I think this really is the future of cars. With autonomous vehicles, there becomes much less of a need to own one (call up one from the service on a cell phone). That service will have long range cars for long range needs. Alternately, a long range power unit could be appended to a bubble car when greater range or speed is needed, or a monorail capable of carrying bubble cars at high speed could replace the fast lane on the freeway.

Modern cars are hugely overdesigned because they need to be able to do anything: 1-person commutes, carry the soccer team, drive downtown, drive across country. If we could call up the vehicle we needed when we needed it, each specialized vehicle could be much cheaper to build and operate. Autonomous driving isn't only possible and likely, it is essential to the future of cars.

But do they drive in snow?

Something like this solves the real problem with mass transit -- people (at least Americans) simply don't like riding buses and trains full of other people. Rather than attempting massive social engineering to get people to enjoy communal commuting, it makes a lot more sense to preserve the autonomy of individual cars, but make them smaller and far more efficient. Rather than one do-everything vehicle, the greeenest and cheapest solution for most people will probably be two have two specialized vehicles -- one for no-cargo commuting and one for hauling heavy stuff. If one drives the bubble car every day, and only uses the truck every couple of weeks to haul furniture, help someone move, and do major shopping, the net cost and CO2 per vehicle mile will still go way down. What we shouldn't do is burden small light vehicles with loads of "nice to have" extras like extra cargo space, heating and air conditioning, extreme crash resistance, and high speed capability. Keep them small, light, and simple, and there will be a market. Let them gradually evolve into SUVs and we'll be right back where we are today.

I had to smile at the naivete of this line, though: "And instead of being powered by smoky little petrol engines, they are driven electrically."

...and the electricity comes from... where? Smoky big power stations? Flooded valleys where every living thing and human habitation has been destroyed to create a reservoir? I suppose if 60% of the people live in cities, they won't care what has to happen out in the countryside to provide them with their "clean" electricity. And then there's the little matter of the lead or the lithium for the batteries. It doesn't just come from the lithium factory.

One of the popular bubble cars imported to Britain had a front opening door
and no reverse gear because this reduced taxes at that time.
However it was not uncommon for people to park up against a wall or fence , the door could not be opened , and people were sometimes trapped for hours .

Before I can take any article on the future of motoring seriously I would need to know how the infrastructure of freeways and wide laned boulevards is to be addressed. Having just toured California and Nevada, there is no way I would ever travel in one of these devices on American roads.

D Sherman,

Well said, except you bought into the 'urban' assumption like the Economist did.

Maybe we will eventually give up on suburbia, and of course then we will not be needing real cars. Now, by far the largest number of miles traveled is not between cities and not around city streets; it is grinding in from distributed housing to distributed working places. Something there is that doesn't love a city, in spite of the occassional draw of some mass attraction. And also in spite of the fact that planning folk, well meaning as they are, can not understand why we do not want to jam our families into apartments, at least not in mid years of life.

I suspect that when suburbia gets planned out from under us, the ENv or whatever will not be all that important, as urban settings actually function reasonably well with subways etc. But GM needs to spend money dreaming about future products, however unlikely.

Auto motive folk lore has it that in the late fifties the head of Austins called Alex Issigonis into his office and said "Let's design a proper minature car and get those bloody awful bubble cars of the roads" Hence the mini.
If only they had had some sort of intellectual property rights over the front wheel drive transverse engine concept.

Within 20 years there will be self-driving cars. There will be no need for private motor cars because taxis will have become cheap and ubiquitous once we have got rid of the man behind the wheel.

Imho, this is a great idea for daily work commuters that involve travel <40=50 miles to and from work - considering safety standards being met. And how about keeping our current vehicles for highway/long distance travel that are lets say about a 100 or more miles round trip.

Sounds good！But how does it work in the slippery roads~

people respect people with big expensive cars. germany's economy is built on this. any german, if he/she has the money, will buy the biggest most expensive car possible. status. people are most like this not in the usa, but strangely enough where everyone is preaching that everyone should ride around in bubble cars.

i guess they mean the peasants should use these things... as long as i am not a peasant...

its like that wacky al gore preaching that the world is ending not because of his $1300 month utility bill, but because the rest of us are not driving electric cars.

@Montrawa and @kennethMo, they will eventually.

@D. Sherman, last I checked (recently) people from most countries prefer private over communal transport (this includes air travel). Americans tolerate it in cities like New York, Boston and Washington D.C. (and other cities to a lesser extent) because they have to. I like the rest of your points though.

@Jim Bullis, the rise of telecommuting is making suburbia more attractive although much more needs to be done in that area. Housing trends over the past 30 years do not point to shrinking homes but rather the opposite.

@terry_taylor_shanghai, you're right that there will always be a market for conspicuous consumption. However, I haven't owned a car in almost 4 years and I'm a middle class professional. What is my "status" consumable? Travel. For other car-less urbanites it can be expensive clothes and watches/jewelry. Check out this New York Times article for an alternative view: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/business/08consume.html

@Svavar... i ride a bike in china :) people with cars here are crazy.. ungodly traffic jams, accidents, etc.

but big powerful expensive cars are status. and will be in the future. "what separates the men from the boys is the price of their toys" :) naturally this applies in the 3rd world where women want to escape poverty. but to me seems like this is more true wherever people preach more about saving the earth by riding in little bubbles. for all the save-the-earth rhetoric in germany, i never met a german woman who found earth-saving men to be sexy, or really believed that the real reason he was riding a bike was because he could not afford a car.

i once met 3 pathetic frenchmen in the moscow airport. upon discovering i was american, they start mumbling this typical european nonsense about how americans are destroying the world with their big cars. i said that any frenchman with the money would have the most expensive car possible. upon discovering i was not the typical yankee apologetic idiot, they grinned.

bubble cars are for the peasants and always will be. i apologized to the frenchman that the colonials dont accept their rightful position as peasants. :)

IT's still gonna be a long way for those developing countries which in the rushing petroleum times.. but i can see it's great prospect in future,the mind is really awsome and green` i just told my friend about the compact bubble car idea days before, and now i've read this news it's really foreseeable and exciting..

Most cars nowaday are some mutants of the Hummer beasts because of the high profit margins in producing the beasts. On the other hand, the bubbles are likely to remain as concept transporters because they are unlikely to bring in the profits that today Capitalists are hungering for.

As a private retired person, I have been pondering on these ideas for some time.

1. Get rid of the driver, replace him or her with a robotized system.

2. Reduce the attractiveness of private car ownership. You can still have whatever you fancy, but no steering wheel (the robots would be perturbed by your erratic driving, so your car will need a robot driver to be 100% compliant, but there is no objection to large size, gold plating etc.). This would be a necessity for some trades, plumbers, health workers etc. Comparative cost would be the main driver of choice.

3. Set up a suitably assorted fleet available for hire on demand with a simple phone call, the reply would include Time of start, estimated time of arrival and cost break-down.

4. Design a car for the most frequent usage, I did an unscientific observation while standing on a street corner in Brussels. 7 out of 10 cars were carrying driver only. A single-seat car may not be possible, it would risk being blown over by a gust of wind, especially when returning empty to a parking or refueling area. A 2-seater with face to face seating and a single door would possibly be a reasonable minimum size, except for goods only vehicles, which could be smaller. The 2-seater described could also be used to split traffic lanes and thereby double their capacity. The car can be ordered to "go park", "dismiss" = return to owner's control, or "refuel / recharge"

What size do we need to deliver a slice of pizza?

5. Private cars currently average about 12000 Km per year, this translates to about one hour per day. This varies. Adopt hire-cars available in a very short time and the number of cars in circulation can be reduced by a factor of 3 to 5. This does not affect the number of cars moving on the road which would remain close to the present, but the average car occupies 10 Sq. meters of paved space, without room to open doors. The 2-seater described above would need at most 4 sq. meters, and could be parked without need for access, as it would move to pick up its next customer.

6. I suspect that infrastructure improvements would be needed, mainly to replace road signs and keep the cars on the straight and narrow. A computerized traffic control system (I was going to call it “MOM” = Master / Mistress of Mobility)could vary speed limits and traffic access to road sections for emergencies or VIP convoys or Road Works. It would instruct cars to Go Slow in Snow, Rain or Ice, and would despatch automated snow-clearance vehicles. It could also instruct parked cars to move out of the way of garbage collection and street cleaning crews. MOM can expect total compliance. To my knowledge no law enforcement authority has yet succeeded in getting 100% compliance even to speed limits.

7. Goods-only vehicles could be robotized for present infrastructure, but, why is it necessary to build 3 lanes capable of 40-tonners when most traffic is less than 5 tonnes? The narrow vehicle concept opens possibilities for overpasses etc. of lightweight construction.
Pizza and small package delivery, might justify special toy-sized tracks.

All of the above provides openings for large savings in CO2 as well as cost savings.
No more driving licenses, an 8-year-old could travel in robotized cars, so could the blind and otherwise handicapped persons. There is no need to be sober or fit or sane to use one. This could revive the pub trade.
There would be redundancy for taxi drivers, driving instructors and large sections of police forces.
Public transport would continue to offer transport from where you are not to where you don’t want to go, with the opportunity of meeting other people.
There would be a substantial reduction in road casualties.
Car chases would no longer be necessary as the cars could be ordered to come to the police station, with the offender.

There are problems: how to avoid collisions with animals, people or objects.
“Big Brother” issues as every trip by every person could be recorded.

My estimate for a generalized system is 20 to 30 years from now. It could start with island communities as pilot projects. How about Channel Islands, Madeira or others of about their size and population? They don’t like cars anyway. Later move to designated city-center areas, for example, Amsterdam, Manhattan, London and Paris etc.

The system could not plausibly be mixed with robotized and non-robotized vehicles in the same area. MOM would need to stop all robotized cars to allow non-robotized cars to use the streets. This is a big transition problem, but is manageable. There would also need to be changes to laws.

Technical solutions for all aspects of this type of project exist or can be developed, and the advantages are substantial, let’s start the debate, then planning then do it.
If the West does not do it, the Chinese may be forced to, by lack of land and infrastructure resources. The USA will end up buying this system from China.

terry_taylor: You seem to confuse expense and efficiency, vaguely related but not always well correlated. It's certainly possibly to have a cheap but pretty inefficient car, or a much more prestigious one which consumes less.

The average German disposable income is not vastly lower than the US (figure are pretty out of date): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_per_capita_personal_in...

However I pretty sure the average German (or European) car is quite a bit more efficient than in the US.

Of course this doesn't come from any vast moral superiority at an individual level. It's simply driven by the cost of fuel in Europe. One could argue that is a result of European's voting for, or at least tolerating the taxation levels that make up a large part of the difference.

In the end we are all, US, Europe, Australia, China/India more and more, consuming unsustainable levels of rapidly depleting resources which we are going to be competing for. So we'd better find some good alternatives which can still give people the mobility they desire.

Ironically while undoubtable being part of the problem, if I had to bet on where a good solution will come, or be industrialized in, the US would be top of the list.

The twenties and thirties were a time of producing minimalist cars , but they were called cycle cars then.
The ones that were the most successful had high performance and were fun to drive. The Morgan three wheeler for example .
Like wise the mini, It was intended to be a cheap car for the working man , but had high performance The working man did not like it , chose to buy a used proper car ,
However the mini's high performance endeared it to the sporting fringe.

What has to change is our need to go to the office each morning.
Work should be done from home, meetings online.
That is how we'll reduce travel as well as fuel consumption.

How many child seats fit into this thing?
How well does it do in a head on collision with a Volvo?