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Lit Motors thinks we're just driving around in too much car

Founder Daniel Kim thinks the answer is to reduce the size of our vehicles dramatically, along with their number of wheels.

Brian Cooley Editor at Large
Brian Cooley is CNET's Editor at large and has been with the brand since 1995. He currently focuses on electrification of vehicles but also follows the big trends in smart home, digital healthcare, 5G, the future of food, and augmented & virtual realities. Cooley is a sought after presenter by brands and their agencies when they want to understand how consumers react to new technologies. He has been a regular featured speaker at CES, Cannes Lions, Advertising Week and The PHM HealthFront™. He was born and raised in Silicon Valley when Apple's campus was mostly apricots.
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Brian Cooley
2 min read
Watch this: Lit Motors thinks we're just driving around in too much car

So Lit Motors is developing what looks a lot like a motorcycle, but with several traits from a car: You don't have to balance and you don't get wet. They call this model the C-1 and the full-size running prototype is, admittedly, in a very basic state. But here we see the sort of thinking that is perhaps just this side of too radical, while performing drastic surgery on one of the last great areas of waste in our daily lives: the amount of car we lug around for no particular reason.

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I like Daniel Kim, he wants to change things but isn't up "there" in a world of intangibles. He began his career as a Land Rover mechanic and, like Steve Jobs, did a little coursework at Reed College in Oregon before moving on (probably bored with the routine progression of college.) He's assembled a team of about a dozen people in a old warehouse in San Francisco that looks like a poster child for urban renewal.

The C-1 is up against some long odds to be sure: Aside from printing "motorcycle" (which will do it few favors in the U.S. market), I also came to realize there's a significant mental hurdle to trusting a two-wheeled vehicle to keep itself upright with you in it. By unseen magic. In traffic. But change has to start somewhere and what Lit's working on is at least part of the new attitude toward everyday vehicles we need to embrace, two wheels, three, or four.