RUF: the vehicle of the future or barbarism?

2001/03/13 Galarraga Aiestaran, Ana - Elhuyar Zientzia

• Garraioak

After a dozen years of work, Palle Jensen, ingenious Danish inventor, has presented the future vehicle clean, cheap and fast. The name of the vehicle is RUF (Rapid, Urban, Flexible), ie fast, urban and flexible, which are its main features.

According to Jensen, the RUF collects the benefits of the train and the car, since it incorporates to the efficiency of the train the flexibility of the car. It is a double means of transport: it can circulate like a conventional electric car, but its main route would be on rails.

Thus, people would enter the car that has charged the batteries overnight and drive to the nearest rail station. There, it would indicate the destination to the computer and the computer driver of the rails would take control of the car. Lane roads would exceed current roads and the connected car would drive the car a hundred kilometers per hour until scheduled arrival. Upon arrival, the driver would slow down the speed and take control of the car again to get to your workplace or wherever you want.

The benefits would be many, for example, would greatly reduce pollution in cities and, as the car is fully automated when going on rails, people could do many other things during that time, such as reading the newspaper, surfing the Internet, etc.

The prototype of the RUF vehicle is constantly evolving at the Copenhagen School of Engineering. Its inventor would like both the politician and the person responsible for transport in the cities to be aware of the benefits that the RUF would entail, in the conviction that it would benefit everyone.