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Vehicles of Tomorrow?
Human Factors Guy writes "We've seen here before car manufacturers putting more and more technology into cars, but what are the cars of tomorrow going to look like? Driver monitoring through head and eye tracking (which Volvo is already
implementing), Adaptive
Cruise Control systems, maybe even pedestrian recognition systems. With
cars becoming more like semi-intelligent robots every year, what do /. readers think will and won't make it?"
I have used this a lot while driving on long trips and I totally love it. It takes a bit getting used to letting the car do the braking, but once you get used to it, you wonder what you ever did without it before.
So to answer your question, what will cars of the future look like, I would say the Infiniti FX35 is a good start...
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
I don't know how much the car itself will change from a design sense (if that's what is meant by 'look like'), and I'm not sure how much the act of driving a car will change.
It does seem that there is a trend toward all these 'driver aid' tools, like GPS systems and ubiquitous Big Brother-like organizations that can control your car and track you. I do think, therefore, that the act of driving is going to be considerably less free, as an experience.
The real change will be under the hood, as Peak Oil passes, and the petroleum supplies begin to dwindle rather than grow (there are currently zero large oil fields set to come online in 2008, and only one in 2007, so it might be here faster than we think). I'd expect, therefore, that cars will become a luxury commodity once again, as the cost of powering them starts to become prohibitively expensive.
As this happens, there will likely be another trend in the 2010s similar to the 1980s, when there was a premium placed on economy, rather than size, because if the price of gas balloons in the 2010s to something more like $5-$7 a gallon, as some in the oil industry predict, it means saving a 10 MPG increase in economy can make a dig difference to the TCO of an automobile.
gameDB
yes
the 8 footer works best for this.
it's also pretty easy to rent a truck- if absolutely neccessary.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
The biggest change I can imagine is when drive-by-wire will be fully implemented. This means among other things that steering will no longer will be done mechanically. This will change the interior or cars dramatically, see here and here.
Agreed, except for automatic ignition, automatic transmission, power steering, power brakes, power roofs, power locks, airbags, traction control, running lights, headlights period, huge leaps in aerodynamics and materials, production economics, component lifespans, hybrid vehicles, and associated technologies (ultracapacitors, higher energy/power density batteries, etc), and a dozen other things I can't think of off the top of my head, nothing has really changed.
There's only one thing I hate about Halloween, which is...
At least here in Europe, we see the signs of the future cars today, and I hate it. All trends seem to converge to make traffic laws self-enforcing like laws of nature.
Want to drive too fast - sorry, the car won't allow you.
Want to park where you shouldn't - the automatically request a parking ticket for you.
The pieces for this total traffic control are already here today. A few examples:
We already have black boxes for cars. Those will see wide adoptions as soon as the insurance companies give rebates for having them installed. For them it makes sense, as it provides better data about accidents. No more fibbing how fast you were.
We already have active on-board-units toll-collection for highway and automatic verification of the box is present. At the moment, it's only for trucks on highways here in Austria, but the system is still young.
We already have working number plate scanner which tag entry ond exit time of cars on a road section and generates automatically speeding tickets if the average speed is too high.
A lot of cars already have GPS navigation to know where they are. Some of those have online updates for traffic jams and other up-to-date news. I can imagine some of them even can tell you today if you're driving too fast.
The engine-management software of all sports cars in Europe won't allow you to exceed 250 km/h, even if the car could.
Tamper-prevention software is in wide use and mostly works if used together with verification. Think about the XBox.
Now put all those ingredients in a big bowl, add a healthy dose of total-control-freaks in burocracies, bake for 10 years with insurance and motor-tax incentives and you get self-enforcing traffic laws.
The car will know where it is and what the speed limits are. The car will make sure for you, that you stay a good citizen via the motor management. The car will know how big the distance to the front car is and will make sure you keep a healthy distance.
Now why not rip the little dictator out of your car? Your car will have to identify itself to the autorities for toll collection on the most travelled roads. While doing that, it's very easy to verify that an untampered control-unit works in the car. If not, they have your license plate from the traffic camera.
All in all, for most purposes it won't be possible to escape. Due to the numerous checkpoints, the recognition-rate doesn't even have to be perfect. 80 to 90 percent is good enough.
Why develop auto-pilots if it's so easy to make the life of the drivers miserable.
I can't wait until Stirling engines become popular, either for cars or just home electrical power. Basically, they're external combustion engines that run off any heat difference; a furnace, a paraboloidal solar collector, whatever.
It seems like about once a year, I read a report somewhere like PopSci that someone's finally figured out how to make the concept workable for commercial purposes - even though Stirling engines were used very successfully in rural areas in the 1800s!. Yet somehow, every startup just disappears off the face of the earth afterwards for no apparent reason. Coincidence... or conspiracy?
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