Car share scheme
Exciting developments in motive technology
Check out this cool air car, now available in
http://www.theaircar.com/
This could make the below idea feasible!
The recent launch of a car share scheme
echoes Harry’s plan which was first written about in 1969. This included electric vehicles which would be co-operatively owned and shared. Knowledge of the whereabouts, condition, and state of charge and so on of the vehicles would be kept in a central database. Access to a car would be via credit card which would be logged by the car, which then would release its keys to the member. Membership would be necessarily limited to people with a valid license that had a stable address.
Since the cars would be electric, they would need daily charging, and it was envisaged that there would be charging stations installed rather like parking meters are in
The whereabouts of available cars would be published by the web, and booking taken on a first come first served basis. The cars would not be made available if the central database determined they were overdue for a service, of if the diagnostics indicated the car was in any way unsafe or had been vandalized.
Leaving a car away from designated areas would mean the card holder lost his or her card until the matter was resolved. Reasonable breakdown would be covered by the organization, willful neglect would be charged to the individual. In many ways the current system is analogous to the one envisioned back then but with petrol cars replacing the electric ones.
My guesstimate for the savings in the numbers of cars on the road was a factor of three. In fact the study published in the Age
Fewer cars on the road on a regular basis amounts to a huge saving in pollution, greenhouse gases and noise.
Maybe one day we will be able to reclaim our beautiful cities form the smelly noisy dangerous and unhealthy machines we have created.