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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?"
has been around for over 100 years- it's called a bicycle
but they keep coming up with great improvements on the awesome machine.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I'm still waiting for foam to fill the car when you have an accident... Sandra is hot.
Improbablity drive powered space ships!
I like muppets.
This is for targeting...right?
Jon Bardin
Is that they'd get the turn signal thing fixed. Seems like 80% of the vehicles here in Seattle don't even have them.
I just wish that they will be powered by something, anything other than the internal combustion engine. It's time for something new. But then again, maybe you already knew that I feel that way.
Do not read this sig.
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.
Automated freeway cruising.
Honestly, the technology exists right now to automatically drive my car along a freeway. I could probably set this up today with a few thousand dollars in hardware and a lot of code. Self-driving car projects are incredibly expensive and not yet fully reliable because they try to use them in the city. This is an extremely difficult environment to deal with.
But a freeway is perfect. All you need are cameras to watch the lines on the road, radar (or more cameras) to watch for other vehicles and objects in the road, servos to actuate the car's controls and a computer to run it all. I've actually thought about designing such a system for my RV, since long trips in that thing are very taxing. I'd still have to sit in the driver's seat and keep an eye on things, but that's infinitely less stressful than the driving itself.
But this will never be a mainstream product in our society. Too many lawyers and other disinterested parties (such as insurance companies). We'll have flying cars before you can go down and buy a self-freeway-driving module.
Last summer, I saw a guy talking on a cel phone while riding a bike. What call is so bloody important that you can't pull over or take it later?
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
I for one want to welcome our new semi-intelligent robot car overlords...
(still beats the less than intelligent polititans..
once we're past the gimmicks we should see some improvements, but come on, that auto park option that Toyota presented last year feels like the latest update to curb feelers! I see cameras on the back bumper (already in some fancy cars) and cameras instead of rearview mirrors to be the most important; anything that doesn't force you to look away from the road will help.
CB$#%^&*!
free ipod and free gmail!
It will have pedals.
Seriously, decades ago pedal cars, not toys, were sold widely in Spain. They could easily average 25 mph and if you didn't have to go long distances (over 10 miles) were reasonable. Problem with many people is they're lazy and they want to take all their crap all over the place with them. There was even a design in the early 60's or late 50's of the car of tomorrow in Popular Science, which carried a spare car for zipping around in away from the collosal family mover (which actually puts the Hummer to shame.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Need a ride? Walk to the closest community car and touch the handle. The door opens, seats/mirrors/radio/temperature adjusts to your preferences and away you go.
At your destination, you get out of the car. Your account is debited the appropriate fare and you... just... walk... away (and into the next car you need).
idiot next to me who's eating cereal and reading the paper while driving ... all those types of folks can do that safely if we get robot cars!
They are already in robot cars. You need to upgrade.
Free XBox, PS2
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
If I could make one small request to the car making industry, it would be: Please do not dumb down driving.
Driving is a learned exercise that requires experience to become good at. The introduction of things like traction control, and anti-lock braking systems have caused much of the driving public to ignore time-tested techniques for maintaining control over a vehicle.
Case in point: A cousin of mine was recently endowed with a driver's license. However, nobody thought it necessary to tell him how in certain vehicles under certain conditions, pumping the brake pedal is necessary to stop. They assumed anything he drove would have anti-lock brakes.
Things like smart cruise control are going to make us become complacent about things like safe following distances and paying attention to the conditions ahead of the vehicle you are following.
Until we're ready to turn over 100% control to the robots (which shouldn't happen for a very long time), please make vehicles safer by encouraging driver experience, not by doing things for him/her.
What I'd like to see in the vehicles of tomorrow are better drivers.
Speak truth to power.
On the subject of "pedestrian recognition systems," I'm reminded of something my dad once said while trying to teach me to drive.
"When you feel a bump, stop."
At the time, he was referring to concrete parking separators, but I think it reflected a more general approach.
Can't you even manage a drive-by shooting without an aimbot?
Proper starting. Automobile engines are started all wrong. Cranking, compression, fuel, and spark all start at the same time. Oil pressure comes later. As a result, half of engine wear occurs during start. Many big engines (locomotives, marine diesels, some big tractors) are started properly - oil pressure first, then a few turns with compression released to oil up the cylinders, and finally combustion starts. Wear is much reduced.
Once 42-volt electrical systems become popular, and valve control goes electrical, we may see electric booster oil pumps and valve actuators. Once you can crank the engine with compression off and oil pressure up, you need a much smaller starting motor. The starting motor and alternator can then be combined.
A lot of progress has been made on this over the past couple of decades, and we have a couple more decades of progress to go before it's safe enough to use in the real world, but as soon as an autopilot is invented that drives better than the average human (especially under emergency conditions), there will be a large insurance break for using it. Shortly after this it will become the norm.
My money's on methanol or methane, as both can be stored as liquids (methanol more easily), and methanol can be burned in a conventional engine with a bit of tweaking (making the switch from internal combustion to electric engines much more graceful). You even have interesting hybrid options available, like an electric car with a gas turbine burning methane (or propane, which you can fill up with at gas stations now, making the switchover to _methane_ easier). Methane and methanol can both be synthesized directly from water, CO2, and electricity, meaning that they're suitable fuels for an electric vehicle infrastructure after fossil fuel supplies of them run out (and after we need more than we can get by reclaiming biological waste). We have lots of experience with moving hydrocarbon gases and volatile liquids around, so the transport infrastructure's already here. Methane and methanol have nowhere *near* the storage and handling problems hydrogen has.
It'll be interesting to see when the first point happens (I think it's pretty inevitable that it's going to). A methanol (or a methane) fuel system might or might not happen. If compact energy storage and vehicle efficiency get good enough, a direct electric scheme might work. However, most non-chemical methods of electric storage don't have high enough theoretical densities (even with nanotube-reinforced flywheels and induction rings), and a purely electric vehicle infrastructure is a lot harder to phase in gracefully. Alternatively, we might just keep improving our ability to harvest lower-grade and less-accessible hydrocarbon deposits, and push the fossil fuel problem far enough off that by the time the crunch hits, technology will be different enough to drastically alter the space of possible solutions.
Definitely interesting times ahead.
Unfortunately, emission standards are only going to get more strict in the coming years so unless the clean air technologies in diesels can keep up, we may not see many options on the market.
Automatic point assignment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here's an idea I had a couple years ago:
Put a liquid crystal display coating over the windshield that can selectively darken specific parts of it. Have a sensor outside the car facing forward that notes any super bright light sources like the sun or headlights at night. It also tracks where the face of the driver is and, if it determines a glare situation is occurring, does the geometry to find out exactly what part of the windshield is between their head and the light source and applies a tint at that one place. The person could still see that the light source was present, but it wouldn't blind them.
Try driving west in the evening as the sun is setting, and something like this starts to look pretty good.
I wish better instrumentation became ubiquitous. Every car should have an instantaneous and average MPG indication, tire pressure indicators (and self-inflators), oil pressure, and so forth. This would help improve fuel efficiency for the country, and help reduce fuel and maintenance costs for individuals.
-Better Fuel Economy
-Better sound systems
-Headlights that are bright but dont blind oncoming traffic
-Can run past 100,000 miles without major repairs
-Less rusting, even on newer cars
-And finally, the ability to work on them without the need for 3 different diagnostic machines that cost 10 grand each!
How well do the lane sensors work when you throw some snow on the road?
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
The automobiles of the future will look like trees, because, based on how little road building is taking place, they won't be able to move anyway. So they may as well look good sitting there.
Unless it has zero pollution and runs without petrol I don't see anything innovative.
Zero pollution and no petrol is not very realistic.
What I would like to see is a car that can "scale". By this, I mean that a car for 99.9% of its use is to transport one person and little to no extra payload. It would be cool to have a car that was about the size of an Insight, but it could expand with an extra motor and space to the size of an SUV. Yeah, I said SUV on slashdot in a positive context, so mod me down now.
It would be cool if this car had expandable, temporary compartments for payloads like groceries, and maybe even come with something like one of those roof luggage carriers.
It kills me that so many people buy a big car to drive back and forth to work so that they can have the big car the couple of times a year that they need it. I fall into this category, but my car is 13 years old, has over 180,000 miles on it, and it was free, and it works.
because my double decker 3-foot erector set wing just isn't big enough sometimes
add to that list:
brighter neon
louder steros
larger exhaust pipes
louder exhaust pipes
a wider range of stickers
bigger uglier rims... spinners and lights were a good start, but how about embedded video screens, or ultrashiny chrome that blinds other drivers?
more places to stick useless video screens (see above)
brighter, more obnoxious colors
larger body kits, with more of that panel-gap appearance that looks so good
did i miss anything?
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
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.
I thought for a second about how cool it would be to have my car turn wherever I looked, until I realized that the girls who like to jog around where I live would make this a dangerous technology.
Synergy is your friend
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...
It's probably worth mentioning again, as we discuss smarter cars, that insurance companies are declaring a car "totaled" more quickly these days, even with relatively minor structural damage, because the cost of replacing all of these electronic gizmos after an accident is adding signficantly to the typical repair cost. Reference, for example: http://csmonitor.com/2004/0419/p13s02-wmgn.html
So as we contemplate even smarter cars with even more electronics installed, even relatively minor accidents might result in a car being declared "totaled" and thereby increase insurance costs overall. Ironically, it may not be the purchase cost of the electronics that eventually constrains the smart-car market (particularly since smart electronics seem to get cheaper all the time), but rather the insurance considerations instead!
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
The idea is to get rid of the personal repulsion properties of the drivers.
What about implementing separation techniques (much like IFR flying) that would permit vehicles, first in specialty lanes and then later on the road at alrge, to operate safely at predetermined distances.
Together with reversible-direction lanes, we could save many of the billions of hours (how many human lifetimes is that) wasted sitting in traffic each year.
Rotary engines, over head cams, fuel injection, super/turbo chargers, active suspensions, disc brakes, and of course electronic stability packages too. But I want the vehicle of tomorrow to be like a f1 car of the early nineties, high rev v-10, traction control, active suspension, ABS, slick tires.
Seriously
Autopilot for Airplanes is relatively easy.
And if airplanes didn't require pilots, they would be more economical than cars, which need to stop and start to avoid hitting each other, which need very expensive roads, which tend to hit pedestrians at a frightful pace, and tend to run into each other - largely because roads are sort of an everlasting game of chicken.
Per mile travelled, airplanes are much safer.
Autopilot would prevent them running into skyscrapers, and actually reduce the threat - who wants to hijack a commuter plane with 30 gallons of fuel and 12 people?
So we convert to electric golfcarts to drive us to and from the community airdrome.
And save gas by sharing a better ride on a point to point nonstop mass transit.
AIK
Where the hell do you live? What kind of work do you do? 30 miles is a long bike ride. I found that about 20km is as much as I want to do on the way to work. (That takes about an hour.) I guess I'm lucky. I found work about a mile way from home and I live five minutes (walking) from a grocery store. When I move at the end of the month, I'm about 2.5 miles away from work and spitting distance to a grocery store.
My view's not optimistic; it's pragmatistic. It requires people to make serious sacrifices and lifestyle changes. It means a redesign of communities so you can live near your work and shop where you live. I don't think people are ready for the changes or willing to make the sacrifices required.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Hey, when comfort can be had without:
1) Destroying the ecosystem
2) Unnecessarily causing huge wars over scarce resources
3) Setting up an economy based on a non-renewable resource which is doomed to crash
then I'm all in favor of it. However, using fossil fuels to go everywhere is a short-sighted solution to an problem that can be solved without causing any of the problems like the three above.
So, yeah. If you don't wanna occasionally ride a bike or pedal a car, even though it's better for everyone on the entire planet, then you are lazy as well as selfish.
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
It's the next logical step. Then you have a car which can drive itself...
P RT/
But if cars can drive themselves it doesn't really make sense that everyone has one, after all, it isn't really a good use of resources to have a car or three sitting idle in office/mall garages for an individual when it can be off transporting your children to school and your wife to the shops or her own job. There's no longer a need for a 3 car family, you simply call the car and tell it when and where you want to be picked up. Why spend 80 grand on multiple cars when you can spend 30 grand on one car and the other 50 on something more enjoyable?
But wait, we can take this a step further, why limit it just to private transport, the same applies to public transport. Why own a car at all when you can simply call an autotaxi and it'll pick you up when and where you want and deliver you when and where you want. Instead of investing 80 grand in hardware which depreciates by 30% the second it rolls out of the showroom and then continues to cost you 2 grand a year in fuel, servicing and insurance. Simply call an autocab.
Course there's still the problem of traffic, just because most of the cars are driven automatically doesn't reduce the numbers on the road and there are still going to be normally driven cars on the road so you're still going to get stuck in traffic jams during rush hour. You could take the public autotaxis off the road and put them on separate raised "roads" which allows full computer control and which bypass the normal roads, thereby bypassing the traffic jams.
e.g.
http://www.skywebexpress.com/
and
http://www.atsltd.co.uk/
and
http://www.yorkprt.com/
and
http://www.austrans.com/
The concept is called Personal Rapid Transit and is basically a packet based mass transit system. It's perfectly possible to implement today.
More info:
http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/
http://www.cprt.org/
http://www.acprt.org/
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.