Not so much I recently found out! I'm not talking about plain old hitchhiking. I'm talking about car sharing as we know it of present day. You sign up with a car sharing program and you can use cars from a given pool of vehicles all over your town or country. Most common car sharing programs, among others, include zip car or Cambio.
Turns out, as I recently discovered, car sharing was around long before these companies. Meet the Witkar. The Witkar was an electric(!) car sharing project introduced in the Netherlands back in seventies. Witkar, literally meaning white car, was build around a pool of tiny electric vehicles located at various stations all over Amsterdam.
While this piece of tech was designed almost 50 years ago and things were a little different back then. Computers had a fraction of the power of a modern day smartphone, GPS was non-existent, and battery performance was a joke compare to what we have to our disposal today. Nevertheless the Witkar project made it possible to share mobility using state of the art technology such as magnetic key cards to check out one of these tiny electric vehicles.
A short BBC item on the Witkar in English. This tech was way ahead of its time:
As also noted in the video the project was suffering from all kinds of problems. Lack of stations, full or empty stations, and taxi drivers not being particularly happy with these tiny little white vehicles. The project was looked at as a gimmick and eventually didn't make it into maturity.
Forward a few decades and the car sharing concept is widely accepted. Although still a small market, car sharing got a foot in the door of conventional mobility. The visionaries behind the Witkar project were way ahead of their times. Despite the lack of technology trivial to us, they managed to build a working concept.
The Witkar teaches us that sometimes projects are ahead of their times. Even if an idea might seem silly at times, it might be the norm in a distant future. Do you know of any current day projects that might be a normal concept in the future? Space travel perhaps?
If you like what I do, consider voting for my witness here:
