George Rebane

Wired reports that Segway technology has now found its way into a new line of small urban people movers – well OK, call them cars or podcars.  To me the most amazing thing about them is that they are being introduced by General Motors, and in China to boot.  Don’t know much about their total energy consumption. I would also like to see some results of traffic modeling with a downtown packed full of these gizmos.  Just increasing the density of small vehicles doesn’t mean that things will move better since each vehicle still has a human agent making decisions on when/where to change lanes, turn, slow down, stop, … .  If they can be automatically hooked into computer controlled ‘trains’, then things could be really looking up.  In any event, these electrically driven pods really look cool and could be just the thing for zipping around town.  Read more and see more pictures here.