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

How to leave behind our unwieldy, gas-guzzling, carbon dioxide-emitting vehicles for cars that are green, smart, connected, and fun.

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 are 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.

The fundamental reinvention of the automobile won't be easy, but it is an urgent necessity--to make urban mobility more convenient and sustainable, to make cities more livable, and to help bring the automobile industry out of crisis.

William J. Mitchell was the Alexander W. Dreyfoos, Jr., Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences and directed the Smart Cities research group at MIT’s Media Lab. Christopher Borroni-Bird is GM’s Director of Advanced Technology Vehicle Concepts. Lawrence D. Burns advises companies, governments, and universities on transportation, energy, and communications systems and technology. He was Vice President of Research and Development at General Motors from 1998 to 2009.