For 10 frantic weeks in the last quarter of graduate school, I worked with four of my classmates in the Stanford Design Program to create a fully functional electric vehicle for short distance personal mobility.
We were interested in looking at ways to forgo the traditional car ownership schema and to revisit how people might treat their local trips through the lens of appropriate power consumption. We wanted to create a new mode of transportation that allowed for a physical and visual engagement with the world around you without giving up the cargo and passenger capacity of a traditional car. Furthermore, it was important for us to create a vehicle with "transparent" technology. We wanted the Engineering to be as invisible as possible, so we used in-hub motors and steer-by-wire to eliminate the visual clutter of the technology that makes the vehicle go.
For more information and photographic documentation, check out the website at www.wengmotors.com.
Again, the entire project went from absolutely nothing to a fully-functional and highly resolved vehicle in just ten weeks! In the days following our presentation to the faculty, our project was featured on the homepage of Stanford.edu, an article in the Stanford Report, radio interviews on CBS, television time on ABC and NBC, and coverage with Engadget, Autoblog Green, and other popular blogs. We have also been offered grant funding through Lightspeed Venture Partners to continue work on the project.
Here's the original Stanford Report article.