FTA: “Citroën expects that almost half of the drivers will be younger than 18. They argue that parents will prefer to have their teenage children race around the city in a vehicle that is much safer than scooters or bicycles. […]
So What Is The Problem?”
The problem is that it will move teenagers out of bicycles, scooters, and public transport, thus making roads busier. That’s not where we should want to go if we want to make city centers more livable.
This is always the same rebound/stacking problem with tech. Look at 5G, supposedly it uses less energy per byte than 4g, but we'll have 2 problems:
- rebound: faster bandwidth = people will consume more bytes = need more energy
- stack: 5G will be deployed on top of 4g which is deployed on top of 3g which is deployed on top of 2g which is still operational in many places.
It goes the same for transportation. If an electric car replaces a ICE car it's a net positive (or maybe not, you'd have to study the whole cycle from lithium mining to end of life disposal). If an electric car replaces a pedestrian or a bicycle it's a net negative no matter how you look at it.
> or maybe not, you'd have to study the whole cycle from lithium mining to end of life disposal
It also depends on the electric mix, but an electric car will almost always be a net positive over its lifetime, due to its much better power-to-wheels efficiency (70-80% instead of 20-40% for ICE). That's 2 to 4 times energy saved! (depending on model)
But overall efficiency needs to take into account the weight too. A Tesla Model X is 2.5t. If your car is 2 times the weight of your old car, say good bye to your efficiency gains.
That's where a Citroën AMI has potential, IMO. A really light-weight, really efficient electric car that does the job. Hope they start advertising it like that.
Except they're advertising it as something to replace cyclists and pedestrians. Streets should not be designed keeping cars in mind, but keep pedestrians first and then cyclists.
I for one hope it doesn't take off, just for this sole reason, even though I liked the quirkiness of the design.
Even narrowly looking at congestion, the cost you rightly identify should be set against benefits.
For example, what % of kids who are currently driven to school in gargantuan SUVs could drive themselves in an Ami? I would certainly rather they cycled, but i'll take fewer SUVs on the roads as a second best.
As a cyclist, I'd also be happier contending with an Ami than a Range Rover, and with a bit of luck the Amis will also slow the Range Rovers down.
Is it even feasible cycling on some roads where SUVs abound, along with trucks? At the very least, a micro-car is more visible. Yes, we need more cycle / electric bike lanes.
Depends a lot on local conditions. In my locale, cars and bikes tend to follow different routes. Cars follow the usual fast congested main roads, while bikes thread their way through the neighborhood streets, bike paths, etc. I commute by bike to my workplace amidst very little traffic. In the downtown area, there are some bike paths and lanes that bypass the worst of the car traffic, thanks to abandoned rail lines.
> Is it even feasible cycling on some roads where SUVs abound, along with trucks?
It's feasible to cycle on any urban road where SUVs abound, provided that they have an urban speed limit.
And by the way, it's not comfortable for pedestrians to contend with bicycles. At least cyclists driving on roads have to navigate drivers who had to go through training to have the privilege of being there, and risk suffering consequences if they do not abide by rules.
I do not know about France, but in Portugal there are many teenagers that drive around in tiny (50 cc?) cars. Those 'cars' are noisy and probably not very clean. So I hope many of them will switch to this as an alternative.
> The problem is that it will move teenagers out of bicycles, scooters, and public transport, thus making roads busier.
These kids are not zipping around in bicycles or scooters. They are either being driven around by their parents or Uber/taxi drivers in their 2-ton 6-seaters or being zipped around in taxis.
These modes of transportation are not a panacea but nothing is, and mindlessly parroting "use bicycles!" does absolutely nothing to address the problem. I'm pretty sure people already know that bicycles exist for a couple of centuries now but somehow they choose not to use them in spite of the colossal cost of purchasing and maintaining a motorized vehicle.
These vehicles pollute less, have a smaller footprint, are safer, are hard to steal, and are affordable. More importantly, they are real, exist today, don't require retrofitting the current system nor do they require legislation changes. Sounds like an improvement.
yes, but smaller, less aggressive cars are better than the current situation (despite the generally-flawed 'induced demand' argument, which is more simply conceptualized as being far from the supply and demand equilibrium), and a good stepping stone toward relinquishing the hold that gas-guzzling behemoths have over our lives.
but the ami is a underpowered for american cities, from the article:
> "It has a top speed of 45km/h, it can do 75km on a full charge..."
if it could go up to 45mph and 75mi per charge, you could replace a lot of urban cars with the ami, but as it is, it's unfortunately more directly competitive with (electric) bikes and scooters rather than errand and commuter cars. 90% of trips can be replaced by cars like the ami, particularly in cities.
America is a unique country. No other country has the (lack of) density that the US does. Let's let Citroen and its ilk figure out the solutions for the rest of the world, while the US gets its act together in terms of, say, allowing mixed-use complexes and building walkable cities. Anyway half of the US has a vendetta against the environment.
i'm certainly happy that citroën is expanding our general conceptions of transportation. i'm more lamenting that it's not as practical where i live (a fairly walkable neighborhood in LA), and providing the main limitation in that regard.
incidentally, i think we could quadruple density in LA (with mixed-use and other techniques) without any loss of "neighborhood character" (unless of course, one's definition of that excludes diversity of race and income). the weather here is perfect for multimodal transportation year-round. that kind of density means more construction projects could (better) afford to put parking underground so that we could convert street parking to dedicated bike/scooter lanes without loss of parking convenience. and smaller utility cars like the ami means that we could put more of them in that parking area, while needing fewer of them because of the higher walkability of the neighborhood afforded by the higher density of commerce/employment as well.
The prevalence of cars on US roads, and the way cities are designed keeping long distance car rides in mind rather than pedestrian walking is proof enough.
"The roads are busier with near silent, zero tailpipe emission vehicles now"
Seems like a nicer problem to wrestle with than
"We have a bunch of young people injured or dead on bicycles or as pedestrians each year"
Like, there's not even any contest as to which of those problems i'd rather face.
If i was to uncharitably re-frame your argument, it's simply pulling up the ladder to avoid future generations having an option to take up a new form of mobility.
I doubt Citroen would make a big dent in the bicycle market, especially in super dense cities like Paris.
But I could see such vehicle popular with boomers living in the country side. That would provide some freedom to move around in a fairly safe (from elements, your own balance) and provide enough cargo for groceries.
There are golf-cart communities in SoCal that do this. Within the bounds of the development, it's legal to drive what are essentially golf carts on the local roads. It is very popular with the retiree crowd.
No idea. I can say these developments are common enough that I knew of more than one used Japanese Kei truck importer that was making a good living off of catering to them back when I lived in SoCal.
Not sure why I have been downvoted. My parents are french boomers, and I could totally see them buying such vehicle for their common errands. They do not live a dense city, like Paris. While they both enjoy biking, I do not see them going the cargo bike way for their groceries. They would still use a car. But they do not need a big car either. I guess time would tell if the new Citroen Ami would find its niche.
100% agree with the article - cars, even in this petite form factor, are not the future of urban transportation. Cycling, electric cycling, scooting, walking and better mass transit will make our cities quieter, safer and more livable. Sure, there is a niche for these cute cars for those unable to use these other forms.
These things are nowhere near as good as you think, and HN fetishizes them a bit too much. Trying to cycle or scoot on slush filled roads or in 90 degree plus temperatures is a tedious chore; being unable to simply go out and bring home a 75 pound piece of unassembled furniture, or buying frozen foods in bulk sucks too.
Being 50 or older and having even the slightest health problem will teach you why cars are good. My own mother is 70 and is starting to have knee issues; cars are the only way for her to even survive. A lot of ebikes and scooters aren't even able to support a weight limit over 200-250 pounds, limiting cargo usage. Many struggle to go up hills.
And we aren't even getting into things like how bicycles and scooters are much easier to steal or steal from, or how unsafe walking can be at certain times of the day especially if you are a woman. Or having to ride a bus next to someone who smells like shit and is possibly deranged.
Cars are freedom and power. There is way too much idolizing a sort of serf mindset here; have nothing, do what government tells you, be part of a crowd dependent on others to sustain you.
> Trying to cycle or scoot on slush filled roads or in 90 degree plus temperatures is a tedious chore; being unable to simply go out and bring home a 75 pound piece of unassembled furniture, or buying frozen foods in bulk sucks too.
As far as I am concerned, I ride buses and trains and almost never cycle, and I don’t have a car. The cases you mention here would be solved much more rationally and efficiently by generalising home deliveries (with electric trucks). You don’t need to dimension your car for the furniture you need to carry around once every 5 years. You can just rent a van for a day then.
> Cars are freedom and power.
...which come at a cost that too few people realise, and which our children will have to pay.
> There is way too much idolizing a sort of serf mindset here; have nothing, do what government tells you, be part of a crowd dependent on others to sustain you.
Now I have some ideological issues with this.
Most governments I know encourage people to buy cars because it stimulates the economy and keeps some factories running, and some mates among money. Governments in general follow, not lead, these efforts.
You already are part of a crowd and could not survive on your own. You are dependent on thousands of people you will never meet for the most insignificant of your daily activities. To paraphrase, there is way to much idolising a sort of tough survivor mindset around. The tough guy living in a forest with his gun (which he built? From ore he mined?) is a mirage. If society collapses, tough guys will die just as well as others. There has to be a middle ground, where one can be wise enough to enjoy the freedom that living in society provides without being entirely controlled by totalitarians.
I don't have kids yet, but my parents took me everywhere on public transport. I loved it. In fact, I often wanted to go on the bus even when we had no need to.
I absolutely loved trains as well. I couldn’t understand why grown-ups kept moaning about having to take one to work every day; it sounded like heaven!
Yes, two. One in primary school, whom I drop off before taking the bus to work in the morning and take home on the way back, and one in day care, with whom my partner does the same. We rent or borrow a car for holidays.
It is true that a car is often very useful when you have children. But then, a family can have a small city car instead of two SUVs.
I am not against the concept of cars, I actually love driving a good one. But I despair when I see the growing popularity of SUVs, and sedans getting larger and larger.
Funny thing about kids, they aren't allowed to drive cars. They actually aren't allowed to call an Uber either, but they can call a real taxi, or take public transportation, or ride a bike, or god forbid walk around unsurprised.
And yet every time an article about walking or cycling is posted here, people come out of the woodwork to explain why they couldn't possibly be a practical form of transportation, and no we shouldn't fund public transportation either. Have you considered that not everyone lives in a car-dependent suburb? What about people who are too old or disabled to drive a car? What about people who can't afford to buy and maintain and insure and fuel and park a car? Have you considered that a car can be a prison rather than a power fantasy?
Its the strange HN dichotomy between "let's all work from home all the time" and "we all live in villages where it is -30 in the night and 2000 degrees in the day so we need a car"
You depend on:
- millions of square kilometers of paved roads and parking garages
- a long and complicated supply chain producing an difficult to maintain, expensive, and fast decaying machine which requires a non-renewable resource as fuel
- the forced indulgence of your fellow citizens as you pollute the air with noise and poisonous gases and make them deal the danger you impose on them (sometimes it will cost them their lives)
- the arrangement of our cities for cars and the damage that does to communities, quality of life, and aesthetics
You have lots of dependencies, the government and the car industry has just naturalized them and largely guaranteed them to you. That's why you see non-drivers as serfs. And that's why we see drivers as entitled.
My father is close to 70 and is in very bad health. His knees and feet are painful and will never heal. He is overweight, has multiple cardiac issues and other problems. He lives in a rural town.
He's also looking to buy an electric bicycle, because he's anticipating the day when he won't be allowed to drive anymore. He also wants to be able to follow my mom on bike, or me and my siblings, or his grandkids. His car is getting expensive and less and less useful since he's been buying his groceries online (yes, even in a rural town).
I respect your opinion but disagree wholeheartedly. When I drive [in the city or suburbs] I feel like my attention is enslaved to the road, to the traffic lights, to the stop signs, etc.
When I'm walking, or even biking, around the city I have so much more freedom to drink in my surroundings and live in the moment. I can literally stop to smell the flowers.
Don't get me wrong, cars have uses that are uniquely difficult to solve without one. As you mention, hauling heavy cargo, transporting the mobility-challenged, and shielding from bad weather, are just a few examples.
But as someone who is not hauling heavy cargo, is not mobility-challenged, and isn't particularly afraid of a little bad weather (and well I tend to not go anywhere during a blizzard anyways), I quite prefer to walk or bike or take a train or take a bus, rather than be a slave to the road.
This is silly. I could also list many scenarios where cars are bad.
The reality is that car ownership isn't necessary for many people - having access to a car is enough.
I can walk, bike, or bus most of the time, and then when I have a load of frozen food or furniture to bring home, I can rent or hail a car. And yeah, if I move to a rural area or I get bad knees, I'll buy a car.
cars will be the future of urban transportation for as long as urban areas will be designed with cars in mind. there needs to be a top-down policy change to break the cycle - until then, making cars smaller, lighter and less polluting is our best bet.
...in warm climates. Nobody wants to walk to or from a bus stop in -30 degree winds if they can get an alternative, and most won't scooter or bike in freezing conditions either.
I stay in Boston, and winter really isn't as big a problem for public transport as people make it out to be. I can't think of many cities outside Canada/Russia that have worse weather (cold, high precipitation and windy).
If anything, owning a car in the winter is a massive pain as driving is riskier, involves daily drive-thru shovelling and regular de-icing that gets irritating rather fast. Biking does get quite difficult for longer trips, but people still use bikes (owned or rental city bikes) for short distance trips to the grocery stores within 10 minute distances.
I recognize that this only works in dense enough cities. But, if the city is dense enough to have good public transportation in the summer, then it is dense enough for public transportation to be sufficient over the winter.
Not sure what the percentage is, but it's not a small number.
This is the map of areas classified as Köppen Humid Continental. It covers almost all of the populated areas of Canada and the northern United States, as well as parts of Europe and Korea, northern Japan and northern China.
Most northern US geographies experience at least a few days of -30°C (-22°F) weather every winter (even coastal places like NYC -- I remember it was freezing in lower Manhattan ca Feb 2016). However it's not as bad as it looks, as these temperatures are wind-chill temperatures and usually occur in the wee hours of the morning.
Where do you want to go? Living in a city center right now. It's hard for me to find a thing I DON'T have in a radius of 4km, which is a reasonable walking distance.
The parent was specifically talking about walking rather than taking public transit. Boston has a particularly dense core and yes, so long as you confine yourself to the original Boston core (North End, Beacon Hill, Financial District, maybe add the Back Bay), you don't really need to use public transit. But I'm probably not going to walk from there to Harvard Square in Cambridge, Symphony Hall, or even the Seaport on a regular basis although I could.
I'm not familiar with Boston. But I think NY and Paris are actually too big for everything to be walkable. In smaller cities that's definitely possible. I used to live in Bristol, UK (pop. ~500k) and if you lived centrally then you get pretty much anywhere within 30 minutes of walking.
I don't enjoy displaying Amsterdam as an example of how cycling would take over if only given the chance, because this city is an outlier as it's essentially flat.
I live in Amsterdam. Your point is valid that the flat topography makes cycling easy.
But electric bicycles solve the issue of climbing slopes and are extremely cheap. For the price of an entry-level car you can buy 6 good e-bikes or 2–3 top-of-the-line models. Making cities more bike-friendly would be a boon to the working class who could then enjoy mobility cheaply.
I agree that they are a good alternative, but to me they're also a very bad combination of being somewhat expensive and, at the same time, easy to steal.
Personally if I were to invest in an e-bike, it would have to be the folding variant which I could take with me.
My daily commute takes me from sea level (well, 1 meter above) to 66 meters above sea level. It's not uncommon that I have obligations at around 79 meters above sea level. Both of those climbs are single hills that don't let up, and are on major commuting routes in my city - a city in which biking is almost at an Amsterdam-level of bike usage.
Sure, it's tougher than a flat road. But if you're in any kind of shape it shouldn't take too big of a toll out of you. During lockdown I spent months without going on that commute, and without keeping myself in shape by other means, and when starting back up again I didn't miss a beat.
A small hill (which I consider ~60-80 meter differences) shouldn't scare people much.
EDIT: I should also add that I ride on a heavy mountain bike. The intention was to use it as a commuter and to ride trails, but it's almost exclusively been used as a commuter.
I'm afraid this car will create more problems than it solves. It is a disappointingly short sighted effort.
To make a difference in a city it needs to shrink down the area occupied by cars today as well as reduce the absolute numbers. Since this car cannot travel at even modest highway speeds it does not replace anyone's primary car. The result is that people will end up owning more cars. If they can afford it.
The second problem is that it puts a new demographic on the road: teenagers. In this segment it would (again, for those who can afford it) replace public transport, bicycling and walking.
I live in a city. I have a small car. What I really want is an even smaller car built around the fact that most of the time I am transporting just myself. But I need to be able to drive at highway speeds in order to not cause traffic problems.
This is an embarrassingly poor design effort. Europeans used to be great at designing nation changing, important small cars. The french had the 2CV and the Renault 4. The Italians gave us the (original) Fiat 500.
You are completely missing what this is about and the segment this is targeting. This is not a small car designed for the American market. This is not even a small car in the European sense. This clearly is targeting the segment filled by scooters and small motorcycles.
European urban driving has little in common with American urban driving. Cities are compact and very dense with little to no parking space and speed limit at 30km/h to 50km/h. You are never going to get close to highway speeds driving inside a city in Europe.
I live in Europe. I spend most of my driving time in and close to the city. The sole reason I need a car is that I often need to get from one side of the city to the other. That usually means ring roads and similar, which have higher speed limits and even higher actual speeds driven. Which means I need both something that won't cause a traffic jam there, AND something that is small enough to navigate and park in the city.
A lot of people also live just outside the city core and commute by car into the city. This too means roads with higher speed limits than the actual top speed of this car. Which means, it becomes a problem.
I live in a country where 5.6% of cars are electric. (By comparison, California has 1.3% electric cars). In part because of exactly this need to combine inner city and the periphery around the city. Authorities try to get cars out of the city, which is why they provide tax incentives to at least switch to electric for those who can't switch to public transport.
If we talk about people who only navigate inner cities, electric bicycles, scooters and small motorcycles are preferable from a traffic point if view since they are much more effective. They take up much less space on the road, require less parking space and can navigate the city much faster. (In the summer it is faster to navigate across the city on an electrical bicycle than it is to drive any car regardless of size)
From a government perspective, this car doesn't solve a problem. It creates new problems by increasing the space requirements and by putting new demographics into new settings. Dramatically so if the car were to be successful. From a consumer perspective it does offer more comfort for a narrow sliver of affluent teenagers, and a possible service vehicle for companies, municipalities etc.
For someone who needs a car anyway this is a typical second or third car - which means we fail to shrink down the fleet; it just grows larger.
Its _only_ qualities are size and aesthetics. It falls short in every other respect.
> From a consumer perspective it does offer more comfort for a narrow sliver of affluent teenagers, and a possible service vehicle for companies, municipalities etc.
I like how you casually toss that. This is not a detail. This is the core market of the car and it has been perfectly designed to address it.
This is a clean, compact, two seaters with a size and performance profile perfectly suited for a city looking like Paris. It's probably going to make a killing as a ride sharing solution.
It's a very interesting new value proposition (small, slow, clean, quite cheap) and it does so using an extremely aggressive engineering proposition (only 250 parts, perfectly symmetrical, similar front and back).
This car is a design master
class. The fact that you fail to see that is on you. Meanwhile it is selling very well.
Why do you assume that I don’t see that and people have not done made simple and cheap cars before?
The difference is scale. Making a car relevant for a narrow demographic isn’t very impressive. Making a car that makes mobility for the masses is. I would encourage you to look a bit closer at cars that did this in the past.
Its so hard to buy a small car these days in the US. The offerings are pretty poor. Mitsubishi Mirage, Fiat 500, Chevy Spark. And then if you want AWD there are basically no options (I drive a discontinued Suzuki SX4 because everything else is bigger). Not to mention the lack of practical small city cars but everything else keeps getting bigger. The small Rav4 is now much larger and there isn't a little crossover replacing it.
I don't know if your use of AWD is for winter driving, but I've learned that snow tires make more of a difference during the winter than AWD. You can get a set of snow tires, mounted on rims, balanced, and inflated, delivered to your doorstep by TireRack for what seems like a reasonable price.
You drive on summer tyres during the winter? In that case, yes, being on the right tyre will make a bigger difference than having AWD. Where I live you will actually be fined if your tyres are not "suitable for the conditions" - which essentially means that if you are on summer tyres during winter, you are going to get a pretty hefty fine.
We use snow tires during the winter. But in the US, summer tires are sold as "all season," and handle poorly in snow. We're not required to use snow tires in our region, and they salt the roads heavily, to the detriment of my bicycle.
Over the past few decades of living in this region, folks have pretty much settled on "needing" AWD to drive in snow, and then gaining relatively little benefit, while insisting that "all season" means that they don't need snow tires.
I asked my mechanic about it. His take: "They should stop salting the roads, folks should get snow tires and learn how to drive."
Some snow but mostly I also like to take the car onto gravel and fire roads. Probably wouldn't use snow tires as I'm in coastal California and only see snow a few days per year in the mountains.
The problem with winter tires is in regions where you get fewer than 10 days of snowy roads per year. That’s where AWD plus traction control are really helpful. And that technology is also useful on wet or dusty roads, not just on snow.
I have to wonder a bit about the use case for an urban-only car. Most of the people I know who live in cities, even cities with good public transit, own cars but they mostly own cars to get out of the city on weekends and so forth. Even if it's relatively cheap it still has many of the downsides of owning a car in a dense city but you can't actually use it for many of the purposes you'd want a car in the first place.
I guess if it's aimed at teenagers maybe? But that seems even more niche.
I would love to live in a city where all the cars are small, quiet, and not too fast.
But logistically, how would cars enter or leave the city? If you wanted to travel by car with a few others to visit someone in another city ... do you have to take your small electric car with luggage to the city boundary, and then switch to a different car that can go on the highway (and has a greater range)? When you arrive at the destination city, do you then again switch vehicles to another small city car? So one trip needs 3 vehicles? Would the city boundary then have to be host to a giant concentration of garages where people keep their city-car until they return? Would people own the highway-capable cars, but be obliged to store them possibly very far away from their homes? Or in this story are the highway-capable cars almost all rentals?
I honestly just need it to be fast, 45kph is dangerous on motorways. Plenty of European cities have motorways leading drivers into the city from the suburbs. The range isn’t an issue under normal conditions, but may be a dealbreaker if it’s your second car and backup.
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In the middle of the nineteenth century, the center of Paris was viewed as overcrowded, dark, dangerous, and unhealthy. In 1845, the French social reformer Victor Considerant wrote: "Paris is an immense workshop of putrefaction, where misery, pestilence and sickness work in concert, where sunlight and air rarely penetrate. Paris is a terrible place where plants shrivel and perish, and where, of seven small infants, four die during the course of the year."
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In France, you are not allowed to transport 'packages' in trains. Just luggages.
But more closely related to cities, imagine your life if there was just bicycles lanes and there was no car/truck for the plumber, ambulances, deliveries and supplying, old and handicap people, ...
I really like the idea about using a smartphone and bluetooth speaker for the dash system. I'm wondering how big of a cost savings it could be for other budget cars, where you just have an app for climate control and Bring-Your-Own-Speakers.
The Volkswagen Up has a smartphone cradle for navigation (which will also charge your phone, and let you play music from it via Bluetooth), though it has a built-in radio.
The author sees this as another car, therefore not helpful for living streets. I share this sentiment however I wonder if streets would become pleasant to be in if all of the vehicles were silent and electric. Most towns have cars with revving engines and the pollution that comes with it. The Ami does not come with these problems and I think it would be interesting to see a large scale trial of a town where only silent true electric vehicles are allowed in town. Would people start using their front gardens and have time for passing neighbours?
Did the French get the G-Wiz a decade ago, only for it to fail? That too used the quad bike classification.
I think noise adds safety though. This is why things like electric mobility scooters or forklifts/platform vehicles often have a (sometimes piercing) noise when backing up. True silent vehicles going thirty miles or up might be more dangerous than not.
There's a straightforward use case: In Paris we never had a car because public transport was so good and having a car was such a pain. But we had no kids. Once we had a kid suddenly there were many new issues such as trying to carry the baby seat to/from the metro. Suddenly a car was more inviting and this wold be great for that application.
When the kid is older things can change; we later lived in a city with plentiful bike lanes and it was great...except in the snow.
Yes it is actually crazy how much stuff people with babies and toddlers need to carry. Of course the amount of stuff also expands to fill the available space. My niece requires like 5 different toys for a single outing, let alone a weekend out of town.
I think the conclusion is a bit unbalanced. Plenty of trips are short range and people don't have unlimited cash to replace their bikes with even cheap cars. If it's there, they may well use it a lot of journeys which they'd otherwise have used a car for - popping to the shops, going in to town or going to a nearby friend's house.
In france there is a brand of these four-wheeled motorcycles called ligier which has been around for decades. They’ve been getting more popular, and it seems traditional car companies are taking notice.
Cheers for the awesome blog! It's rare to see one these days, which is dedicated to a niche topic like automotive UX design and is not trying to sell you consulting services (like mine, lol).
The author's main argument seems to be that the Citroen Ami is successful along many dimensions, but it is not a bicycle. While large scale adoption would encourage some helpful trends with respect to emissions and safety, it might crowd further adoption of cycling out, so should adoption of the Ami is to be avoided.
I understand the the arguments favoring bicycle transport, but I think it's odd to hinge them on a the review of a model of car.
Isn't this space ripe for a 3d-printer-like revolution? I mean, lots of the parts can probably be had off the shelf, someone might come up with a system for securing standard aluminium tubing togeather at a few set angles for a frame. Outer and inner panels can be vacum formed plastic or glassfiber and made by practically anyone with the space and the inclination to bang togeather the molds.
It's a specific type of vehicle in France, "car without licence". It's basically a moped engine inside. They have difficulty going above 20kmh up a slope
> It is classified as a quadricycle, not a car, so anyone over 14 can legally drive the car in France without a license.
I imagine that also allows it to escape the rigorous crash testing that cars are subject to. This is why experimental vehicles in the United States usually have 3 wheels instead of 4.
TLDR; the author likes this tiny city car, but doesn’t like that it fundamentally competes not with other cars, but with biking and transit. For the sake of climate and city life, society should be moving the other direction (away from cars towards bikes and transit).
I don’t disagree with the authors take on where we want cities to go. However I do not share the concern that this tiny car makes the problem worse.
My reasoning is, the battle to reduce the role of cars in cities is fundamentally cultural, at least in democratic societies.
I think the rising number of “in-between” mobility options like this is a huge asset in the culture shift. Forget about the weather, the infrastructure, etc. The bigger problem is ability and laziness.
Modern cities are simply too big for walking across in a time-efficient manner. But as most people have noticed, assuming one can safely bike, the bicycle enormously improves the radius that a person can conveniently access without the space consumption of a car.
But what I think idealists, especially young idealists, really have a hard time relating to, is what a small percentage of humans can really get around by bike as their primary mode.
Adults over 30 represent the bulk of the population, and a very large percentage of these folks (including myself) are physically limited either by health condition, by age, by injury, or even just by being very out of shape. A person in that condition may smile at the bike lanes and think they look like fun, but also sadly think to themselves “I could never do that.”
As long as this large and politically dominant chunk of the population feels excluded, going bike-first isn’t going to happen.
But this is where e-bikes, scooters, and “quadricycles” like the Ami are so valuable. Anyone who depends on driving could drive one of those. And shifting to smaller, lighter, slower vehicles improves safety for everyone else. It also reduces the demand for things like giant parking lots that so wreck the urban fabric.
I think anything that creates more options in the middle make the transition easier to accept and embrace. And anything that makes more people feel welcome and included in the shift away from car-centric cities helps reduce opposition and make the next increment of change politically feasible.
I know it isn’t as exciting or glamorous as jumping all the way to the final destination in one go, but incremental steps like this are generally how true progress happens. So I, for one, am excited about the Ami, and the general rise in micro-mobility options it represents.
> Modern cities are simply too big for walking across in a time-efficient manner.
I'm a big proponent of transit, but I realize that transit has one downside -- time. The time dimension is oft forgotten aspect of accessibility.
You may be able to get somewhere, but if it takes several connections and a transit time of over 1 hr, you're not likely to do it frequently.
There are invisible barriers to connectivity that are time-related (or more broadly, friction-related).
As a younger person my time was worth less so I thought nothing of trading off time. But I'm older now, and I realize in order to get more done, I need to get to more places quicker.
(Anecdotally I hear people forgoing dates because they don't think they can sustain a relationship with someone who lives one borough too far away. Almost no one owns a car in NYC, so the MTA is generally the only option, and getting from Queens to Columbia University say can take an hour.)
> "You may be able to get somewhere, but if it takes several connections and a transit time of over 1 hr, you're not likely to do it frequently."
That's exactly my experience living on North Shore of Nassau County, Long Island, NY. I don't have a car.
A primary factor which permits me to live without a car is in-town taxi service (not Uber). Shopping, laundry, etc. are all within 20 minute walk. The town is compact, unlike most suburban sprawl.
Previous to COVID I commuted 4 days to Midtown by rail, which was ~1.25h one way. Now I work from home.
I consider the Ami an ideal vehicle to fit my lifestyle, and would be much more desired if the in town taxi service were 2+ times more expensive, if I needed to go out more, and if the weather was more reliably rainy or cold and icy, and if needed to wear 'adult clothes' which I didn't wish to ruin walking in dirty streets.
This may be true for an individual musing whether to purchase a car in a given city where they happen to have a choice, but from an urban planning perspective, designing a city for cars imposes the same issue as a result of decreased density. All that automobile speed is wasted passing highways and parking lots. As the joke goes: Houston is an hour away from Houston.
I've worked in Houston (and have driven on the I-45 during rush hour) so I know what you mean.
I've also been to NYC many times so I know the other extreme too.
I think a good urban environment accommodates mixed-mode transportation, with a preference for mass transit but also reasonable accommodation for motor vehicles. I live in Chicago where mass transit is a big thing (an anomaly in the midwest) especially downtown and the north side, but the driving experience here isn't that bad either. The congestion -- even pre-covid -- is never really too bad (at least not by LA or Houston standards), and parking is expensive but not astronomical.
I guess in Chicago there are options. If I want to get somewhere quick by car (and am willing to pay for it), I can. Or if I want to pay way less and use public transit, I can too.
This article is so smug. It reminds me of Communist arguments AGAINST worker's rights.
These communist arguments boil down to: "we should not try to make workers' lives better, because in order to have The Revolution, workers need to be angry and dissatisfied."
I'd go with 'distingtive' as it breaks some expectations. "Ugly" is not a usefull description as it's very individual. I wouldn't be surprised though if european sensubilites skew diffrently than, say american.
I'd argue this very firmly meets the expectations of a class of small cars where being distinctive matters (almost) as much as being compact, and certainly more than having it look the way bigger cars are expected to.
With the 2CV, Mini Cooper and the Smart cars as the most prominent early examples, but there are a bunch of other cars in this segment pushing down towards the 100"/2.5m length mark now, and a lot of the newer design aesthetics in this segment seems to involve intentionally signalling that it's part of this segment by an exaggerated "compressed" look (compare the Mini Cooper, that just looks like a small but relatively normal car, to e.g. the Smart ForTwo or the Ami, that both looks like they've been squashed).
This is intentional signalling to a customer segment that wants that type of car.
Yeah, it is distinctive but not in a good way, compare it to next cheapest model[1] it's way better and normal looking. Their other cars design are over top, specially that the parent company own Citroën, Peugeot, DS, Opel and Vauxhall.
The Tesla Model S was probably the first contemporary US car design that I actually thought looked nice (although my first reaction was "That new model of Ford Mondeo looks really nice").
I'd say infantile more than anything. It looks like a fisher-price preschool toy. Or like one of the little tikes children's pedal cars. Kind of fitting in a cynical sense, I guess.
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So What Is The Problem?”
The problem is that it will move teenagers out of bicycles, scooters, and public transport, thus making roads busier. That’s not where we should want to go if we want to make city centers more livable.