Rethinking Personal Mobility
Project Neodrive is a research initiative exploring light, weather-protected, human-scaled vehicles that combine what people value in cars with the social and climate efficiency of bicycles.
Our mission: Drastically reduce the impact of personal mobility on the world.
We are an EPFL MAKE for society project.
What we build
We publish three kinds of thing. Research, complete vehicles and the modules they are made of.
Vehicles
Complete prototypes. Each one is a research instrument built to answer specifics questions, and judged on whether it answered it.
Modules
Drive, control, and energy subsystems that exist because buying them was blocked either by minimum order quantities, closed systems, or parts that arrive needing weeks of work. Documented so the next team doesn’t have to repeat the exercise. We aim to design theses modules to be as generic as possible so that we can reuse them accross our experiment and avoid “reinventing the wheel” (pun intended).
Research
Our tools, data and findings. Software for questions this category has no answers to. From enclosure shape optimisation, routing and path planning for vehicles that fit neither bikes nor cars, modal shift estimation and the measurements that come out of using them.
Why we build it that way
Seven chapters of reasoning, worked out in order.
Chapter 1: The Problem
Why cars are inefficient, polluting, and overkill for most trips.
Chapter 2: Our Approach
How we’re bridging the gap toward sustainable personal mobility.
Chapter 3: Designing for Humans
Understanding what people actually need from their transportation.
Chapter 4: Living Within Limits
Working within the constraints of resources and sustainability.
Chapter 5: The Laws of Physics
The fundamental principles that shape vehicle design.
Chapter 6: Making It Viable
The economic conditions under which this could work, and the threshold that disqualifies it.
Chapter 7: The Missing Layer
The barriers that prevent a small team from just buying the parts, and what we do about them.
Join the Movement
Want to help rethink mobility?
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