Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien
A bit beyond moving to electric, which I think will happen sooner than 2040, but I believe car ownership itself won't be around for long. Instead people will call self-driving cars and be assigned one from a fleet owned by Google/Apple/Uber etc which will complete their journey then zip off somewhere else. With these cars being active more than most cars are now the cost per trip could be far less than what we effectively pay now for ownership, fuel, maintenance and insurance.
The benefits are massive: Less space will be required for parking as we would have fewer cars and those not active could go to a remote place rather than near town centers etc.
It's much safer as these cars could go faster, react quicker and make fewer mistakes than humans do plus they could communicate with each other. Imagine all these cars being networked and able to make adjustments to their speed/mapping based on the load of other cars up ahead.
It would solve this problem of charging as you no longer worry about parking or re-fueling cars.
I think before too long it will seem crazy that humans spent large amounts of money to own cars which spent most of their time parked and were driven by humans with their slow reaction times and who used signals to communicate to each other about their intentions.
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Now there you see is what is much more likely to be the reality. We're currently being allowed to labour under the notion that we can continue to have the freedom and flexibility we currently enjoy with our cars by switching to electric vehicles but that can't be the case for the reasons I've given above.
Whether we agree with the negative environmental impact of traditional car ownership/usage or not, the real world effect of these changes to what have become fundamental freedoms needs to be made clear to the public.
Right now I'm wondering how happy people are going to be having to pack/unpack their 'auto' car with the stuff they need for work/leisure every day, possibly multiple times a day. I'm wondering how many disabled friendly 'auto' vehicles will be available or whether the disabled will just have to wait longer to get anywhere because the wheelchair friendly vehicles are in short supply. There's a whole long list of potential problems with all of this and given the stakes, i.e. global warming, that might be something we're going to have to accept but that doesn't alter the fact that this all needs to be thought properly through. 2040 seems like a very long way away but it's no time at all in which to fully address the considerable societal changes that this is going to involve. Of course there will be positives and there may be little choice but we need to be aware of and accept the negatives as well don't we?