Rule of Thirds: Three-Faced Urban Delivery Vehicle Concept

Getting around a traffic-packed city is challenging for anyone, but especially so for huge delivery trucks. With traffic, lack of parking and small spaces to navigate, it’s easy to see why a smaller, more maneuverable delivery vehicle would be beneficial. London industrial designer Adam Schacter has a great solution: the CarGo delivery truck concept can transform itself from a very small vehicle to a larger-capacity pickup truck easily, so it can navigate spaces most delivery vehicles can’t go.

The passenger compartment of the electric-powered vehicle looks like a lot of the tiny electric car designs we’ve seen in the past several years, but it includes a cargo container on the back. And based on the orientation of that container, the CarGo has three main configurations. Narrow Mode has a slightly elongated wheel base and a tilted CarGo Pod, allowing for easy maneuverability. Compact Mode features a shorter footprint with the CarGo Pod snug against the passenger compartment. And Pick-up Truck Mode looks much like a standard pickup, with a horizontal CarGo Pod making a roomy (expandable) truck bed. And if needed, the CarGo Pod can be removed entirely, making the vehicle into an ideal commuter car.

Maybe the best part of all is the clip-on body panels that would allow for logos or advertisements to be easily added to the vehicle’s body. If the CarGo is being used for business deliveries, this could be a vital part of the design – and the panels could easily be changed out for different applications.

The beauty of the design is that it’s so simple and full of common sense. Schacter realized that delivery vehicles don’t necessarily need to seat two, since delivery drivers usually travel alone. He saw the problem that many delivery vans and trucks have in navigating congested city streets, and he decided that a flexible vehicle design would help drivers make small deliveries faster while cutting down on urban car emissions.

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See more in Cars & Trucks or under Transportation. February, 2010.