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Urbee 3D-printed car: the greenest car in the world?

Not to be confused with a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle with a similar sounding name, Urbee stands for URBan Electric vehicle with Ethanol as back-up. You can see why they settled on Urbee now, can't you? The Urbee is also the world’s first 3D-printed car, and the plan is to drive it from San Francisco to New York - a distance of 2,905 miles - in less than 44 hours.

PACE's global Portable Assisted Mobility Device project gets underway

The Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education (PACE) has challenged selected global college teams to design a Portable Assisted Mobility Device (PAMD) that will help solve mobility and sustainability problems within megacities in 2030. Each team of selected global colleges will consist of one Industrial Design Institution and several Engineering and Manufacturing Institutions, with students working alongside their professors and industry mentors to help develop their designs for a small power-assisted vehicle that can be taken on public transport, stowed or carried indoors.  The PAMD concepts are designed to carry one passenger and their personal items such as a briefcase or backpack. The PAMD must address the transportation issues as the population grows within a target market that the teams specify.

“Where is the sustainable vehicle design?”

The notion of a 'new paradigm in car design' was a theme running through talks by five panelists at London's Royal College of Art last week, who debated "Seriously now, where is the sustainable vehicle design?" Despite disparate backgrounds, there was broad agreement that a truly sustainable form of personal transportation is unlikely to come from an established automotive firm any time soon. Panelist Rob Holdway of Giraffe Innovation was most vocal in his approach to the subject, saying "Frankly, I think the car is unacceptable - we hear a lot about the sustainable car, but I don't think there is such a thing as a sustainable car". The audience - made up mainly of RCA students - also heard from Nico Sergent of Riversimple about how the company's seven-point business model, and its open source strategy, incentivized the company to build a truly sustainable car and mobility package that the current auto model simply doesn't allow.