What is the future of personal transport? One man with an idea or two is GM’s technology guru Chris Borroni-Bird who spoke to news agency headlineauto in Detroit earlier this month …
Brit Chris Borroni-Bird hopes to see his latest creations on the streets of cities new and old well before he retires from General Motors. He is 46 so you might think he has plenty of time.
But his work tends to need time. Cambridge graduate Borroni-Bird, one of the world’s leading fuel cell experts who joined GM in 2000 is looking at global transport needs 15 to 20 years down the road.
His team’s latest creation is the EN-V, showcased for six months at last year’s Shanghai World Expo and also displayed at the Detroit motor show earlier this month.
He’s excited by the possibilities of EN-V-style transport and says that one of the immediate challenges is "the need to find a sweet spot between a real street and a sanitised environment to test EN-Vs in."
EN-V, short for Electric Networked Vehicle, is a vision of the future of urban personal mobility. Three different EN-V designs represent distinct characteristics that emphasise what GM describes as "the enjoyable nature of future transportation." They are Jiao (Pride), Miao (Magic) and Xiao (Laugh).
At less than half the length of a Smart ForTwo, six EN-Vs can fit into a standard American parking space while one self-balancing two-wheeled EN-V provides interior space for two passengers. Using its sophisticated sensing technology, EN-V can detect obstacles in its path, including pedestrians or other vehicles, and automatically come to a stop.
So far, the EN-V project has been internally-funded by GM. "We are now looking to take it forward with city partners or corporations and I think it would be ideal in Europe’s historic cities where buildings and the fabric of the city need to be preserved – cities like Florence or somewhere like Amsterdam where people might swap bicycles for EN-V," he said.
Asian cities because of their population density and European cities because they tend to be progressive are likely to be more receptive to something like the EN-V than US cities because they don’t have the same population density, he points out.
Such a solution would increase the customer base for EVs too, because they would be less costly than current generation electric cars.
"A vehicle this size would be very affordable – it will weigh less than 500kg and have a range of 50-60km; you could optimise it for pedestrian and bicycle protection or it could work in a gated community or with an ageing population."
Borroni-Bird points out that an electric bike in China costs $300 (about £190) so an EN-V type vehicle "will be more than that" but probably not much more; when a figure of $500 was mentioned he didn’t disagree and you get the impression it could certainly be under $1000. Remember, he says, that "manufacturing is all existing technology so we would only need to build a few hundred to get it going."
Chris Borroni-Bird is director of GM’s Design and Technology Fusion Group. He was also program director for GM’s AUTOnomy concept and the Hy-wire concept vehicles, which were the first vehicles designed from the ground up around a fuel cell propulsion system and the first to combine fuel cells with drive-by-wire technology.
