It’s a covered bike that you can’t push over, on account of it having Segway-style balancing smarts… though personally, I think I’d have just added another wheel, so a) there’s more room and b) it won’t fall over when the battery dies.
I’d make it a full Aptera in other words.
Looks pretty cool though – not quite a teapot car… though possibly a teapot-car designed by Apple, cut in half.
Looks like they’re semi-crowdfunding as well… or at least there’s an option to pre-order… though from the look of the glossy pics, they’ve got a fair bit of money behind them already.
They’ve also got Amory Lovins on the board… so there’s a pretty good chance this one could go off. If they take my advice though (and they won’t, no one ever does), they should pilot it somewhere like Niue…
… because innovation on this scale in first-world countries happens in spite of our governments, not because of them – and to launch something like this you’ll need about a billion dollars to get through the red tape. Launch in a Favela somewhere (not that Niue is that exactly… it’s a low-crime-zone) and your biggest problem is slowness of supply-chain. What you won’t have though, are regulations set up so only massive corporations can play.
So that’s my advice. Similar to tax-havens, I’m 1/2-expecting the emergence of innovation-havens, where govt/corporate sclerosis, and the mental-illness known as “IP” is deliberately held at bay.
Someone, somewhere else said that a possible future pattern is a drift away from “nations” (which are a relatively new phenomena in any case) back to City States… so I’m kindof imagining a city-state on an island.
It’s hard to imagine this ending well actually… though maybe islands of sanity will catalyse sanity elsewhere.
Bitcoin - Milestones etc
Slow Light
Is it because I is White?
Flowers in the Garden of the Teapot Cars
Crowd-Sourced Fightmobile
Teapot Cars : How they happen
The Bamboo Aptera
Zambikes, Zambulances
Keyhole Gardens
The Hanging Fruit-Baskets of Babylon
On Addiction
And The Void Mooned Back...
The Spirit Of The World
A Machine to Steal Souls
More Anti Digital
Thync
Robotic Sensory Loops and Whatnot
Cartestian Robot Roundup.
Post-Scarcity Link-Dump
Servo Bender
Your dislike of teapot cars confuses me.
ie: http://www.genomicon.com/2012/09/wealth-and-taste/
You seem to detest self-indulgent “luxury”, but you give cars a free-pass, you say they should maintain an image of sexiness.
http://www.genomicon.com/2009/11/teapot-cars-how-they-happen/
But it’s a projected image, just like those plinth collections. No?
I don’t detest self-indulgent luxury (in part because I’m a catastrophic hedonist) – what I dislike though is the aesthetic style – that I suspect very strongly comes from Ancient Rome… which always seems to creep in when there are huge wealth disparities.
I recognise that this is a matter of taste – but I’m also a half-hearted disciple of the Ancient Greek schools of thought that believed that there was a mathematical basis behind beauty… and have noticed that simplicity is a key part of this. To put it more controversially, I don’t think beauty is relative, I think it is (to a degree) absolute – and it comes from maths.
And so to cars – the sexiness… this is an aesthetic born of mathematical simplicity… good example here: http://www.genomicon.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/flyingAptera3.jpg
But… I think there’s a cultural thing with cars as well – there’s a romance, which allows antique versions to be beautiful in ways that would make other things ugly.
—
I think when I talk about sex and cars I’m talking about something else though – cars are a type of sexual communication… even in this age where they sit stranded in traffic most of the time, and car design has been utterly tamed… Citroens now look like any other car.
The communication is partly to do with social hierarchy – people who design cars where you’d have to make your girlfriend (real or prospective) sit in the back, because there’s only one seat in the front really don’t get it.
As to teapot-cars – they’re by people who are specifically designing for Japanese girls (and there’s nothing wrong with that) or who don’t understand masculine aesthetics – I’m guessing they’re designed by people like this: http://korkhovy.narod.ru/image_model/hipsters.jpeg