The Citroën Ami and the future of urban transportation
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So What Is The Problem?”
The problem is that it will move teenagers out of bicycles, scooters, and public transport, thus making roads busier. That’s not where we should want to go if we want to make city centers more livable.
- rebound: faster bandwidth = people will consume more bytes = need more energy
- stack: 5G will be deployed on top of 4g which is deployed on top of 3g which is deployed on top of 2g which is still operational in many places.
It goes the same for transportation. If an electric car replaces a ICE car it's a net positive (or maybe not, you'd have to study the whole cycle from lithium mining to end of life disposal). If an electric car replaces a pedestrian or a bicycle it's a net negative no matter how you look at it.
It also depends on the electric mix, but an electric car will almost always be a net positive over its lifetime, due to its much better power-to-wheels efficiency (70-80% instead of 20-40% for ICE). That's 2 to 4 times energy saved! (depending on model)
But overall efficiency needs to take into account the weight too. A Tesla Model X is 2.5t. If your car is 2 times the weight of your old car, say good bye to your efficiency gains.
That's where a Citroën AMI has potential, IMO. A really light-weight, really efficient electric car that does the job. Hope they start advertising it like that.
I for one hope it doesn't take off, just for this sole reason, even though I liked the quirkiness of the design.
Seems like a nicer problem to wrestle with than
"We have a bunch of young people injured or dead on bicycles or as pedestrians each year"
Like, there's not even any contest as to which of those problems i'd rather face.
If i was to uncharitably re-frame your argument, it's simply pulling up the ladder to avoid future generations having an option to take up a new form of mobility.
However anecdotally I have two friends whose teenager children had accidents with cars like that and zero who had accidents with bicycles.
Anecdotally my score is 1-1 (with a "real" car.)
That is because of too many cars on the streets. We cannot solve that by adding more cars to the streets, electric or not.
For example, what % of kids who are currently driven to school in gargantuan SUVs could drive themselves in an Ami? I would certainly rather they cycled, but i'll take fewer SUVs on the roads as a second best.
As a cyclist, I'd also be happier contending with an Ami than a Range Rover, and with a bit of luck the Amis will also slow the Range Rovers down.
It's feasible to cycle on any urban road where SUVs abound, provided that they have an urban speed limit.
And by the way, it's not comfortable for pedestrians to contend with bicycles. At least cyclists driving on roads have to navigate drivers who had to go through training to have the privilege of being there, and risk suffering consequences if they do not abide by rules.
but the ami is a underpowered for american cities, from the article:
> "It has a top speed of 45km/h, it can do 75km on a full charge..."
if it could go up to 45mph and 75mi per charge, you could replace a lot of urban cars with the ami, but as it is, it's unfortunately more directly competitive with (electric) bikes and scooters rather than errand and commuter cars. 90% of trips can be replaced by cars like the ami, particularly in cities.
Citation please
Does something like this exist anywhere except the US?
incidentally, i think we could quadruple density in LA (with mixed-use and other techniques) without any loss of "neighborhood character" (unless of course, one's definition of that excludes diversity of race and income). the weather here is perfect for multimodal transportation year-round. that kind of density means more construction projects could (better) afford to put parking underground so that we could convert street parking to dedicated bike/scooter lanes without loss of parking convenience. and smaller utility cars like the ami means that we could put more of them in that parking area, while needing fewer of them because of the higher walkability of the neighborhood afforded by the higher density of commerce/employment as well.
But I could see such vehicle popular with boomers living in the country side. That would provide some freedom to move around in a fairly safe (from elements, your own balance) and provide enough cargo for groceries.
These kids are not zipping around in bicycles or scooters. They are either being driven around by their parents or Uber/taxi drivers in their 2-ton 6-seaters or being zipped around in taxis.
These modes of transportation are not a panacea but nothing is, and mindlessly parroting "use bicycles!" does absolutely nothing to address the problem. I'm pretty sure people already know that bicycles exist for a couple of centuries now but somehow they choose not to use them in spite of the colossal cost of purchasing and maintaining a motorized vehicle.
These vehicles pollute less, have a smaller footprint, are safer, are hard to steal, and are affordable. More importantly, they are real, exist today, don't require retrofitting the current system nor do they require legislation changes. Sounds like an improvement.
ideally there would be no need to get to the bus stop - if most of your needs could be satisfied within walking distance.
The parent was specifically talking about walking rather than taking public transit. Boston has a particularly dense core and yes, so long as you confine yourself to the original Boston core (North End, Beacon Hill, Financial District, maybe add the Back Bay), you don't really need to use public transit. But I'm probably not going to walk from there to Harvard Square in Cambridge, Symphony Hall, or even the Seaport on a regular basis although I could.
https://www.smartcitylab.com/blog/governance-finance/paris-1...
Even in normal times, 99% of my transit usage is for leisure rather than necessity.
What's the percentage of the world population living in dense urban areas where temperatures drop to -30 ?
This is the map of areas classified as Köppen Humid Continental. It covers almost all of the populated areas of Canada and the northern United States, as well as parts of Europe and Korea, northern Japan and northern China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humid_continental_climate#/med...
Most northern US geographies experience at least a few days of -30°C (-22°F) weather every winter (even coastal places like NYC -- I remember it was freezing in lower Manhattan ca Feb 2016). However it's not as bad as it looks, as these temperatures are wind-chill temperatures and usually occur in the wee hours of the morning.
If anything, owning a car in the winter is a massive pain as driving is riskier, involves daily drive-thru shovelling and regular de-icing that gets irritating rather fast. Biking does get quite difficult for longer trips, but people still use bikes (owned or rental city bikes) for short distance trips to the grocery stores within 10 minute distances.
I recognize that this only works in dense enough cities. But, if the city is dense enough to have good public transportation in the summer, then it is dense enough for public transportation to be sufficient over the winter.
Being 50 or older and having even the slightest health problem will teach you why cars are good. My own mother is 70 and is starting to have knee issues; cars are the only way for her to even survive. A lot of ebikes and scooters aren't even able to support a weight limit over 200-250 pounds, limiting cargo usage. Many struggle to go up hills.
And we aren't even getting into things like how bicycles and scooters are much easier to steal or steal from, or how unsafe walking can be at certain times of the day especially if you are a woman. Or having to ride a bus next to someone who smells like shit and is possibly deranged.
Cars are freedom and power. There is way too much idolizing a sort of serf mindset here; have nothing, do what government tells you, be part of a crowd dependent on others to sustain you.
As far as I am concerned, I ride buses and trains and almost never cycle, and I don’t have a car. The cases you mention here would be solved much more rationally and efficiently by generalising home deliveries (with electric trucks). You don’t need to dimension your car for the furniture you need to carry around once every 5 years. You can just rent a van for a day then.
> Cars are freedom and power.
...which come at a cost that too few people realise, and which our children will have to pay.
> There is way too much idolizing a sort of serf mindset here; have nothing, do what government tells you, be part of a crowd dependent on others to sustain you.
Now I have some ideological issues with this.
Most governments I know encourage people to buy cars because it stimulates the economy and keeps some factories running, and some mates among money. Governments in general follow, not lead, these efforts.
You already are part of a crowd and could not survive on your own. You are dependent on thousands of people you will never meet for the most insignificant of your daily activities. To paraphrase, there is way to much idolising a sort of tough survivor mindset around. The tough guy living in a forest with his gun (which he built? From ore he mined?) is a mirage. If society collapses, tough guys will die just as well as others. There has to be a middle ground, where one can be wise enough to enjoy the freedom that living in society provides without being entirely controlled by totalitarians.
Do you have kids?
It is true that a car is often very useful when you have children. But then, a family can have a small city car instead of two SUVs.
I am not against the concept of cars, I actually love driving a good one. But I despair when I see the growing popularity of SUVs, and sedans getting larger and larger.
The reality is that car ownership isn't necessary for many people - having access to a car is enough.
I can walk, bike, or bus most of the time, and then when I have a load of frozen food or furniture to bring home, I can rent or hail a car. And yeah, if I move to a rural area or I get bad knees, I'll buy a car.
I respect your opinion but disagree wholeheartedly. When I drive [in the city or suburbs] I feel like my attention is enslaved to the road, to the traffic lights, to the stop signs, etc.
When I'm walking, or even biking, around the city I have so much more freedom to drink in my surroundings and live in the moment. I can literally stop to smell the flowers.
Don't get me wrong, cars have uses that are uniquely difficult to solve without one. As you mention, hauling heavy cargo, transporting the mobility-challenged, and shielding from bad weather, are just a few examples.
But as someone who is not hauling heavy cargo, is not mobility-challenged, and isn't particularly afraid of a little bad weather (and well I tend to not go anywhere during a blizzard anyways), I quite prefer to walk or bike or take a train or take a bus, rather than be a slave to the road.
He's also looking to buy an electric bicycle, because he's anticipating the day when he won't be allowed to drive anymore. He also wants to be able to follow my mom on bike, or me and my siblings, or his grandkids. His car is getting expensive and less and less useful since he's been buying his groceries online (yes, even in a rural town).
You have lots of dependencies, the government and the car industry has just naturalized them and largely guaranteed them to you. That's why you see non-drivers as serfs. And that's why we see drivers as entitled.
Elevation map of Amsterdam:
https://www.floodmap.net/Elevation/ElevationMap/?gi=2759794
Paris:
https://www.floodmap.net/Elevation/ElevationMap/?gi=2988507
Note the difference in scale.
You need a lot more sustained power for climbing in comparison to just cruising along.
Also the Netherlands have a high population density of 500 people per square kilometer, so they simply can't really rely on cars.
But electric bicycles solve the issue of climbing slopes and are extremely cheap. For the price of an entry-level car you can buy 6 good e-bikes or 2–3 top-of-the-line models. Making cities more bike-friendly would be a boon to the working class who could then enjoy mobility cheaply.
Personally if I were to invest in an e-bike, it would have to be the folding variant which I could take with me.
Sure, it's tougher than a flat road. But if you're in any kind of shape it shouldn't take too big of a toll out of you. During lockdown I spent months without going on that commute, and without keeping myself in shape by other means, and when starting back up again I didn't miss a beat.
A small hill (which I consider ~60-80 meter differences) shouldn't scare people much.
EDIT: I should also add that I ride on a heavy mountain bike. The intention was to use it as a commuter and to ride trails, but it's almost exclusively been used as a commuter.
To make a difference in a city it needs to shrink down the area occupied by cars today as well as reduce the absolute numbers. Since this car cannot travel at even modest highway speeds it does not replace anyone's primary car. The result is that people will end up owning more cars. If they can afford it.
The second problem is that it puts a new demographic on the road: teenagers. In this segment it would (again, for those who can afford it) replace public transport, bicycling and walking.
I live in a city. I have a small car. What I really want is an even smaller car built around the fact that most of the time I am transporting just myself. But I need to be able to drive at highway speeds in order to not cause traffic problems.
This is an embarrassingly poor design effort. Europeans used to be great at designing nation changing, important small cars. The french had the 2CV and the Renault 4. The Italians gave us the (original) Fiat 500.
Over the past few decades of living in this region, folks have pretty much settled on "needing" AWD to drive in snow, and then gaining relatively little benefit, while insisting that "all season" means that they don't need snow tires.
I asked my mechanic about it. His take: "They should stop salting the roads, folks should get snow tires and learn how to drive."
You are completely missing what this is about and the segment this is targeting. This is not a small car designed for the American market. This is not even a small car in the European sense. This clearly is targeting the segment filled by scooters and small motorcycles.
European urban driving has little in common with American urban driving. Cities are compact and very dense with little to no parking space and speed limit at 30km/h to 50km/h. You are never going to get close to highway speeds driving inside a city in Europe.
A lot of people also live just outside the city core and commute by car into the city. This too means roads with higher speed limits than the actual top speed of this car. Which means, it becomes a problem.
I live in a country where 5.6% of cars are electric. (By comparison, California has 1.3% electric cars). In part because of exactly this need to combine inner city and the periphery around the city. Authorities try to get cars out of the city, which is why they provide tax incentives to at least switch to electric for those who can't switch to public transport.
If we talk about people who only navigate inner cities, electric bicycles, scooters and small motorcycles are preferable from a traffic point if view since they are much more effective. They take up much less space on the road, require less parking space and can navigate the city much faster. (In the summer it is faster to navigate across the city on an electrical bicycle than it is to drive any car regardless of size)
From a government perspective, this car doesn't solve a problem. It creates new problems by increasing the space requirements and by putting new demographics into new settings. Dramatically so if the car were to be successful. From a consumer perspective it does offer more comfort for a narrow sliver of affluent teenagers, and a possible service vehicle for companies, municipalities etc.
For someone who needs a car anyway this is a typical second or third car - which means we fail to shrink down the fleet; it just grows larger.
Its _only_ qualities are size and aesthetics. It falls short in every other respect.
I like how you casually toss that. This is not a detail. This is the core market of the car and it has been perfectly designed to address it.
This is a clean, compact, two seaters with a size and performance profile perfectly suited for a city looking like Paris. It's probably going to make a killing as a ride sharing solution.
It's a very interesting new value proposition (small, slow, clean, quite cheap) and it does so using an extremely aggressive engineering proposition (only 250 parts, perfectly symmetrical, similar front and back).
This car is a design master class. The fact that you fail to see that is on you. Meanwhile it is selling very well.
The difference is scale. Making a car relevant for a narrow demographic isn’t very impressive. Making a car that makes mobility for the masses is. I would encourage you to look a bit closer at cars that did this in the past.
I guess if it's aimed at teenagers maybe? But that seems even more niche.
But logistically, how would cars enter or leave the city? If you wanted to travel by car with a few others to visit someone in another city ... do you have to take your small electric car with luggage to the city boundary, and then switch to a different car that can go on the highway (and has a greater range)? When you arrive at the destination city, do you then again switch vehicles to another small city car? So one trip needs 3 vehicles? Would the city boundary then have to be host to a giant concentration of garages where people keep their city-car until they return? Would people own the highway-capable cars, but be obliged to store them possibly very far away from their homes? Or in this story are the highway-capable cars almost all rentals?
Here it looks like that this one wants to promote bicycling so will say anything to support that.
But it is like going back to the dark age. Do you remember when we couldn't go very far from home? Transport things?
He pretends that Paris was better and a paradise before the 'evil work' of Haussmann. It is so untrue!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
<< In the middle of the nineteenth century, the center of Paris was viewed as overcrowded, dark, dangerous, and unhealthy. In 1845, the French social reformer Victor Considerant wrote: "Paris is an immense workshop of putrefaction, where misery, pestilence and sickness work in concert, where sunlight and air rarely penetrate. Paris is a terrible place where plants shrivel and perish, and where, of seven small infants, four die during the course of the year." >>
Also some interesting photo of that time:
https://www.messynessychic.com/2013/10/11/lost-paris-documen...
But more closely related to cities, imagine your life if there was just bicycles lanes and there was no car/truck for the plumber, ambulances, deliveries and supplying, old and handicap people, ...
Did the French get the G-Wiz a decade ago, only for it to fail? That too used the quad bike classification.
When the kid is older things can change; we later lived in a city with plentiful bike lanes and it was great...except in the snow.
I understand the the arguments favoring bicycle transport, but I think it's odd to hinge them on a the review of a model of car.
> It is classified as a quadricycle, not a car, so anyone over 14 can legally drive the car in France without a license.
I imagine that also allows it to escape the rigorous crash testing that cars are subject to. This is why experimental vehicles in the United States usually have 3 wheels instead of 4.
And since speed is limited to 50 km/h in cities and soon to 30 km/h, a faster speed should not be needed.
But at the end of the article I am starting to warm up to it.
Maybe its not that ugly.
I don’t disagree with the authors take on where we want cities to go. However I do not share the concern that this tiny car makes the problem worse.
My reasoning is, the battle to reduce the role of cars in cities is fundamentally cultural, at least in democratic societies.
I think the rising number of “in-between” mobility options like this is a huge asset in the culture shift. Forget about the weather, the infrastructure, etc. The bigger problem is ability and laziness.
Modern cities are simply too big for walking across in a time-efficient manner. But as most people have noticed, assuming one can safely bike, the bicycle enormously improves the radius that a person can conveniently access without the space consumption of a car.
But what I think idealists, especially young idealists, really have a hard time relating to, is what a small percentage of humans can really get around by bike as their primary mode.
Adults over 30 represent the bulk of the population, and a very large percentage of these folks (including myself) are physically limited either by health condition, by age, by injury, or even just by being very out of shape. A person in that condition may smile at the bike lanes and think they look like fun, but also sadly think to themselves “I could never do that.”
As long as this large and politically dominant chunk of the population feels excluded, going bike-first isn’t going to happen.
But this is where e-bikes, scooters, and “quadricycles” like the Ami are so valuable. Anyone who depends on driving could drive one of those. And shifting to smaller, lighter, slower vehicles improves safety for everyone else. It also reduces the demand for things like giant parking lots that so wreck the urban fabric.
I think anything that creates more options in the middle make the transition easier to accept and embrace. And anything that makes more people feel welcome and included in the shift away from car-centric cities helps reduce opposition and make the next increment of change politically feasible.
I know it isn’t as exciting or glamorous as jumping all the way to the final destination in one go, but incremental steps like this are generally how true progress happens. So I, for one, am excited about the Ami, and the general rise in micro-mobility options it represents.
I'm a big proponent of transit, but I realize that transit has one downside -- time. The time dimension is oft forgotten aspect of accessibility.
You may be able to get somewhere, but if it takes several connections and a transit time of over 1 hr, you're not likely to do it frequently.
There are invisible barriers to connectivity that are time-related (or more broadly, friction-related).
As a younger person my time was worth less so I thought nothing of trading off time. But I'm older now, and I realize in order to get more done, I need to get to more places quicker.
(Anecdotally I hear people forgoing dates because they don't think they can sustain a relationship with someone who lives one borough too far away. Almost no one owns a car in NYC, so the MTA is generally the only option, and getting from Queens to Columbia University say can take an hour.)
I've also been to NYC many times so I know the other extreme too.
I think a good urban environment accommodates mixed-mode transportation, with a preference for mass transit but also reasonable accommodation for motor vehicles. I live in Chicago where mass transit is a big thing (an anomaly in the midwest) especially downtown and the north side, but the driving experience here isn't that bad either. The congestion -- even pre-covid -- is never really too bad (at least not by LA or Houston standards), and parking is expensive but not astronomical.
I guess in Chicago there are options. If I want to get somewhere quick by car (and am willing to pay for it), I can. Or if I want to pay way less and use public transit, I can too.
Toronto is similar.
That's exactly my experience living on North Shore of Nassau County, Long Island, NY. I don't have a car.
A primary factor which permits me to live without a car is in-town taxi service (not Uber). Shopping, laundry, etc. are all within 20 minute walk. The town is compact, unlike most suburban sprawl.
Previous to COVID I commuted 4 days to Midtown by rail, which was ~1.25h one way. Now I work from home.
I consider the Ami an ideal vehicle to fit my lifestyle, and would be much more desired if the in town taxi service were 2+ times more expensive, if I needed to go out more, and if the weather was more reliably rainy or cold and icy, and if needed to wear 'adult clothes' which I didn't wish to ruin walking in dirty streets.
These communist arguments boil down to: "we should not try to make workers' lives better, because in order to have The Revolution, workers need to be angry and dissatisfied."
Just take a good thing where you can get it!
With the 2CV, Mini Cooper and the Smart cars as the most prominent early examples, but there are a bunch of other cars in this segment pushing down towards the 100"/2.5m length mark now, and a lot of the newer design aesthetics in this segment seems to involve intentionally signalling that it's part of this segment by an exaggerated "compressed" look (compare the Mini Cooper, that just looks like a small but relatively normal car, to e.g. the Smart ForTwo or the Ami, that both looks like they've been squashed).
This is intentional signalling to a customer segment that wants that type of car.