The future of cars

The future of road transportation has become clear to me in recent weeks. Before that, it all seemed very fuzzy how things might unfurl. Now I would bet on the following three phases occurring.

There are already cars on the market - from VWs to Toyotas - that can park themselves. Drivers for the first time are experiencing the sensations of taking their hands off the steering wheel and watching it whirl around as the car gently reverses into a slot. This is the thin end of a much bigger wedge.

Mercedes (and doubtless other manufacturers) are messing about with cars which can overtake by themselves. The US military is more ambitious. Truck drivers are an easy target in Afghanistan, so the US army would prefer deliveries to be done by computer-controlled, expendable, vehicles. No human required.

Phase One
This will see individual cities wired with suitable infrastructure and cars will start operating within a grid - where vehicles are moved around by a central traffic control system . Each car becomes like a train on the rail network. There are just a lot more of them than trains - and more ‘tracks’.

Cars would still look much the same – with steering wheels and gear-sticks and the rest. But when embarking on a journey within a metropolitan ‘grid’, the driver turns on the engine, says where they want to go and then...presses a button handing over authority to the Metropolitan Traffic Control.

The car is now guided over the most efficient route using SatNav, sensors on the car and other sensors stationed along the roads. Such devices could start cropping up in cats-eyes, lampposts and the like.

On the outskirts of urban areas, control is handed back to the driver – who drives onwards just as they would today.

Another zone of automation will occur when joining the motorway networks, with cars bunching together to form road-trains.

I would hazard that this phase could last 30 years.

Phase Two
Automation becomes trickier and more expensive as one moves outside towns, cities and motorways and into the lower-density rural areas. But slowly, as technology improves, larger and larger parts of the country will get covered by a patchwork of ‘grids’. Taking another wild stab at timeframes, let’s say it takes another 30 years to cover the whole UK - creating finally a single national motor grid.

Phase Three
It is only now we can dispense with the need to drive cars. Steering wheels are finally redundant and cars as we know them disappear - replaced by driverless pods that zip around pretty-much anywhere you’d want them to.

Is this fanciful? Not when you look at the sky. In some ways what I’ve described is similar to progression of what is happening in the more technically-advanced arena of aerospace.

Until the 1950s, flying aircraft was essentially a manual affair. But since then, increasing parts of the flightpath have been taken care of by the autopilot and Air Traffic Control. With unmanned drones routinely whizzing about over Afghanistan, it is clear that autopilots can do the job start to finish: from takeoff to landing. While passengers wouldn’t take to pilotless aircraft just yet, one suspects it is only a matter of time before the human is reduced to keeping a weather eye on an automated process, rather than running the show. And so it will be with cars.

Picture credit: cunningba (car from Woody Allen's film Sleeper)
A third post will examine the power sources propelling cars