Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility

General Motors and Segway are set to announce in a few hours their collaboration on a two-seat, two-wheel electric mobility pod called Project P.U.M.A.

It's called the P.U.M.A. because that stands for Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility and also because that's a cool name. And by putting "Project" with it GM makes it sound roughly as significant as the Manhattan Project. Incidentally, Manhattan (and the Manhattans of the third world) is just the kind of place GM and Segway see something like this pod making sense.

Of course, Toyota and Suzuki have shown their own electro-nubbins over the years and haven't gotten far with the projects. You might also think of the GM/Segway as half of a GEM Peapod neighborhood electric vehicle or a Nissan Pivo (but without all the smoldering sex appeal or the robotic buddy).

The two companies are only 18 months into the project and the vehicle doesn't even have body work yet. We've included an illustration on one proposed body. Anyway, the companies see the P.U.M.A. or whatever it ends up being called (if anything at all) as a low environmental impact way to relieve some of the congestion of the increasingly crowded cities of the future.