Reinventing the automobile by Mitchell, Borroni-Bird and Burns

Big questions about mobility as we edge towards urban gridlock

A few pages earlier in this issue of PE, Paul Jaggers of Stadco talks about the opportunities to reinvent the vehicle that are being missed through a concentration on the powertrain. A new book out this month takes an even wider view of where future cars might go.

Reinventing the Automobile is subtitled “personal urban mobility for the 21st century” and is written by an intriguing combination: William Mitchell, a world-renowned professor of urban geography at MIT; Christopher Borroni-Bird, the director of advanced technology vehicle concepts at General Motors; and Larry Burns, GM’s recently retired R&D chief.  

Quite a bit of the book is about advanced concepts in vehicles, but perhaps the real value is in its discussion of bigger issues. Our cities have been redesigned to fit a model of individual mobility and are choking, both atmospherically and on the streets; our power grids are separated into an electricity system that feeds homes and offices and a fuel system that powers transport; our lives are compartmentalised into increasing connectedness through computing and telecoms and the engineered bubbles we drive around that talk to no one except by colliding with each other. 

Inevitably a book such as this will raise more questions than it answers. Reinventing the automobile means revisiting some fundamental things, and taking a bit of time to decide not just what’s feasible but also what’s desirable is a necessary stage in this process. This nicely-made book helps.

• Published by the MIT Press, priced £16.95