PUMA - Personal Urban Mobility and Accessbility vehicle

[morph999]

Say goodbye to your personal privacy. Say goodbye to times when you can drive the speed limit you wanted and where you wanted. PUMA will put an end to that. Sounds like this gas and oil crisis is all fiction to me. A generated crisis to force us into PUMAs. PUMA sounds like Joseph Stalin's wet dream. Basically these vehicles will use vehicle-to-vehicle information to drive you around the city. Sounds like you tell the car where to go and it will drive you, hands free. The car is predicted to only get 35 miles range. What a joke. Like we don't know about the EV-95 battery that has 1000 mile range or the new Lead Acid that are predicted to last 4 times longer? We get 35 mile range now. We got 35 mile range in 1970. Anyway, I expect these vehicles to have gps devices and the whole get up. All a cop would have to do is type into his computer and I'm sure he could find you easily where ever you happened to be. The car will be like a mobile cell phone because it uses wireless technology and wouldn't be surprised if a phone device wasn't going to be built into it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123906731177395605.html

 

[EMF]

I saw this yesterday and then had to suffer through a news report about it on NPR. This is without a doubt, the stupidest idea I have seen in a long time and is even more useless than the over hyped failure Segway that this POS is based upon.

GM knows that there is nowhere for this thing to fit as it is too wide for a sidewalk and goes too fast, (35mph) but is too slow and fragile for the roads. They actually have some sort of collision avoidance system integrated to keep you from getting hit or to keep you from hitting a pedestrian. Riiiiight.

PLUS- they "estimate" that this thing will cost you about 1/3 the cost of owning a real car! Way too expensive....

So- they actually were bold enough to SUGGEST that cities and municipalities would CREATE areas for these deathtraps to run in! Are they nuts? What municipality can even maintain what they have filling potholes etc? No city would ever create special roadways for these ridiculous things.

If I find out my tax money (bailout funds) goes into ideas like this - I am writing my congressman.

I would like to see the Volt make it to market, but if this is the kind of thinking that is driving GM at the moment- we need to let these ignoramuses go down hard. We simply cannot support such stupidity with tax dollars.

 

[Mathurin]

I want to like it, but don't. I don't think they're unfit for roads, the objection is the large nerd factor, otherwise it seems like yet another LSM just this one is non tandem wheeled, big deal. But what's with wanting these motorcycles to be allowed on bicycle facilites? Is that supposed to make sense? Allowing motorcycles on bike paths seems like a very bad idea, idk how it is elsewhere but over here our bike paths have too many parts that just arn't safe beyond 15-25 km/h mainly due to lack of visibility, meat pylons and surprising designs, it makes them annoying for going 30-ish, so that roads feel better for doing that. Anyways if how they did with the segways is any indication then I'm pretty sure little to nothing good will come of efforts in that direction.

 

[Matt Gruber]

I like the fact that it gets around car DOT rules by going on 2 wheels! Very clever!
High cost is GREAT for status seekers.
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