Cars are great on open roads — they’re safe, secure, and efficient at mid-to-high speeds. But they take up a huge amount of space which can cause huge problems in urban areas.
Motorbikes and mopeds, on the other hand, take up less space in urban areas, reducing congestion and saving on parking space. However, they are harder to control and can’t carry as much stuff.
But Tel Aviv-based City Transformer thinks that it might have created a vehicle that combines both high-speed stability and carrying capacity with a small footprint. We caught up with Anat Lea Bonshtien, VP of Business Development, at MOVE in London to find out how the car might change the face of city streets.
Bonshtien explains that the City Transform can change the width of its chassis on the fly from 1 metre — giving it roughly the same footprint as a motorbike — to 1.4 metres and how this could revolutionise the way people navigate urban areas.
She also explains how the company is not only targeting urban drivers with the vehicle but cities, as well. According to Bonshtien, the car could be revolutionary for shared mobility services as drivers wouldn’t need to take their own private cars into congested city centres. Instead, they would be able to take a City Transformer around a city centre, before swapping for something more suitable for long journeys.
But Bonshtien wasn’t the only person at MOVE claiming that their company had the secret sauce to unlocking city centres. The Auto Futures team also caught up with Morten Rynning, the founder and CEO of CityQ, to learn how his bike-cum-car vehicles can provide the best of cycling with the weather protection and safety features of a car.
