Mygreenwheels

Wahey! Something mad to write about :-)

Recently I predicted the Apple McLaren electric car love-child, but the child has arrived and it looks like I got the parenthood wrong. I'm intrigued by this little shape-shifter EV that's controlled by an iPhone.

Photo copyright RinspeedSwiss auto tuner Rinspeed will reveal its latest loony electric concept car designed by Frank Rinderknecht (the last one was submersible sports car) at the Geneva Motor Show. If its name, the iChange, gives you an inkling about its unique properties, that's only half the story. This is an electric car that you control with your iPhone and that can shape-shift to accommodate an extra passenger.

It looks amazing too and, even though some bloggers are poo-poohing it as 'a show-offy compromise', I think it's got a lot to show off about. I love the central driving position with the option of having one or two seats behind and the lifting canopy instead of doors (though that could be a tricky feature here in wet and windy Edinburgh). I'm a car show-off at heart, so this one's got my name on it.

Take away the gimmickry and it's a pretty solid EV that'll do zero to 60 in about 4.0 seconds with a top speed of 137mph, so that would put it in Tesla territory. There's also talk that the iChange will be able to choose from two different li-ion battery stack configurations for long and short trips, but no word so far on who'll be supplying those.

The iChange features a Harmon/Kardon infotainment system (sounds like one of the characters from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and a navigation system that selects the most energy efficient route and shows it in 3D - how cool! Even the wool in the interior is dyed and spun using eco-friendly methods and it's got rooftop solar panels to power the fans that control the interior temperature.

As Wired says, there's almost no chance the iChange will ever appear in showrooms, but that isn't the point. The point is to push the auto industry in a new direction and get it thinking about new ways of building cars. Absolutely.

"If we want to maintain our individual mobility in the future, we have to rethink the car in its entirety, without taboos," Rinderknecht says. "Most of all, we have to take its econological aspects into consideration."

And for the sharp-eyed among you who went ... ECONOLOGICAL???? Apparently it's a real word relating to a conceptual framework for thinking about phenomena or actions -- along the lines of "ecology" -- and it's used in both science as well as business and organisational psychology. So there.