Students at the University of Bristol have invented an electric e-trailer that they hope will reduce millions of car journeys to the supermarket. The trailer can be attached to a bike or scooter, then collected from the user's home.
Developed by a group of five students under the name SLANT, it has now won £10,000 funding from the University of Bristol’s Innovation start-up incubator Runway.
The e-trailer is the brainchild of Innovations Master’s students, Tarun George Maddila, Artemis Fragkopoulos, Nigel Deshpande, Louis Cocking and Sam Bell. The tap-to-rent invention would be unlocked with a debit and credit card before being loaded to take the shopping home before leaving it outside for a SLANT employee to return to the supermarket.
Bristol Innovation students focus on creating solutions to real world problems. The team at SLANT said the new trailer will make shopping more sustainable, take cars off the road and be a useful solution for anyone who doesn’t have a vehicle.
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Artemis, a business innovation and entrepreneurship MSc student, said the number of car trips to UK supermarkets was 'mind-boggling', with 73% of shoppers using cars, totalling millions of journeys per year.
“In England, 19% of car journeys are made only to go shopping. If we could cut even half of these it would make a huge impact on traffic and the environment, and could mean people don’t need to spend so much of their income on cars,” he said.
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The £10,000 will be used to build two prototypes to refine the design. The team said that initial costs could be kept low by trialling the e-trailers at individual supermarkets before rolling them out.
Tarun, a technology innovation and entrepreneurship MSc student, said: “We hope this sustainable solution will help the environment and consumers - and supermarkets too, by increasing footfall, decreasing congestion and helping their net-zero commitments. I’m really excited by innovation – and when I wanted to study it I couldn’t think of a better place than Bristol.
“Without this course, and mixing with students and lecturers with all sorts of expertise, we never would have come up with this idea. We couldn’t be happier to win this funding, which will help us build the next stage of SLANT.”
Mark Neild, director of Runway and senior innovation lecturer said he felt proud to be working with talented innovators who were keen to push boundaries. He said: “Our expert judges uniformly complimented them on the excellent standard of their pitches.”
