that embrace this philosophy will stand a much better
chance at prosperity long after organizations adhering
to the traditional model have run aground.
It is difficult to visualize and prepare for a coming
phase change before the event, when it seems as if
chaos and entropy are increasing boundlessly. Conse-
quently, when we originally shared our comprehensive
vision with potential investors and other stakeholders,
we were told that our ideas are scattered, unfocused,
and without direction. Yet it is precisely this model of
scattered, distributed components working together as
a global information system that creates value in the
Syntiant network.
We are committed to overcoming the challenge of
limited information access and striving to bridge the
gap by creating a global, user-built community. We be-
lieve the tipping point is soon upon us for a more con-
sumer-driven, user-focused world in social networks.
About the Author
Jason P. Clark is a serial entrepreneur in the field of network infra-
structures, multimedia, and virtual-reality content. He’s the creator
of three international patents for uni-directional audio navigation,
which were later purchased by Hewlett-Packard. At age 32, he’s
developed and acquired funding for more than five start-up
companies. He’s currently chief technical officer for Syntiant,
www.syntiant.com/.
The author acknowledges Brad Thompson, CEO of Altruent,
and Elliot Kulakow, partner/VP Technology R&D at Syntiant, as
contributors to this article. Without their distributive intelligence
and vision, this article would not have been possible.
Urban Design
Sustainable Urban
Mobility in 2020
By Ryan Chin
To make the car of the future, we need to make the city
of the future, says an MIT designer.
How can you design a city by designing a car? To-
day’s automobiles are driven by an increasing number
of users who live in cities. The United Nations reported
in 2007 that migration patterns and population growth
have created an equal split between inhabitants of cities
and rural areas for the first time in human history. This
general trend will continue for the next several decades
and will produce a very urbanized world.
In 1950, New York City was the only megacity on the
planet, with 10 million occupants. Today, there are 25
megacities that are mostly in developing countries. To
verify this trend, we need only to look at the rapid ur-
banization in China to see the mass migration of the ru-
ral poor to urban areas for economic opportunity. Pop-
ulation experts project that most of the urban growth
will occur in Asia and Africa for the next several dec-
ades. Simultaneously, humanity’s thirst for personal
mobility will continue to grow. History shows that, as
countries develop economically, so does their use of
four-wheeled motorized transportation.
The world’s automobile fleet is currently estimated at
800 million cars that serve the 7.8 billion people living
on Planet Earth. In the developed world, roughly seven
out of 10 people own a car, whereas in the developing
world, it’s two out of 10. The continued economic de-
velopment of Brazil, Russia, India, and China will fuel
the growth of this fleet to more than 1 billion cars by
2020. The continued use of this personal transportation
model is simply unsustainable given the combination
of energy inefficiency, environmental consequences of
fossil-fuel usage, potential disruptions to fuel supplies,
urban sprawl created by automobile reliance, and con-
gestion caused by inadequate alternative modes of
transport. What we need is to radically rethink the
problem by examining not only the automobile itself,
but also how it is used in cities (where most of us are
currently living).
Size and Weight
2010: Today’s automobiles weigh an average of
nearly 4,000 lb, approximately 20 times the weight of
the driver. Today’s automobiles also have a footprint of
approximately 100 square feet, which is nearly 15 times
the amount of space required for a comfortable office
chair. But the size requirements don’t stop at the foot-
print of the vehicle, if we consider the space that cars
occupy on the road, in parking at home, work, and
other destinations; add to that the space for mainte-
nance and repair and it quickly grows to approximately
1,200 sq. ft. per vehicle. In midtown Manhattan, a 1,200
sq. ft. condominium would cost you upwards of $2 mil-
lion to own.
2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will be more light-
weight and smaller. Size, weight, and energy efficiency
are three factors that intimately interconnect in the de-
sign and engineering of automobiles. The lighter the
vehicle, the more energy efficient it will be to move the
mass of the car. The smaller the vehicle, the less mass
THE FUTURIST July-August 2010 29
 2020 Visionaries
Vehicle-to-Grid Energy
Industrial research has been conducted in the
last decade on the benefits of Vehicle-to-Grid
(V2G) charging. This enables cars to charge from
renewable power sources and also feed power
back into the grid, which can be sold at a premium
back to the utility. Utilities will be able to load
level the electric grid by “peak shaving” during
the hottest days when everyone has the air condi-
tioning running.
you have. This set of relations forms a set of positive
and negative feedback loops that ultimately affect the
design of the vehicle. It will be imperative to incorpo-
rate technological improvements in lightweight materi-
als, and composites will certainly help to make vehicles
leaner, but this is not enough. Vehicles must also be-
come more compact. These changes will not only im-
prove energy efficiency, but also the vehicles’ overall
footprint.
Range and Speed
2010: Today’s automobiles have a fuel range of about
300 miles (meaning they can travel 300 miles or so on
one tank) can go from 0 to 60 mph in less than 10 sec-
onds, and top out at more than 110 mph. This is great
for intercity travel, but most Americans don’t travel
that far. More than 80% of daily commutes in America
are less than 40 miles (round trip). With more than 81%
of Americans living in metropolitan areas, you simply
don’t need to go 100 miles an hour down a city street. If
you travel to Shanghai today, the average speed in the
city is 9 mph. Bangalore, India, has achieved 24-hour
congestion. Today’s vehicle is simply over-engineered
for most practical purposes in cities.
2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will not need that
much refueling autonomy. BMW recently finished a se-
ries of user experiments to examine “range anxi-
ety” — the fear of running out of electricity in electric
cars — and discovered that their new electric mini (with
100 miles of range) has two to three times the range re-
quired for practically all trips. Users don’t need to have
five to six times the range, and they quickly learned to
adapt to the constraints (and benefits) of this new ve-
hicle type. The introduction of electric charging infra-
structure in the upcoming decade will virtually elimi-
nate range issues in urban areas. Cities like San
Francisco, Portland, Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona all
have initiatives to bring a network of charging stations
in their respective metropolitan areas. Car makers are
30 THE FUTURIST July-August 2010
introducing plug-in options for many models that en-
able the electrical charging from a common 110V house-
hold outlet.
Gasoline versus Electric
2010: Today’s vehicles are predominantly powered
by petroleum-based fuels. An internal combustion en-
gine is terribly inefficient (approximately 15%) in con-
verting chemical energy into mechanical work to drive
the wheels of your car. Hybrid vehicles are better at
conserving energy at the cost of a more complex power-
train, but projections for the next five years call for less
than 12% of the total new car market. The remaining al-
ternative fuels, like compressed natural gas, hydrogen,
compressed air, and biofuels, have varying levels of ef-
ficiency, but are utilized in even fewer numbers than
hybrids. Battery electric vehicles utilize electric motors
that are more than 90% energy efficient, but these have
not taken over mainstream markets because of limita-
tions of battery technology.
2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will be increasingly
electrified. The emergence of new battery chemistries
such as lithium ion nanophosphate have allowed bat-
tery manufacturers to produce cells that have higher
energy density and lower internal resistance, thus al-
lowing rapid charging in less than 30 minutes. In fact,
my colleagues at the MIT Electric Vehicle Team have
been able to rapid-charge these new cells in less than 7
minutes with just a 10% degradation in capacity after
1,500 cycles. For comparison, lithium ion cells in your
laptop today have roughly 1,000 cycles of usable life.
The ability to rapid-charge will enable users to top-off
their batteries in about the time it will take to order and
drink an espresso, thus opening up new opportunities
to create a ubiquitous charging network distributed
throughout cities. No longer do we need to charge only
at home or the workplace where our cars sit waiting for
six to 10 hours.
Driver-Controlled versus Autonomous Driving
2010: Today’s cars are driven by human operators.
Drivers have a number of telematic devices that aid in
driving, such as antilock brakes for safe stopping, adap-
tive cruise control for the highway, parking sensors to
help avoid scratches to the bumpers, and GPS for navi-
gating unfamiliar places. However, we still have more
than 50,000 deaths a year in the United States under the
current driving paradigm. Today’s drivers sit in traffic
for more than 50 hours a year and endure the stop-and-
go driving experience.
2020: Tomorrow’s cars will be increasingly autono-
mous. The annual DARPA Urban Challenge has consis-
tently proven to be a tremendously useful catalyst for

CityCar vehicles designed by MIT Media Lab.
innovations in autonomous driving. The most recent
challenge shows that autonomously driven vehicles can
navigate in busy city streets without incident. The po-
tential of autonomous vehicles to self-drive and coordi-
nate with other autonomous vehicles is to smooth traf-
fic flows. In urban environments, top speed is not
necessary; it is the orchestrated movement of vehicles
within a speed regime that will improve congestion.
The introduction of semi-autonomous systems such as
self-parking and automated highway systems has pro-
vided useful lessons in the benefits and challenges of
autonomous driving. Continued federally funded
research in this area, combined with improvements in
computational power, will enable the miniaturization
of autonomous technologies, thus making autonomous
driving commercially viable for mass markets in the
coming decade.
Private versus Shared Ownership
2010: Today’s automobiles are designed for private
ownership. The burden of ownership includes the cost
of the vehicle, depreciation, tires, licensure, taxes, regis-
tration, insurance, maintenance, fuel, and parking.
These individual direct costs are compounded by what
economists call “negative externalities,” which include
congestion and pollution leading to global warm-
ing — that is, costs to society not immediately felt by
the individual user. Privately owned commuter ve-
hicles that may drive two hours a day (round trip) will
sit doing nothing useful for 92% of the day. During this
state, the car takes up valuable real estate and doesn’t
move people around. Single passenger occupancy also
doesn’t help in this situation; if I stand on Memorial
Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I could wait up to
20 minutes before seeing a vehicle with two occupants.
In that same city, approximately one-third of the land
WILLIAM LARK / MIT MEDIA LAB
area is devoted to the servicing of automobiles (this in-
cludes roads and parking for cars) that are principally
used by private individuals. This is not an atypical
land-use percentage devoted to the automobile
throughout the United States.
2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will be increasingly
utilized in cooperative or shared-use models. The emer-
gence of car-sharing and bike-sharing schemes in urban
areas in both the United States and Europe have estab-
lished alternative models and markets for fractional or
on-demand mobility. Zipcar, the world’s largest car-
share program, has grown from just a handful of cars to
a fleet of 6,000 cars and 275,000 drivers in 49 cities in
just under 10 years. It’s very difficult to own one-
quarter or one-tenth of a car with traditional owner-
ship, and let’s not even talk about fractional insurance.
Shared ownership provides users fractional ownership
that allows them access to any vehicle in the fleet when-
ever they please and for as long as they need, just like
video on demand or print on demand.
Radical Rethinking Required
Since 2003, the Smart Cities group at the MIT Media
Lab has developed solutions to directly tackle these
problems. We have designed an electric two-passenger
vehicle called the CityCar, which utilizes in-wheel elec-
tric motors called Wheel Robots that have incorporated
drive, suspension, and braking directly inside the
wheel. Each wheel is independently controlled with by-
wire controls (no mechanical linkages) and is capable of
120 degrees of steering, which provides very high ma-
neuverability. The CityCar can turn on its own axis
(zero turn radius) and can make sideways turns by
turning the wheels perpendicular to the primary driv-
ing axis.
The Wheel Robots eliminate the need for traditional
THE FUTURIST July-August 2010 31
 2020 Visionaries
components like drivelines, transmissions, and gear-
boxes. We have taken advantage of this freedom by re-
thinking the architecture of the vehicle. Since there is
no driveline, we can make the vehicle very compact by
folding the chassis. The CityCar can fold up to half its
length to just under the width of a traditional parking
space. The CityCar, when folded, is less than 60 inches
in length and 100 inches when unfolded (comparable to
the Smart Car). Three CityCars when parked can fit
into one traditional parking space. It weighs just
1,000 lb, thus making it very lightweight and energy ef-
ficient, and the new architecture allows us to rethink
entry and exit. We have designed a front ingress solu-
tion that easily allows the driver and passenger to
safely exit the vehicle onto the curb rather than the
street. The folding mechanism complements this fea-
ture by articulating the seats so that the user can ergo-
nomically and elegantly exit at an elevated position.
CityCars are designed to park nose-in to the curb,
which allows the users to use the sidewalk rather than
the street. Finally, the in-wheel motors will provide
plenty of low-end torque, thus making the CityCar fun
to drive in urban areas.
The introduction of large fleets of electric vehicles provides cities
the opportunity to rethink energy storage. If we add up 4,000
CityCars (which is approximately double the taxi fleet in Boston),
the total energy storage in the batteries would be 20 megawatts of
32 THE FUTURIST July-August 2010
Simply redesigning the vehicle is only one part of the
solution. We have also created a new use model, called
“Mobility on Demand”(MoD), which utilizes a fleet of
lightweight electric vehicles (LEVs) that are distributed
at electric charging stations throughout a metropolitan
area. The LEVs are designed for shared use, which en-
able high utilization rates for the vehicles and the park-
ing spaces they occupy. The use model mimics the bike
sharing systems made popular in Europe, whereby us-
ers simply walk up to the closest charging station,
swipe a credit card, pick up a vehicle, drive to the sta-
tion closest to their destination, and drop off the
­vehicle.
Our group has designed our CityCar to fit into these
MoD systems, thus creating a complementary network
that can solve what transportation planners call the
“First Mile Last Mile” problem of public transit — that
is, how to bridge the distance between your real origin
(i.e., your home) to the transit station and from the tran-
sit station to your real final destination (i.e., your work-
place). Often these distances are too long to walk, thus
encouraging private automobile use.
The expansion of MoD into a sustainable urban eco-
WILLIAM LARK / MIT MEDIA LAB
power, which is enough to power the entire city for two full min-
utes, says Chin. This may not seem like a lot, but 20 megawatts
roughly equates to 20% of what a utility company would need to
effectively offset peak energy usage in a city.
system can be achieved by introducing additional
shared-use vehicle types like electric bicycles and scoot-
ers. (Smart Cities has also designed an electric folding
scooter called the “RoboScooter” and an electric bike
called the “GreenWheel.”) This will offer flexibility and
convenience while allowing for asymmetric trips. For
example, a user can drive a GreenWheel to the super-
market, then go home with a CityCar that can carry
groceries.
We believe that MoD systems will work better than
private automobiles in cities because you never have to
worry about storing the vehicle. In many cases, a MoD
charging station will be closer to your final destination
than if you had to park in a private lot. A typical urban
trip is short, however; much of the time spent is not ac-
tually driving, but rather walking to the vehicle and
finding parking once you get there. A recent study by
the Imperial College in London showed that, during
congested hours, more than 40% of total gasoline use is
by cars looking for a parking space!
In 2020, I expect the shift from private gasoline pow-
ered use to shared electric vehicles will be on its way.
There are three primary factors that will accelerate this
trend:
1. Economic and environmental pressure to transition
away from petroleum fuels.
2. Technological innovations.
3. Political leadership to promote new regulations
and policies for this type of innovation.
In 2010, China has become the world’s number-one
WILLIAM LARK / MIT MEDIA LAB
automobile market, surpassing the United States. in the
total number of cars purchased. The increased con-
sumption of fossil fuels and the emissions of CO2 will
be part and parcel of this economic development. This
will all but guarantee increased demand for petroleum
and set the stage for political responsiveness.
Luckily, most of the technologies required to make
the CityCar real already exist today, such as highly effi-
cient electric motors, computational horsepower, new
battery technologies, wireless network communica-
tions, lightweight composite materials, advanced sens-
ing, and GPS. The only thing that limits us is the inher-
ent difficulty of breaking away from our preconceived
notions and embracing this radical rethinking. ❑
About the Author
Ryan Chin is PhD student at the MIT Media Lab in the Smart
­Cities research group. He has led and managed the design devel-
opment of lightweight electric vehicles (LEVs), including the
­CityCar, RoboScooter, and GreenWheel electric bicycle. In 2007,
Chin co-founded the MIT Smart Customization group, which is fo-
cused on improving the ability of companies to efficiently custom-
ize products and services across a diverse set of industries and
customer groups. Web site: http://cities.media.mit.edu.
The author would like to acknowledge the collective effort of
the Smart Cities team that developed the CityCar, RoboScooter,
GreenWheel, and the Mobility-on-Demand System. He is particu-
larly grateful for the guidance of Professor William J. Mitchell and
team leaders William Lark Jr., Raul-David “Retro” Poblano,
­Michael Chia-Liang Lin, Andres Sevtsuk, Dimitris Papanikolaou,
and Chih-Chao Chuang.
The door on the front of the CityCar allows for safe
exit onto sidewalk.
THE FUTURIST July-August 2010 33
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