. This video is a fan-tast-ic overview of all the single and narrow track vehicles in the pipeline right now. They’ve put those innovations into very sharp perspective as well — laying out the reality of traffic congestion we’re going to face in the next decade and beyond. With the number of cars on the roads worldwide set to double in that time period (greatly outpacing the growth of road infrastructure), one of the best solutions may indeed be smaller vehicles optimized for efficient commuting. Narrower, nimbler vehicles means not only drastically less fuel consumption, but less congestion.
What this means for Project Streetliner is that I’m re-evaluating width. The seed of this idea was essentially for a recumbent version of the Piaggio MP3 with a streamliner shell on it. In the video, the presenter talks about how the Nissan Land Glider concept began explicitly with a half-width vehicle. In my mind, a vehicle like Concept #2 would be about 2/3 the width of a standard car. If I adopt a more narrow track and shroud the vehicle more like a Velomobile, that could make for a very interesting vehicle.
