Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century

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William J. Mitchell

Christopher E. Borroni-Bird

Lawrence D. Burns

The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010, English

Nonfiction, Product/Industrial Design

8 x 8 inches, hardcover, 240 pages, 82 color illustrations

ISBN: 9780262013826

Suggested Retail Price: $21.95

From the Publisher. This book provides a long-overdue vision for a new automobile era. The cars we drive today follow the same underlying design principles as the Model Ts of a hundred years ago and the tail-finned sedans of fifty years ago. In the twenty-first century, cars are still made for twentieth-century purposes. They're well suited for conveying multiple passengers over long distances at high speeds, but inefficient for providing personal mobility within cities—where most of the world's people now live. In this pathbreaking book, William Mitchell and two industry experts reimagine the automobile, describing vehicles of the near future that are green, smart, connected, and fun to drive. They roll out four big ideas that will make this both feasible and timely.

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Carl Magnusson

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I attended William Mitchell’s presentation of his concept and book at the New-York Historical Society and was taken by the authors’ pragmatic blueprint for mobility’s future. It redefined the car in context of today’s challenges—congestion, safety, and energy—and opportunities. I very much appreciate the clear sanity of their thoughts while reminiscing about Frank Lloyd Wright’s early ideas on mobility. In a parallel and separate development, Ross Lovegrove’s recent visual solution for a concept car for Renault brings cultural content back into automobile design.

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