Slashdot Mirror
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.
Blade Runner, for example, posited that the skies above Los Angeles would swarm with flying cars by 2019.
It's only 2014. There's still 5 years. Get to work, everyone!
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
No. a flying car would offer way too much freedom for the plebes. There's no way the totalitarians in power would allow this.
The last photo of all the cubicle-cars in a warehouse is pretty amusing. If you install a toilet and a bed in these things, you can just put food in and get work out - no need to let your workers "go home" or anything else that could compromise productivity - just keep them locked in their transparent cells and put them wherever you need them. Seriously, how can he look at his design and not think of prisons?
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
I would think that the office of the future would consist of people working from home and connecting to VR environments. The only reason why people still go into work is because the boss requires a presence and it aids in ad-hoc communications. If you can accomplish the same thing through VR (i.e. walk around the office, stop at the water cooler, catch side conversations, etc.) then most information workers (those that don't require interaction with physical objects) can simply work from home and pocket the transportation savings. Plus, it would ease road congestion.
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It looks like a black rectangle to me. Maybe their web page is just fucked up.
Didn't miss anything. I got as far as the first slide. Or maybe it's their site web page. Whatever it is, it is quite incomprehensible. I don't know what my car will look like in 15 years -- assuming I'm still alive and still have a car. But I'm virtually certain that these dudes will have no role whatsoever in it's design and implementation.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
It also deals with the parking issue. If you don't have to walk to / from parking then it doesn't matter if it's inconveniently far from where you need to go. So you can reclaim urban space. Also, automated driving would be a big time saver in many ways - for example, letting the car drive the kids to school or things of that nature. It'd also greatly facilitate shopping services - aka, if you want to buy a stack of plywood from a hardware, it's not like the store has to pay a courier to ship it to you, they just have to load it into the empty pickup truck. Rapid end-to-end personal delivery of goods would be expected to skyrocket. I'd expect that tiny automated delivery vehicles would then become common to meet the needs of small deliveries. Yes, there would be more vehicles on the move, but they'll be able to be on the move much more efficiently, with close convoying significantly increasing road throughput and decreasing aerodynamic drag. When all traffic is automated on public roads, you can even have roads automatically reconfigure themselves, with most roads being one-way but that way changing in accordance with need.
People will still own cars. Because you can't store things in other people's cars, you don't know if someone else's car will be beat to heck or smell bad or whatnot, etc, plus the certainty that you can have a vehicle that meets your needs on call right when you need it. But it'll be more of a luxury than it is today, not so much of a necessity. Also, people are still going to want to drive - for fun. Just like people boat for fun and fly for fun - lots of people quite simply enjoy driving and that's not just going to suddenly change. But this will come into conflict with everyone else's needs. The end result will vary from road to road, with most busy urban roads automatic-only but many rural roads, especially scenic ones allowing mixed traffic. However, the more automated traffic there is on the roads, the more one expects non-automated traffic to have to "play by the rules" - for example, in-vehicle transponders to help the automated vehicles know exactly what you're doing, potentially automated overrides if you try to do something crazy that would put automated drivers in undue risk, etc. People driving for fun aren't going to be allowed to endanger people going about their everyday lives any more than pilots on a joy ride are allowed to.
These things are just the logical evolution of the transportation system should self-driving vehicles prove themselves.
Trick People Into Clicking Your Headline With This One Weird Trick!
But that IS the car of the future. Fully automated, but due to bugs it never shows up to give you a ride.
Trick People Into Clicking Your Headline With This One Weird Trick!
"Unfortunately, Rachel's maneuver placed the car in the intersection, going the wrong way. Her sudden appearance in the cross-lanes caused cars to veer in all three dimensions and windshields in at least a half dozen cars turned blue as the auto-pilots went into spastic fault-mode."
from "Let's Go to Prague!", by John Ringo.
In the Honorverse timeline, this is about 4020 AD.
Yeah, there's a lot of potentially great outcomes.
When I worked downtown I generally drove, because the nearest trainstation was driving distance (5-10 minutes by car), and parking there plus taking the train cost as much or more than just driving downtown.
But if the car could drop me off at the station and go home again, that might make sense to me.
But -- its not all sunshine and rainbows. How do I get home -- its quite a bit more complicated for the car to pick me up, especially at rush hour with thousands of other people doing the same thing.
And even though its an self-driving car, driving home empty after dropping me off is a much greater challenge. What if there is a road closure or accident and police are directing traffic.
When I was in the car, the car could pull over and say "Hey, I need some help for just a minute." -- but it can't do that if its empty.
That nixes dropping the kids off at school. Unmanned Package delivery. Well... not nixes... but it pushes it much further into the future I think.
I'm also not quite sure how unmanned courier trucks would work. The courier does more than just drive. He's also the gatekeeper to the packages, collects signatures, provides a level of security by just *being* there.
If the truck is unmanned anyone can just walk up to it and rob it blind. If its moving, they just need someone to step into the road to bring it to a halt. Sure trucks can be hijacked and robbed now... but theres always an element of unpredictability and risk since a human driver is present. But robbing an unmanned vehicle? It will always behave predictably and safely. We're going to have to think hard about security.
And how does even the intended recipient get their package and just their package. Can you imagine being called down by the truck, it flips its back door open, and you root around in it for your package... that's asking for all kinds of trouble.
Sure there are solutions, individual locked compartments, or some other system... but then that will dramatically reduce the overall delivery capacity of the vehicle.
I don't think its going to be a driverless car utopia; and certainly not by 2030. But changes are definitely coming.