a suitcase with wheels at 30 km/h

Just a few days ago, Pere Navarro, director of the DGT, said that “The only way to access the cities will be by public transport“. These are words that a good part of the media has used to advance supposed prohibitions about which nothing has really been said. But they do reflect another battle: the battle for space.

For years, European cities they have put up a battle with the cars and they are redistributing space. The large pedestrian areas such as those in Barcelona, ​​the mandatory ZBEs in Spain or the commitment to cycling in Paris are good examples. But it is a movement that has been brewing for decades. What happened to the Scalextric de Atocha? Did you know that Amsterdam was once part of the car paradise?

These same debates were already taking place in Japan more than 30 years ago. And when one lives in overcrowded populations and with very high population densities, having or not having a car is no longer a question of purchasing power, it is a question of how that can impact our own environment. These questions of how many cars there should be in a city and what implications they have is what led Japan to implement the Shako Shomeishothe regulations that prevent you from buying a car if you do not have a secured parking space. At least in the busiest cities.

In that same context were born the kei carespecially narrow and small cars with specific regulations to avoid being subject to taxes and that Shako Shomeisho that limits the purchase of vehicles. The concept wants to repeat in Europe although if it has triumphed in Japan it is because it is deeply rational, something that does not always go well with the European idea of ​​the automobile.

And since in Japan the radically rational triumphs and they are decades ahead when it comes to space management, already in the 80s and 90s they were wondering what mobility solutions They could arrive in the future to move us around in a motorized vehicle, taking up as little space as possible.

With those, Mazda pulled an ace up its sleeve.

One in suitcase format.

The Mazda Suitcase Car or the “suitcase car”

The 90s had just begun and Mazda wanted to look for original mobility solutions. Playing the typical Futurology game that It is made in design centersthe Japanese company opened an internal competition to receive proposals for a groundbreaking vehicle.

It is very likely that the executives who received Yoshimi Kanemoto were already expecting that the designer who led the Mazda Suitcase Car project would arrive with the proposal in a suitcase. We imagine, of course, that not in the way they expected.

Because that suitcase did not hide sketches, design games or feasibility studies. What he was hiding was the very vehicle that had been requested. With the help of Kanemoto, a group of engineers gave life to the Mazda Suitcase Cara small three-wheeled vehicle that moved thanks to a two-stroke engine. The chassis? The suitcase itself, of course.

And it is in the same suitcase where the humble apparatus of the vehicle is stored in which the… driver sits? Or pilot, rather. In this video You can see how it has just enough space to store the engine, the tank and the three wheels. Once assembled, it is as simple as getting on and starting to roll, driving this kind of three-wheeled kart with a handlebar that includes a handle to give gas, like on a motorcycle.

The prototype, obviously, did not reach production but it was an example of how far technology could go to miniaturize the components necessary to make a vehicle roll.

The company itself explains that the prototype was born as an idea to anticipate what vehicles would be like in the year 2020. For its Japanese designer, we would move in a 57×75 cm Samsonite suitcase in which a small kart with the capacity to reach 30 km/h would be hidden. It’s no small thing.

The idea, however, was presented outside Japan. In 1992, Associated Press photographed to one of the company’s executives riding the device in the middle of Times Square, in the days before a New York Auto Show.

Obviously, the proposal went nowhere but we would have to ask Kanemoto what he thinks of those who cross half the world today to get on a kart, dress up as Mario Bross and ride through Tokyo traffic as if they were experiencing a Mario Kart race.

Photos | Mazda

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