Hiriko Fold to ease commuter parking congestion

Those who know the pain of finding a parking spot near a suburban train station after about 6.30am on a work day may be about to find help is at hand.

Auto makers are working hard to promote EVs as the family chariot of the future – a full, no-compromise replacement for the fossil-fuelled vehicle that’s given us a century of fuss free mobility.

But one group is developing them with another aim, not as a full-function transport mode but as a means of supplementing mass transit systems, to address problems associated with what’s known as the “first and last mile”. That is, the growing distance between mass transit hubs – major airports, stations and bus termini – and the individual residential, industrial and commercial spaces they service.

With growth in urbanisation and the swelling of populations in major centres, that distance has grown, leaving many workers facing more than a short walk between transit centre and work in the morning or home in the evening.

Enter the Fold, a two-seat microcar prototype purpose-built for urban car-sharing programs. It’s cute, clever, it’s made by a company called Hiriko – and it doesn’t come from Japan. In fact, it hails from Spain.

“The first- and last-mile problem has been growing steadily during the last 50 years as cities expanded,” said Elizabeth Deakin, professor of city and regional planning and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley, told The New York Times. “It’s often just too far to walk to a mass-transit station.”

The tiny car is the product of a joint project between a consortium of auto parts manufacturers in north-eastern Spain’s Basque region, and the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Smart Cities Research Group, which emerged from MIT’s Media Lab. A clean-sheet design, the Fold has been conceived specifically to fill those gaps in the urban transport matrix.

With the Spanish government kicking in US$18.5 million of a total $87 million raised to date, the venture has morphed into Hiriko Driving Mobility Group – “hiriko” is Basque for “from the city”.

Following the rollout of a prototype in January, the group has set to work on a trial production run at its factory in Vitoria-Gasteiz, near the northern Spanish city of Bilbao. With 20 trial vehicles ready for demo duties, it has announced the car will come in three variants: the Fold; the Alai convertible; and a small truck, the Laga.

With civic authorities expressing interest from as far afield as Berlin, San Francisco, Hong Kong and Brazil, several of the first production run will go to “a couple of European cities” for trialling, Carlos Fernandez Isoird, general coordinator of the Hiriko group, told The New York Times.

Like BMW’s tiny Isetta from the 1950s, entry to the Fold is gained from the front. In the case of the Fold access is via a top-hinged hatch that incorporates the windscreen. There’s no steering wheel, but an aircraft-like stick controlling forward and rearward speed and left and right turns.

Most notable about the Fold, however, is its hinged body. By pivoting the rear of the cabin upwards over the front axle and bringing the rear axle forward, it’s capable of shrinking in length from around to 2.4 about 1.5 metres.

Combined with four-wheel steering extending 60 degrees, which lets the driver effectively rotate the car as if on a turntable, manoeuvre it sideways and stand it up in a parking space. This effectively allows several Folds to cram into a standard spot.

Weighing in below 500kg, the street-ready Fold will use four wheel motors good for a total 15kW, sufficient for a top speed of about 50km/h. Its lithium-ion battery pack will take it up to 120km on a charge.

Mr Isoird told the paper the design had “successfully withstood in-house crash- and safety-testing this year.”

Hiriko plans to bring the Fold to market in 2013 at an estimated US$16,400 (that’s about AUD$16K). To keep shipping costs down, the group will also make it available in “snap-together” modular form – that’s 21st century talk for complete knockdown kit – for assembly on arrival.

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