This Bizarre Dutch Electric Cab Was Wildly Ahead Of Its Time And Built By A Company That Shares A Name With Genitals

Good ideas seem to have an interesting habit of reappearing in different forms over time, adapting and changing each time. I think the fundamental idea behind these strange vehicles – Amsterdam’s Witkar experimental electric phonebooth-looking things – is one of those ideas. The basic idea is pretty simple: wouldn’t it be cool if you could quickly and easily rent a simple little electric city car to get around town? Pick it up at one station, drop it off at another by your destination, pretty much just get in and go. Sounds like a great idea, right?

I think it probably is a pretty good idea, since that’s also the basic idea behind companies like ZipCar, quick scooter rental companies like Lime, bike share things like Citibike, and, perhaps most importantly, an idea I had back in 1989 that I did exactly nothing with. What’s amazing about the Witkar (which just means “white car” in Dutch) system is how early the system was implemented, complete with online (well, via a telephone network but there was a computer involved) payments and authorizations.

The system was designed by Dutch industrial designer and activist Luud Schimmelpenninck who had earlier proposed the “White Bike” plan that proposed one of the first public bike-sharing systems. When the plan was rejected by the city government, the activist group Schimmelpenninck worked with, Provo, just painted 50 bikes white and left them around the city for anyone to use. These were soon impounded by police, but it was an interesting idea.

When it came to the “White Car” (Witkar) project, Luud (I’m sorry, I’m not typing Schimmelpenninck every time) actually did manage to get buy-in from the city, and the first prototype trip took place in 1968. Luud described the project’s goals like this:

“Witkar is a type of complementary individual public transportation and is useful just there where this public transportation is lacking: the short ride.”

So, the point was to provide transportation for relatively short rides in a city, so with that in mind the peculiar vehicles that emerged from this design brief make more sense than if you were to see them out of context.

The Witkar was a sort of plexiglass tube vertically mounted on a (sometimes three, sometimes four) wheeled platform, driven by a 24-volt electric motor capable of going about 18.6 mph, with a range of a bit over nine miles. That’s not much, but it’s adequate for the intended use.

One thing that tends to catch the eye of many English-speaking people who see some pictures of a Whitcar is the badging, and if you read English (if you don’t and you’ve made it this far in this article, holy crap, friend) then I’m sure you’ll see what I mean:

Yes, Cock. It says “Cock.” You know, like a penis. I feel like I should address this, because seeing a funny little electric car with “cock” emblazoned on it merits some explanation. The explanation is that the first ten examples of the Witkar were built by a company called Cock NV, before other companies like Spijkstaal took over. I think its safe to say the name didn’t have the same connotation in that part of the world, too.

Personally, I think the Cock ones are the coolest.

The way one got a Witkar from the station is very interesting, and perhaps the most forward-looking part of the entire enterprise. When the system started officially in 1974, a potential Witkar user would sign up for a lifetime membership of 25 guilders – I believe that would work out to be about $75 American dollars today – and for their money they would get a little magnetic “key.”

The first 15 minutes of the trip were free, after that it was about a dime per minute. Or whatever the 1970s Dutch equivalent of a dime was.

The magnetic key would be used at the stations to authorize the user remotely, by dialing in to a remote mainframe, and then – and I’m sort of speculating here – the key’s magnetic data would be re-written to allow it to unlock one of the cars? I can’t find all the detail I want, but some kind of activation code must have been written to the key to authorize it to activate a car.

A slightly different version of the magnetic key can be seen in use in this BBC video:

For 1974, this level of account management and remote, computerized authorization is pretty phenomenal, and wouldn’t become commonplace until decades later. The same basic fundamental system is how modern systems like Lime or Zipcar work, just using the internet and GPS data and all manner of newer tech.

The recharging setup was quite elegant, too:

An overhead rail at the stations would engage with terminals atop the cars to automatically connect the cars to power for recharging, which was reported as taking only about seven minutes. The battery capacity of these little fishbowls wasn’t much, so even back in the 1970s, this seems quite plausible.

Over the life of the Witkar system, which lasted from 1974 to 1988, 38 Witcars were built. While the goal was 25 stations with a total of 125 Witkars to serve Amsterdam, the reality was only five stations and those 38 cars, not all of which were on the road at once.

The Witkar project wasn’t exactly the success that the planners had hoped it would be, but I’d hesitate to call it a failure, too. From what I can gather, the concept seemed appealing enough to many in Amsterdam, but the execution was lacking. You can see some examples of this by the way the door didn’t really close in that BBC video, and, perhaps more importantly, the number of stations wasn’t ever really enough for the system to be as practical as it could have been.

If a user is required to return the car to a station, then there really needs to be a lot of stations at a lot of varied points around the city, otherwise a long walk may be required to actually get to one’s final destination, defeating the purpose of such a transportation system in the first place.

Modern low-speed electric city vehicles like the new Fiat Toploino or new Citroën Ami could be great for something like this, and all those scooter and bike-sharing companies have proven and matured the authorization and financial side of things, and perhaps better modern batteries could eliminate the need for these to have to return to a specific station, and instead could be collected and charged as needed by the company.

Also, maybe a modern version could avoid having a badge that says “cock.”

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