Archive for March 5th, 2010

For the past few days I’ve been sparing moments to think about personal mobility. As an individual of practically no engineering background this has unfortunately not been quite as easy a process as I had hoped. In fact as of writing it remains at the conceptual stage, as may be seen.

Yes I have set my sights upon the prospect of designing and perhaps constructing a four-wheeled personal-scale mode of transport. I remain highly skeptical of my odds of completion – but hey at least it is something worth trying for.

I’ve decided to take a bit of a systems analysis approach to the project starting from the conceptual design phase and working my way back to defining the problem. That tends to be the flow of things when you respond to what you perceive as a nagging want or need.

So the problem that I seek to solve is that of getting myself from point A to point B in as efficient, convenient, practical and economical a fashion as possible. Oh yes. And I would like the resulting vehicle to be very light, compactable and thus portable.

Yes, portable. A vehicle that can stop a driver outside a workplace, be folded up in under a minute and carried indoors in a zip-bag. At this early stage I know that a lot of design questions may need revisiting.