Correspondent Bill Badrick sends along this YouTube video about a new urban Volkwagen factory.
About two minutes in you’ll see a cargo tram that brings parts to the facility. It runs on the city’s streetcar tracks…
Correspondent Bill Badrick sends along this YouTube video about a new urban Volkwagen factory.
About two minutes in you’ll see a cargo tram that brings parts to the facility. It runs on the city’s streetcar tracks…
2 responses to “A Solution for Our Industrial Land Shortage?”
This is really interesting to me, because it offers the possibility of someday setting up an industrial production system with absolutely zero pollution or fossil fuel consumption. And if you were moving a lot of mass over a short distance, it might even be cost competitive with trucks, too. Especially if you could drive it from the streetcar tracks onto the regular railroad tracks for long distance shipping.
But of course installing the system in the first place would be very complicated and expensive. I read that Amsterdam was experimenting with a system like this, but it fell through because they couldn’t get enough funding.
The VW pancake engine may have been fine for its time, but distribution in the US market was finally ended due to uncontrollable exhaust pollution. The Phaeton is another stereotypical car with typical pollution. Why must automobile-related business interests invest in supposedly advanced but ultimately futile technology? Were the Phaeton a plug-in hybrid, assembled in a typical factory or not, it could be considered an advanced automobile. The pretentiously sterile factory made me want to puke.