Autonomous Anonymous Automobiles: Why cars are about to change forever

As a self-confessed petrol-head (or gear-head, or car nut…the names are so many), it’s an intriguing time in the world. Our cars have become ever more sophisticated, faster, more powerful and more comfortable, and at times it can seem like society’s automotive love affair has never been stronger .

On the other hand, there are plenty of people hoping that the age of the personal car will come to an end sooner rather than later, and not without good reason. Light motor vehicles are one of the biggest sources of pollution worldwide, a staggering 1.2 million are killed in road accidents every year, and let’s not even get started on the years of our lives we waste in traffic jams.

The thing is though, that all signs point to a coming seismic shift that could transform the automobile as we know it.

Sign 1: Self-driving Technology

Cars that drive themselves have been part of our collective culture for decades. Is there anyone who DIDN’T love Herbie , or the impossibly cool K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider? Sadly, for years they remained largely fictional (even while airplanes were learning to pretty much fly themselves) and even recent experiments from Google and others seemed to be closer to this , or this , than what we really wanted .

That’s all changed now though. While Tesla stole the lead and the headlines with its ( somewhat ambitiously named ) Autopilot system launched late 2015, just about every car company has jumped onto the autonomous car bandwagon (or should that just be autonomous wagon?) with self-driving systems either about to hit the road , or in development .

There’s good reasons too — self driving cars are certain to eventually be much safer on the roads than human drivers (to remove all doubt, play this charming little game). In fact, a recent study showed that even limited self-driving capabilities reduced potential accidents by 40  percent, and those systems are getting better every day, as evidenced by this Tesla that predicted an accident before it happened.

When you take the safety aspects and add in the potential for commuters to reclaim some of their millions of hours of lost time , self driving cars seem not just an inevitability, but a development that we should be cheering on with all our hearts.

Sign 2: Ride Sharing

If the autonomous car revolution kept us waiting far too long, the rise of ride-sharing (specifically technology-based solutions like Uber and Ola) seemed to happen without warning. There are still plenty of places that haven’t been affected (mostly the rural and less-population dense areas), but it seems that in nearly every urban centre, the transformation has been sudden and complete. Taxis and autos are out — everyone is ‘uber-ing’ it (you know you’re part of the establishment when your company becomes a verb).

While the erstwhile taxi companies and auto-wallahs look on in shock ( and anger ), the shift is far more wide-ranging. In the biggest cities in the world, owning a car was already an expensive, inconvenient hassle, but still sometimes necessary. Ride-sharing potentially removes that ‘necessary’ aspect completely. Why bother buying and maintaining a car you use only a few times a month (or year) when you can simply summon one whenever you need it. Not coincidentally, millennials haven’t found car-ownership to be nearly as desirable as generations past, even in the car-adoring USA.

As populations get more urban all over the world, and ride-sharing gets more and more ubiquitous, there’s no reason for that trend to change soon (or ever). Combine ride-sharing and self driving, as Uber has already done , and we could quickly arrive at a point where on-demand personal transportation can be solved by swarms of robocars that patrol our streets non-stop, migrating en-masse through the day to satisfy shifting demand. This could drastically reduce the overall number of vehicles needed (one study found that all 14,000 of New York’s taxis could be replaced by just 3,000 ride-sharing cars ) and let cities reclaim the huge tracts of land used for parking and devote them to better use.

The potential of self-driving, ride sharing vehicles has been enough for some to pronounce the end of car ownership , but let’s take a quick look at one other automotive game-changer as well.

Sign 3: Electric  

The shift from petroleum powered cars to alternative fuels is the change that has been the longest in the making, but strangely, it may still be quite far away. One big reason for that has been the stubborn lack of improvement in battery technology, and ‘range anxiety’ coupled with significantly higher car prices has been enough to give many buyers second thoughts. Even so, electric cars are steadily on the rise , and new models from Tesla and GM could just be the ones that finally find acceptance in the mass-market.

Doing away with a conventional drivetrain could allow for mass market cars to look, and be built, very differently from what we’re used to . Electric motors are more compact, and while batteries will still need a lot of space, it’s much easier to arrange them in a way to get the most usable space out of a vehicle. Expect an almost TARDIS-like situation, with the inside being a lot bigger than you’d expect.

Also, assuming that battery tech doesn’t take a great leap forward, we might start finding interesting workarounds for long distance travel, especially taking into account ride-sharing and self-driving technologies. For example, one solution could be a relay type of system where you’re whisked from one highway stop to another, at which point you switch cars and carry on, while the one you arrived in charges up for the next user. Apparently, all roads do lead to Rome .

A Fork in the Road

So where does that leave us gear-heads and our beloved automobiles? It’s possible we’re facing the end of the personal car, and therefore, the end of cars designed to sell to us on the basis of thrill or sex appeal. After all, when you’re using a car only for the sake of point to point transport, why would you pay any more attention to its design than you would to an airliner. You don’t care about what shape it is — you care about the comfortable seats, the space you have and other practical concerns.

Car designs might still be sleek and even aesthetically appealing, but they would do so as a by-product of being as aerodynamic and efficient as possible. ‘Sexy boxes’ in fact, designed to be a comfortable room on wheels that you simply get into when you want to go somewhere (and Hyundai agrees) .

A room on wheels is not the kind of term to warm a car lover’s heart. But…there could be hope. There could be an upside to the end of the everyday automobile. It’s poetic in a way — horses were removed from their duties of transportation to become a preserve of ceremonies and enthusiasts, and now, their replacements could share the same fate .

You see, these same shifts could actually be a way to free the personal car to be the very thing that enthusiasts delight in — a machine to captivate and thrill. Imagine the potential of a world in which the only people who drive are the ones that really, really love to. Most cars today are a bundle of compromises, even the ones that handle those compromises really well .

But if your everyday transport is already sorted out, if you don’t have to worry about being practical, you’re free to spend your money on something you can actually enjoy wholeheartedly, whether that’s some kind of extreme track-day go-kart ( like this one ), or a piece of rolling artwork .

That could be the future of the car — an automotive species divided in two à la HG Wells. Pristine, comfortable transport bubbles, and raw visceral speed demons. It’s probably the best a gear head can hope for right now. Well, either that or we keep our fingers crossed for flying cars to get here soon.