Snap-together autonomous car to make its way to CES 2018

By Gary Elinoff, contributing writer

Rinspeed, the Swiss company well-known for its outside-the-box concept cars, has come up with another show-stopper to be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show to be held in Las Vegas next month. Called the Snap , it lives up to its name, because the autonomous electric vehicle consists of a chassis that holds the drivetrain that can, literally, snap on or snap off a variety of passenger compartments. With this concept, the entire aspect of your vehicle can be altered as easily as changing your hairstyle or your suit.

Why it’s called Snap

To get an idea of the concept, the right side of Fig. 1 illustrates the chassis, or “skateboard,” while the left side features one of the choices of passenger compartments, or “pods.”

Fig. 1: Passenger module and drivetrain separated. Image source: Rinspeed.

In Fig. 2 , we see the chassis and passenger compartment joined as one.

Fig. 2: Passenger module and drivetrain joined. Image source: Rinspeed.

The modularity serves multiple purposes. Some of the modules can serve as campers, mobile offices, or other functions that, at least temporarily, have no need for mobility, and thus have no need for a drivetrain. Those with sufficient money and imagination may well want to own more than one of the easily attachable and detachable passenger modules.

Finally, due to the rapidly advancing state of the art in electric vehicles, even if the drivetrain becomes obsolete, your investment in passenger modules will not be lost because the updated drivetrain will be backward-compatible. Or, if the pods become obsolete first, you’ll still have the drivetrain. You get the idea!

Bringing the Snap to fruition

The idea behind the Snap isn’t to create a car for production but to give us a preview to the likely future of transportation and to perhaps influence and guide that future in some way. Rinspeed was not alone in executing its concept. The company enlisted a veritable Justice League of America (and Europe) of innovating tech companies to bring its concept forward, including the design firm 4erC and prototyper Esoro of Switzerland.

Changing cabs. Image source: Rinspeed.

One of the goodies that make up the City Runabout Pod, depicted in Fig. 2 , is an iris scanner from Gentex in the U.S. A LIDAR (laser ranging) system from Ibeo in Germany enables the vehicle to avoid obstacles and collisions. Communication to the cloud is ensured by components built by NXP and Harman.

The list of contributors to Rinspeed’s Snap concept is too long for all to be mentioned, but the breath of participation is certainly one more affirmation of the inevitable future of electric vehicles and the concept of autonomous driving that they will, inevitably, make possible.