Hiriko

In memoriam

Bill Mitchell has died recently. He was completely unknown for many people, but for others he was a highly esteemed figure. He was a former dean of the MIT and the ideologue of one of the most innovating projects in its conception and result: a new concept of urban mobility in cities that as a result has generated a new concept of city car as a result.

Just like in a relay race, Bill Mitchell started the race from the vision that it was necessary to rethink the current relationship between city and citizen. It was not normal that with the growth of cities there was an everlasting problem of traffic jams, lack of mobility and environmental sustainability. He was the one who thought the solution was to rethink the problem from the perspective of the city, in the form of a new concept of vehicle that is to be a 100% urban, 100% electric car.

This reasoning was relayed on to all his MIT Media Lab Smart Cities team, which developed the concept, transformed it into an electric bicycle, an electric motorcycle and an electric car. It also transformed, in turn, the concept of use by not limiting it to the private sphere but following tendencies in other fields thinking in the concept of sharing and paying only for use: car sharing.

This has now been relayed to a grouping of car industry entrepreneurs in Alava, AFYPAIDA, together with DENOKINN, a Centre of Entrepreneurial Innovation, through EPSILON EUSKADI, a research and automobile development centre. They have started a corporate project to convert Bill Mitchell’s initial concept into a reality, together with the conceptual development carried out by the MIT. As a result they have proposed a new vehicle.

As in a hurdle relay race, we are now starting a new phase. In less than 6 months it has become possible to get everything started. The electric car project in the Basque Country has become a reality, with explicit developments, detailed drawings and deadlines. We now have the baton in our hands and in the hands of Basque companies in the automotive sector that are working day after day to carry it out and to develop each part of the car.

The baton is firmly in our hands, the race is fast, the competitors (some of them at least) have already started to run. And we have nearly 15 months in front of us to reach the finish line: to have the prototypes ready by the end of the first semester of 2011. Then another race will start, there will be another baton to carry, and new companions who will make Bill Mitchell’s idea and vision possible and a reality in our streets and in the streets of other trail-blazing cities in the world.