Persuasive Electric Vehicle (PEV): 0-1 Platform Exploration for Mobility Beyond Cars

Operational & Deployment Lead | MIT Media Lab (2015-Present)

BACKGROUND | The last few years saw a rapid adoption of app-based taxis (ride hailing), shared bikes, and increasingly, autonomous vehicles across the world.  In 2017 alone, ride-hailing companies such as Lyft, Uber, Didi and Grab have raised more than $9.6 billion, and bike-sharing companies such as Ofo and Mobike at least $1.3 billion (Figure 1).  In the first half of 2018, Ford officially launched its bike sharing service GoBike in San Francisco, and Uber acquired its own for $300 million. According to the Brookings Institute, autonomous vehicle-related ventures and R&D garnered $80 billion in investment between 2014 and 2017 [1].  Fueled by such a large influx of capital for R&D and expansion of new transport services around the world, how are these new technologies improving lives and turning into sustainable services?

Ride-hailing services have undeniably helped shift people’s travel preference away from car ownership, once a symbol of personal economic well-being.  But it also suffers from two deficiencies: first, contrary to the messianic vision that ride-hailing services would alleviate traffic jams in cities, in many places it generates more trips and reduces the use of active (e.g. walking, cycling) and public transit modes (e.g. bus) [2]; second, it’s constrained by the legacy footprint of the four-wheel automobile. 

Bike sharing—dock or dock-less—brings multiple benefits, such as a reduction of CO2 emissions, a reduction in vehicle footprint (compared to the car’s), and an increase in the opportunity for non-bike owners to cycle to work and for exercise.  Bike sharing services, however, still faces some challenges: the challenge of fleet rebalancing, long-term financial sustainability, and for dock-less systems, their contentious use of public spaces.

For all the love for new travel options offered through bike-sharing and ride-hailing, cities are facing difficult transitions toward ensuring long-term collective interests—notably in the protection of public spaces and public transit systems.  Amid this seemingly innovative era in the domain of urban transportation — driven by Silicon Valley and the venture capital world—that awaits the arrival of the level 5, fully autonomous car as savior, what might be something the public and private sector can do in the meantime to ensure concrete progress toward improving urban transport?  Through the Persuasive Electric Vehicle (PEV) project at the City Science research group of MIT Media Lab, we seek to take advantage of positive attributes of ride-hailing, bike-sharing, and autonomy to create a new type of vehicle platform that serve with socio-economic and leisure needs of people while minimizing the various negative externalities for the environment and people’s livelihood.

PROCESS | Began with a Nvidia TX1 mounted on a wooden frame in 2015, the team further developed 3 iterations of chassis to support road pilot tests, the exploration of use cases for technology modules provided by research sponsors, and the development of adjacent projects such as pedestrian- and cyclist- focused Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) prototypes (Figure 2), or service designs for tourism in Andorra (Figure 3). The development broadly covered 5 phases from 2015 to 2020:

• V1: Controlled Indoor & Outdoor Pilot (2015-2016)

• V1: Un-controlled Outdoor Pilot on Bike Lanes (2017)

• V2: Live Rush-hour Pilot on Bike Lanes; (2018)

• V2: Social-Machine Interface Development (2018-Present)

• V3: New Service & Business Model Exploration (2019-Present) 

RESULT |  In addition to meeting pilot milestones defined for each iteration of the vehicle, from V1 to V3, the project 

• Exhibition of the 1st design prototype by DENSO at CES 2016

• Exhibition at the $6 billion-dollar “MIT Campaign for a Better World”’s  flagship dinner gala hosted by MIT’s President Reif in 2017 (Figure 4)

• Exhibition of the 2nd design prototype by DENSO at CES 2017

• TV Coverage by the Discovery Channel

• Exhibited at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum’s “The Road Ahead: Reimagining Mobility”, from 2018 to 2019

• Additional investment and design support from DENSO on the fabrication of the V3, car-show grade prototype in 2018

• DENSO senior management’s validation of the V3 prototype, and initiation of additional industry partnerships for exploring potential commercialization.

TEAM | Michael Lin, Abhishek Agarwal, Jerry Yao, Yago Lizarribar, Justin Zhang, Luke Jiang, Jason Wang, Vincy Hsiao, Kai Chang, Bill Lin & Danny Chou.

[1] "Gauging investment in self-driving cars - Brookings Institution." 16 Oct. 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/research/gauging-investment-in-self-driving-cars/. Accessed 8 May. 2018.

[2] "New research on how ride-hailing impacts travel behavior By Regina R ...." https://steps.ucdavis.edu/new-research-ride-hailing-impacts-travel-behavior/. Accessed 8 May. 2018.