WARREN, Michigan — General Motors and Segway announced just prior to the official start of the 2009 New York Auto Show that the two companies have an agreement to jointly develop an electrically powered, two-seat urban mobility pod.
Perhaps predictably, there is no timeline for actually producing the transportation pod, thus far referred to only as Project P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility), but the company has shown a very rough development prototype. How rough? Well, it still doesn't have any bodywork, which makes it look something like a two-wheel bench with roll bars.
Think of the P.U.M.A. as half of a familiar GEM neighborhood electric vehicle or a double-wide Segway PT or a wheelchair with a windshield or a rickshaw minus the driver and you've got the idea. Or simply have a look at the last several Tokyo auto shows and you'll see that Toyota and Suzuki have been noodling around with the same thing for several years.
What makes the GM/Segway different from those pod-people movers? Well, notes Chris Borroni-Bird, GM's director of advanced technology vehicle concepts, unlike the Toyota i-Real and Suzuki Pixy, the P.U.M.A. or whatever the companies will call it, will seat two. And unlike the Toyota, drivers of the GM/Segway thing would be protected from the weather (although possibly not from Chevrolet Suburbans).
Similar to the concepts from the Japanese makers, the GM/Segway pod would be powered by electric motors fed juice by lithium-ion batteries. It would have a top speed of about 35 mph and a range of about 35 miles and can, like the stand-up Segway, turn in place and stop using only the electric motors. When it comes to a stop, a pair of training wheels extend from the front for stability. They retract when the vehicle springs back into action. According to Borroni-Bird, the GM/Segway entrant would also have connectivity that the Japanese concepts wouldn't (that is, if any of them are ever produced).
Like many transportation companies, GM has been working on vehicle-to-vehicle communications for many years. The Segway pod would, in theory, carry a transponder that could communicate its position and heading with every other vehicle with which it shared the road. This would, of course, require that all vehicles it came anywhere near also had transponders. And in GM's grand view, pedestrians and bicyclists would also carry transponders to help avoid vehicle/pedestrian collisions (good luck with that one).
The companies acknowledge that they'll need help from municipalities to get even a small-scale demonstration project underway. Perhaps a city or even Disney could step in to provide that controlled proving ground, says Borroni-Bird. Otherwise, it's hard to image how the company could convince a driver to squeeze into one of these electro-wombs with Crown Vic taxis careening around the road.
If all worked well for the companies, the P.U.M.A. could potentially offer some relief from congestion in increasingly populous and dense cities as well as clear the air of some carbon emissions from 4,000-pound vehicles being used to transport one person slowly to a nearly non-existent parking spot. And it could, in theory, cost only one-quarter to one-third the price to own and operate as a conventional midsize sedan.
But that could be a long, long way off.
Inside Line says: We propose a single-make racing series using the GM/Segway P.U.M.A. with races to be run through central Mumbai. — Daniel Pund, Senior Editor, Detroit
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