Hiriko, Driving Mobility

Hiriko is a concept car project conceived and developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will be fabricated in the Basque region of Northern Spain aiming to reinvent the concept of mobility in urban contexts. Hiriko has been uniquely designed from new perspectives of architecture, energy, ecology, urban planning, and urban design, enabling a true paradigm shift in the way we address mobility. This new social enterprise reinvents the car as an object, and redefines the user's relationship to metropolitan use patterns. The Hiriko vehicle is designed to be used in shared-use rental vehicle systems, otherwise known as “Mobility-on-Demand” (MoD) systems. Like the Paris Velib bike sharing program, users simply walk up to the closest charging station, swipe a credit card, take an electric vehicle, and drive to the nearest station. Bike sharing systems like Paris’ Vélib and Barcelona’s Bicing have proven that MoD systems are very convenient, flexible, and complementary to mass transit systems, by solving the “Last Mile First Mile” problem associated with Subway and Bus networks. MoD systems using lightweight electric vehicles, like Hiriko, are born to reduce energy use, CO2 emissions, land-use, and overall congestion in urban areas. Hiriko consortium has nurtured 3 companies: Hiriko cars, Hiriko services and Hiriko infrastructures.