One innovator is trying to make the future of automobiles fun and green for all mankind.
Educator and avid creator in eco-design, Mitchell Joachim, has come up with the ‘Soft Car,’ a lightweight vehicle that would help solve the pollution problem and interacts with other cars by moving in flocks. Here’s what Joachim had to say about the Soft Car:
“We were thinking that when we’re in the future when we have about 2.4 billion [new] people on this Earth, coming in about 30 years, cities are going to be awfully congested. So we want to think of a gentle congestion. Vehicles where people could move in dense packs or herds or flocks of smart vehicles linked to an intelligent network where the body of the car accepts occasional bumping; accepts an occasional chow, how’re you doing? I’m in a Nerf-like automobile.”
How cool does that sound? Here’s another photo of the prototype:
Joachim has changed the face of design in the past. He is one of the pioneers of the safe and environmental tree house. An MIT designer and green advocate, Joachim believes the Soft Car would work in a modern world. Details like speed and the loss of metal materials would affect the future car, but the inventor believes it would save millions of lives and leave a huge impact on the environment.
“So let’s rethink everything we can think about the car to make sure that no one could possibly get hurt in them. So we had to slow them down. We had to certainly change their materials. Then we had to think of many layers of safety from brakes that replaced the contact patch with the actual belly of the car to thinking of the streets themselves in constant communication with the vehicles and the wheels and the cars behind them. So we rethought the entire system based on this principle of not only would it be good for the environment but no one will ever die in a car accident again. And that’s kind of how the soft car reified itself.”
A car that is not only safe but energy-efficient sounds like a great idea to us. What do you think about the Nerf-like car?
SOURCE: Inhabitat | PHOTO CREDIT: Handout
