Mygreenweek

Now here’s something really crazy. Designer Rob Lovegrove has a concept of a “car on a stick” - a sort of cross between a car and a lamp-post.

The little bubble-shaped vehicle, with its strange, flower-like interior design, carries up to four passengers and their shopping around the mall, taking voice commands and using satellite navigation.

It’s solar powered, and completely electric, and when you’ve had enough of it, you just park it up. But there’s more - instead of taking up space and languishing unused at night, the little car somehow gets elevated on a telescopic pole, and lights up to become a street lamp.

Quite how it achieves this, I’m not sure, and if the process is automated, exactly how it ensures all the passengers have got out is also a mystery. As a person who is prone to falling asleep at inconvenient moments, it conjures visions of waking up and finding myself trapped inside the street architecture, waiting for someone to want to go shopping so that I can get out.

Don’t worry - it’s all just a concept, and I don’t think we’ll be seeing any in the near future. It’s interesting, though. It’s the design equivalent of a thought-experiment, and elements of the design might just be worth taking further. Besides, it’s a shiny pretty thing, which the world needs more of.

Amanda