Here's What Your Car Could Look Like In 2030

Nerval's Lobster writes: If you took your cubicle, four wheels, powerful AI, and brought them all together in unholy matrimony, their offspring might look something like the self-driving future car created by design consultants IDEO. That's not to say that every car on the road in 2030 will look like a mobile office, but technology could take driving to a place where a car's convenience and onboard software (not to mention smaller size) matter more than, say, speed or handling, especially as urban areas become denser and people potentially look at "driving time" as a time to get things done or relax as the car handles the majority of driving tasks. Then again, if old science-fiction movies have proven anything, it's that visions of automobile design thirty or fifty years down the road (pun intended) tend to be far, far different than the eventual reality. (Blade Runner, for example, posited that the skies above Los Angeles would swarm with flying cars by 2019.) So it's anyone's guess what you'll be driving a couple decades from now.

Comments

Re:As a side note, my own thoughts on future autos

[mjwx]

The car of the future will look and act much like the car of today. In the last 50 years the basic premise of the car hasn't changed, 4 wheels powered by an engine controlled by pedals and a wheel.

There hasn't been a radical design change to the car because there's no need for one. By 2030 we wont have fully autonomous cars either. So all cars will still have a steering wheel, pedals and a gear selector (even if it's just D P and R in EV's).

This company is trying to pass off a futuristic looking kitchen table as a "future vision" car whilst ignoring that their glass box as an office workspace has the following problems:
- Not aerodynamic.
- Top heavy.
- Glass has no protection from penetration.
- Cars wont be without manual controls in our lifetime (if nothing else, there will be people who like to drive).
- Has no space for energy storage or engines.
- Has no rear or forward visibility.
- Offers no privacy.
- Ugly as sin.

You can tell the company doesn't have a single engineer as they haven't even put in room for the basics like an engine and fuel tank/battery and dont seem to get that people aren't exhibitionists who like driving around in glass booths let alone considered the effects of inertia on items you place on the table.