Urban commute is a pain: most trips are short and existing options just don't cut it. Cars are expensive / hard to park / stuck in traffic Buses are slow / unreliable / stuck in traffic Motorcycles are heavy / require a special license Bicycles are exhausting / range-limited / slow

In designing and building Fermi, the General Dynamics C4 Systems business unit was faced with a challenge: it needed to provide an environment that could support rigorous testing by multiple Fermi subsystem groups before the spacecraft hardware was available.