Amphibious commuting saves time and pollution
Thanks to an amphibious craft, plenty of time in commuter travel involving Stockholm´s many islands would be saved in the future, and also emissions greatly reduced. Such a vehicle, the “Gena” (also Swedish for “taking a shortcut”!) is now being designed by a team of KTH undergraduate students.
“Gena” is powered by electric motors, enabling ”her” to take the shortest way over either land or water. In many instances, going by road only would today require driving as much as 130 km/h part of the way to reduce the travel time as much as “Gena” will do.
– By using GENA instead of a conventional car, commuters may save up to two hours a day, compared with the time consumed in sitting in traffic queues through the city, says Robert Fedor, one of the student project leaders. Mind you, GENA is a climate-smart solution to some of our city traffic problems, too, thanks to her being powered by electricity.
“Gena” is a simple and environment-friendly amphibious craft, designed for operating both in city traffic and inland coastal waters. She is 3 m long and built on a catamaran-type body of carbon fibres. At the moment, the design has space for one adult driver and an extra passenger. Yet, the group´s ambition is to finally build a full-size vehicle that would replace one conventional motor car in city traffic.
The drastically cut travel times are the result of this vehicle solving the problem of having to pass, by car, a limited number of bridge connections between islands in the Greater Stockholm area. This leads to long and time-consuming detours, which result in large and unnecessary amounts of exhaust emissions.
In the autumn of 2007 the 19-head strong KTH team developed the new vehicle concept by means of analysing and evaluating various technical ideas. The first prototype is to be built in spring 2008. It is hoped that this new concept could be demonstrated in model form during the Stockholm Boat Fair in February-March 2008.
Magnus Myrén