The future of urban transport?

Have you heard the one about the tiny electric Citroën and the Monaco hairpin? Better still, have you seen the video clip of the little Ami piling into the tightest corner on the Formula 1 calendar before flopping over onto its side? It thumps hard into a bollard outside the Fairmont Hotel and becomes famous around the world within hours.

I won’t be too gleeful about all this because I’ve no idea if the driver walked away unharmed or not. I hope so, but the force of the impact suggests he – let’s be honest, it probably was – might have been knocked about a bit. It seems there was a passenger in there too. The Ami is not a substantial motor vehicle and its safety systems are more or less limited to its brakes, seatbelts and the driver’s sense of self-preservation. There are no airbags, complex crash structures or ABS, nor any of the sophisticated (if sometimes infuriating) active safety systems you get in modern cars.

Because let’s not forget, the Citroën Ami is not a car, at least not according to EU regulations. Instead it’s a quadricycle, built to a very different set of rules limiting weight and power, while imposing barely any safety requirements, relatively speaking.