Nissan's electric whirligig car

Posted by T3 Online on Fri 3 Mar 2006

Check out this Nissan's bizarre prototype pod on wheels - it's got a spinning cockpit for crying out loud!

You have to hand it to car designers; they truly push the boundaries now and again. And Nissan's new-Pivo-has an extra twist - the passenger cabin revolves through 360 degrees. If you hate parking, that means you'll never have to reverse again: "Pivo can be driven straight into a parking slot and, once the body has been swivelled around to face the opposite direction, driven straight out again," according to a Nissan spokesperson.

If this vehicle ever goes on sale, you and up to two mates can sit in it and spin round and round for hours: driver at the front and two dizzy passengers behind. The company says its egg-like machine, "examines the future potential of the electric vehicle in a city environment". And with the environment very much the core focus at this year's Geneva Motor Show, it's no surprise that this compact concept car is a close friend of the Earth, powered by a dinky Lithium-ion battery and Nissan-made electric motor. It's tiny too - just 2.7 metres from bumper to bumper and 1.6 metres wide. That's Smart Car territory.

You also get electric sliding doors, while cameras mounted on the cabin's outer pillars transmit moving pictures of your surroundings to screens mounted on the inside of the pillars, turning them into virtual windows. There are cameras at either end of the car too, which send a live video feed to an 'Around View' dashboard monitor that generates a 360-degree image of what's around the motor.

The one thing we don't know? How fast if goes, but we suspect you'd get some serious fun just spinning it round whilst listening to Dead or Alive, "You spin me right round baby, right round"...