GM Greenlights a Weird Electric Pod Car for 2020
Automakers generally leave their "visions of the future" on the auto-show floor. Not General Motors (GM), which is so enamored of its pod-like, drives-by-itself EN-V that it plans to put it into global production around 2020. The weird thing is that a slightly more practical version of this $10,000, two-wheeled phone booth could be an international hit in the world's cities.
The whole front of the car, including the panoramic windshield, is a big hinged door. That's great for visibility, but you'd probably kiss your ass goodbye in a crash. GM has thought of this -- the EN-V is programmed to avoid obstacles, including other cars. Former GM vice president Larry Burns was still on board when EN-V debuted, and he told me that the little pod was perfect for a next generation of motorists who'd rather text than drive.
A hit in China
They loved the EN-V during the six months it spent at the World Expo in Shanghai, and China is the prime market GM has in mind for the production version. The strictly two-seat EN-V has echoes of the fuel-sipping mini cars BMW and others made in the 1950s. It has four tiny electric motors, can hit 25 mpg, and goes 30 miles on a charge of its lithium-ion battery.
With a shape like an upended bullet on wheels, it exactly resembles the kind of impractical Tomorrowland transportation often seen in science fiction movies. Didn't I see Tom Cruise emerging from one in Minority Report?
Did I mention that the EN-V has only two wheels? The Electric Networked Vehicle was developed with Segway and is gyroscopically balanced to stand up on those two wheels, turn in its own length, and generally make people fall all over themselves when it passes them on an urban boulevard. It throws out every accepted standard of auto design, but maybe that's not a bad thing.
Living for the city
Because electric cars are range challenged, automakers are always talking about them as city runabouts. Maybe, but charging them is an issue with no garages or on-street parking. The EN-V addresses that by being so small you could stack 'em up, store them on their sides, or park them on the sidewalk. It's half the length of a Smart car, and six of them can fit into a standard parking space.
A lot of the Buck Rogers features will fall away on the production car, especially if GM wants to keep the price to $10,000. The second-gen EN-V might be bigger, have four wheels and a bigger cabin. But that would make it like, well, a regular car and not nearly as much of a game changer for city driving. It might be better to keep it as close to the original as possible. Much of the EN-V's appeal is in its no-compromise pod design.
The production car will probably also lose expensive-to-produce gyroscopic balance, and many aspects of the autonomous driving. The prototype version can, at least theoretically, park itself, drive on auto pilot, and stop when it senses obstacles in the road. It can be summoned from a smart phone, travel in train-like convoys, and communicate with other like-equipped cars to avoid collisions.
The car in command
The basic technical challenges to make cars drive autonomously have largely been addressed -- Google recently demonstrated a drives-itself Toyota Prius, and an Audi climbed Pike's Peak by itself. But making it practical on a large scale is an entirely different manner. GM's own experiments with self-driving Buicks fell apart in the 1990s because of human factors -- people couldn't adjust to having the car in control, then switching back to taking over themselves.
The EN-V doesn't look like it could possibly work, but it does. I've driven the car twice, once in skeletal rickshaw-type form, and then again as the current pod. Like the Segway, it starts to feel intuitive once you're in the driver's seat, and the gryroscopic balance feels far more natural than it looks.
I didn't get to test out the self-driving feature, and it seems that much of that is a work in progress. I hope it all gets sorted out, because an autonomous pod would be great for getting to my job downtown at the cloning factory in 2020. Since I'll have my 3-D iPad to look at, I'll be fine letting the EN-V do the driving.
If you're finding the EN-V difficult to visualize, here it is on video:
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