Car Companies Now Competing to Build...Houses?

• May 2nd 2014

by Lark Turner

This is General Motors’ new container home, a 320-square-foot, two-bedroom made from 85 percent scrap materials, including Chevy Volt battery cases-turned-bird houses and planter boxes. The 40-foot-long home, according to a news release, will be built by GM and Detroit-based Michigan Urban Farming Initiative. A college student will spend a year in the house on an urban farm in Detroit to “demonstrate the effectiveness of repurposed materials on dwellings oriented toward urban agriculture.”

Weirdly, it turns out Honda and Toyota make homes too, and although theirs have a very different design, both are constructed with sustainability in mind. Toyota has been mass-producing homes for four decades now, according to Jalopnik, and began making them more sustainable around the time that the Prius debuted. The Toyota houses start at about $200,000.

In March, the automaker unveiled its “living laboratory” of “sustainable, zero-carbon living and personal mobility,” which will be based at UC-Davis, according to a news release. The house will produce more energy than it consumes, and a member of the UC-Davis community will get to test-drive it for a year, too — along with an electric Honda Fit.

Interested in a house that’ll really match your car? Here are a couple more renderings of the GM shipping container home to get you started:

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/car_companies_now_competing_to_build...houses/8438.