More than a decade before women had the right to vote in this country, Alice Ramsey became the first one to drive across it. The car was a 1909 Maxwell Model DA, given to her by Maxwell as a kind of advertising stunt with the idea that women would like the DA when they saw a woman driving it and encourage their husbands to buy one. It’s easy to misconstrue her journey as a statement about women’s rights, but Ramsey, 22 at the time and fresh out of Vassar, wasn’t exactly a suffragette. In fact she only accepted the challenge because it had already been done by a man.

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A 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle is probably not your idea of a dream car. At 25 mpg, it’s probably also not your idea of a green car. But a group of mechanical engineering students at the University of Kansas have completed a year-long project aimed at making a Bug much more eco-friendly… with an eventual goal of creating a 500 mpg vehicle.

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A 22-year-old art student at the University of Central Lancashire, Skoda Fabia painstakingly painted a car so it blended in with her studio’s parking lot resulting in people “stopping in the street to look and coming up and almost bumping into it.”

With two seats, two wheels, and a maximum range of 25-35 miles (at 25-35 mph), the P.U.M.A. (which stands for Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility) won’t work for your next road trip. But this new concept vehicle, a joint project of GM and Segway, may be just the ticket for the driving most of us do on a daily basis.

The vehicle was introduced to the media on Tuesday at the New York Auto Show, and Segway CEO Jim Norrod described the P.U.M.A. as “…a dramatically different approach to urban mobility”:

There’s an emotional connection you get when using Segway products. The Project P.U.M.A. prototype embodies this completely through the combination of dynamic stabilization, seamless drive-by-wire controls, and sophisticated battery systems to complete the connection between the rider, environment, and others.

I can immediately think of one emotional connection: the idea of “filling up” the P.U.M.A.’s lithium-ion battery pack for 35-60 cents is pretty exciting.  We’ll have to wait and see if we get to experience that joy first-hand, though — GM and Segway have no plans for production of the vehicle. They’re not the first to conceive of such a vehicle, though — let’s hope a race to produce small urban alternatives to the car heats up.

If you’re in New York, the Auto Show opens to the public tomorrow. If you can’t make it, you can check out pictures and videos at Segway’s official site for the P.U.M.A.

Source: Green Inc.

Image source: Segway