Car manufacturers have a natural tendency to focus on what the cars of the future will look like. They often emphasize the convenience of self-driving vehicles to reassure customers that today's problems won't happen tomorrow, or at least hopefully. However, the vehicles will not always be in transit. The concepts focus on the moving part (the last one I talked about it particularly does), and few face the problem of parking.
Bad, because a future perspective on mobility must consider the entire ecosystem: this is why I find Project DORO, a design concept by the Korean designer interesting. Park Changwoong which offers a new perspective on the problem. Almost utopian, I would add.
Lampposts as parking lots
The concept focuses primarily on street lamps: according to the designer they are one of the most inefficient and underused elements. I disagree on this: even today they can be used to collect environmental data, they host security cameras. Of course, more could be done. DORO, however, goes much further, imagining to use the spaces occupied by the street lamps as vertical parking lots.
And to do this, it contemplates a (rather complex) system that involves practically all the elements of mobility.
The platform
There is a base platform, which contains wheels and motor. A hypothesized system too by Renault e from Citroen for the cars of the future: it can detach itself from the cockpit, or allow you to change cockpits according to the things we want to do while we are on the road.
Once a passenger compartment has been left on the lamppost car parks, the platform can restart by hooking up to another. The potential number of 'complete' cars on the road can be greatly reduced.
The cabin
The cabin that acts as a cockpit is an interesting design exercise: once again, as I have often found in other concepts, the forecast is to interiors similar to those of rooms. The materials are also "residential" ones, including wood and fabrics. Virtually there is glass everywhere, which produces an extraordinarily wide view of the surrounding environment (hopefully one-way, when needed, for passenger privacy).
The parking lamps
Let's come to the strong point of Project DORO: the street lamps. They are a real housing for the cabins. The glance is more dystopian than ever: suddenly all the roads are clear, no cars parked on the edges. They are all suspended in the air. And they can also perform different functions: imagine going to a pub and eating in one of these suspended cabins, and then having you escorted home directly.
What to say: a rather ambitious vision: it presupposes a future that adopts a completely different network from the current one. A network made up of platforms, cabins and street lamps, of course.
In any case, as we often observe, the concepts serve to open the mind and see different possible points of reality: I appreciate that there are “visionaries” also worried about parking.
After all, everyone's dream is not to always see all these cars everywhere, right?
