maki p

Driving may be cheap, but it’s fatiguing, blocks you from doing anything else with your time, and is dangerous — Why do we put up with it?

I am all in favour of sporting or recreational driving — as long as it’s on a closed track separate from roads where pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers are trying to get from A to B without injury, death, or delay. But it’d be a very good thing indeed if we could decouple the cultural associations of escape, romance, and autonomy from our transport vehicles. And it’d be an even better thing indeed if nobody in possession of a car was forced to operate the controls and pay attention to the roads if they didn’t want to.

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Longer term (I suspect a generation after that point) we’ll begin to see pressure to ban humans from driving on the public roads. By this point, the cost of electronics required to upgrade a vehicle to self-driving capability will have fallen so much that it’s ubiquitous, even in the developing world.

By around 2050, I’m fairly sure that the human-driven automobile will be a specialised race-track toy

Privately owned cars will exist, but will function more like a chauffeur-driven limo. They won’t even need to be parked by your house; whistle and it’ll come when you need it. Poor folks won’t have their own car, they’ll just have fractional reserve part-ownership of a vehicle — after all, even at peak rush hour, 95% of the UK vehicle fleet is parked up; we don’t need one car per person, we just need available wheels whenever we want to go somewhere. By 2110, I figure driving a manually-controlled car around will be looked on the way we’d look on someone carrying a sword in public; at best it’s a weird and archaic affectation, and at worst — call the police!

Charles Stross extrapolates on car use in the short and longterm future

(emphasis added)

— 7 months ago
#driving  #cars  #automotive  #transport  #future  #public transport