Who needs an electric car when you can have motorised shoes?

The future of personal transport is widely assumed to be electric cars, but if an American inventor currently vying for the James Dyson design award has his way many of us will be sporting motorised shoes.

In a world where the default mode of transport is often the car, Treadway Wearable Mobility shoes are designed for short urban trips and to link different modes of public transport.

Cars for your feet

According to the shoe’s Los Angeles-based designer, Peter Treadway: “In the ‘City Where No One Walks’ cars are clogging up our streets. If every one of them were to be switched to electric, we would still have the same number of automobiles on the road. This is not just an LA problem. The fact is, cars simply make it easier to be flexible in one’s travel plans. I noticed that many don’t use public transportation because it is just slightly difficult to do so. I figured that if people really enjoyed getting to and from the local train station, they might step up. (One can still drive a car while wearing them.) It would have to be convenient, because convenience is one of the major motivating factors for change.”

If the electric shoe fits

The future of the electric car has been dealt a blow this month by the prediction that the government’s £5,000 ‘Plug-in’ grant will not be available from January 2011. The manufacturers of forthcoming mass-produced have banked on the grant as way of reducing the price of their cars; electric cars are typically twice as expensive as their petrol-powered counterparts.

A spokesperson for the Environmental Transport Association (ETA) said: “Whilst motorised shoes may seem outlandish, the smaller and lighter the electric vehicle the more likely it is to be succeed commercially; the electric bicycles already on sale have a 70-mile range and are practical and cost-effective alternative to cars.”