A sign of the times…a forward thinking European city doing its best to be ecologically and environmentally friendly implements an innovative car-sharing service utilizing pure Battery Electric vehicles to reduce both emissions and traffic congestion…it must be 2024. Nope, it’s actually fifty years earlier.
The city would be Amsterdam and the vehicle would be the “Witkar”, which according to Google Translate, means “White car” or “White cart” in the native language.
So what is a Witkar? It’s a system using small electric rental vehicles located at various docking stations to help reduce traffic and emissions in dense intercity areas and wean drivers away from owning their own car or truck. The inventor was an industrial designer and politician named Luud Schimmelpennink. Failing to get government support, he managed to raise $250K through private investors which allowed for the purchase of thirty-five vehicles, five stations, and the central computer control complex, as a demonstration phase. For our tech fans, the computer was a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11. The system was inaugurated in Amsterdam on March 21st 1974.
Docking stations/charging areas were established at various locations within the city and after subscribing to the service, drivers could then operate a Witkar when needed using a magnetic key, and either return it to the station they started from or at any of the other stations within the city. Costs were calculated based on how long the car was in use, not on mileage. Car-sharing in what may be one of its earliest forms.
The vehicles themselves were quite unique – perhaps the best description is “pod-like”. Three-wheeled with two seats, they used lead-acid batteries similar to those in golf carts. Speed was limited to 30 kph. Charging was done using a roof-mounted “blade” system, similar to that used by many BEV buses today.
So how did things pan out? Unfortunately they didn’t. The Amsterdam city council was never a supporter – and lobbied the central government to deny any additional funding to broaden the system. But perhaps the biggest limitation was slow re-charging, which resulted in vehicles not fully charged when needed. As such, Witkar officially ended in 1986.
A BBC report from 1974 is below.
A more recent three minute BBC video interview with the inventor, now eighty years old, can be viewed here.
I was in Amsterdam in 1983 but don’t remember seen a Witkar. If I did, it didn’t it didn’t stick in the memory and I heard about them only a couple of years ago on the BBC World Service. Can confirm DEC’s PDP-11 was a classic.
Cool! I suppose that many could come up with arguments against this, but I’d love to live in a city where there was a modern, functional, system like this. To me, it seems much more useful than the very similar ebike sharing systems in place in nearly every city nowadays. And hopefully, the small cars would not be treated like those electric scooters…which are left willy-nilly littering sidewalks, green spaces, and such (unused) in the cities that have those things. Then again, of course they’d be treated just like that. Which is (one more reason) why we can’t have good things.
It’s funny to think of Amsterdam being a place where the local govt was hostile to this system. I’m guessing things have changed.
Finally, I have to love the mention of the system running on a DEC PDP-11. I live maybe 10 miles from where that machine would have been built and interact daily with folks who worked for DEC when it (briefly) turned this part of Massachusetts/New Hampshire into the east coast’s Silicon Valley. DEC stuff was everywhere back in the 1970s/1980s. Until it all vanished relatively overnight…leaving behind just the ex-employees and a whole lot of empty real estate.
I thought of many of the same things reading this.
In my area these days, the local governments basically shower eBike and scooter companies with tax breaks, free use of public property for storage, etc. It’s surprising to read that Amsterdam was hostile to this approach.
But then again, I wonder about the actual, long-term financial viability of vehicle or bike sharing as a business model. Systems where the vehicles are docked (like the Witkar) have the disadvantage of limiting people’s mobility. However, the undocked systems (like those scooters) end up being strewn all over the place, requiring a lot of manpower from the company to gather them all up again. No city to my knowledge has come up with a good approach to scooter management, and in many places it’s gotten to be quite a nuisance to pedestrians and property owners.
Here in Northern Virginia, carsharing (like Zipcar) was popular 5-10 years ago, but then fell by the wayside, even with all the public subsidies. I suspect the companies just couldn’t bring in enough revenue.
From what I understand about the Witkar system, when customers would get in a vehicle, they’d select their destination (there were only a few), and the Computer would check if there was enough battery strength to get there, and if there was a docking space available once there. I presume that quite a few trips were not authorized to proceed due to this arrangement, which probably didn’t bode well for the system’s continued popularity.
The tall glass box is unnecessarily bad design. Unsafe and top-heavy. More stable shapes and better chassis designs were around in those days, like the Cushman three-wheeler. Similar vehicles were common in Asia, including Indonesia with Dutch connections. Just electrify one of those.
Unless of course you’re the Pope.
In which case it’s divine.
Gosh, is it really 50 years ago? I remember that on Tomorrow’s World (even before I scrolled down and found it). William Woollard presented Top Gear in the 1980s when it was actually an informative and interesting programme.