WalkCar: The First ‘Car In A Bag’
Don’t you hate it when you’re walking up a hilly street and wish you had a car? Cars are expensive, and in areas where most people don’t have driver’s licenses, people have to take cabs if they’re going somewhere a bit farther than walking distance. Well, a Japanese engineer has created the first personal transportation surface that he calls the ‘WalkCar.’
“Twenty-six-year-old Kuniako Saito and his team at Cocoa Motors recently unveiled the lithium battery-powered “WalkCar” transporter, which is the size of a laptop and resembles a skateboard more than a car.
The slender WalkCar is made from aluminum and weighs between two and three kilograms (4.4 to 6.6 pounds), depending on whether it is an indoor or outdoor version.
It reaches top speeds of 10 kilometers per hour (6.2 miles per hour), for distances of up to 12 kilometers (7.4 miles) after three hours of charging. (Via Business Insider)
The weight limit for the WalkCar is 265 pounds, so some of the bigger Americans might have to do a little bit more walking before they can start gliding around on it. The WalkCar wasn’t first intended to transport people, but bags and heavy objects.
“I thought, “what if we could just carry our transportation in our bags, wouldn’t that mean we’d always have our transportation with us to ride on?” and my friend asked me to make one, since I was doing my masters in engineering specifically on electric car motor control systems,” he told Reuters.
“Maybe I just see it that way, but it seems to me that the U.S. is always the one which invents new products and Japan is the one which takes those products and improves on them to make a better version of it. But here in this case, the WalkCar is a totally new product I have started from scratch. So I also I want to show the world that Japan can also be innovative,” he said.
If you get one of these, they move by shifting your weight to turn, similarly to the Segway, except much cheaper and portable. In the coming months, Saito will launch a Kickstarter for the WalkCar and he estimates the cost to buy a WalkCar for around 100,000 Japanese Yen ($800 U.S.).
Check out this impressive demonstration of the WalkCar:
Shipping would then begin by Spring of 2016. I expect to see this clear up a lot of parking lot space hunters during the holiday season since a person could just hop on a WalkCar to get to the front door.
(Reuters Via Business Insider)
Feature Image Cocoa Cocoa Motors
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Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post, UPROXX,BGR and by just looking up his name.
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