I heard this on the radio the other day and thought I’d share - the speaker was saying that by the time his children are working adults (say 20 years), the above statement would have four things that would seem archaic to them.
I guessed three, can you think of them all?
[ul]
[li]I drove - that automated modes of transport, including the more widespread use of public forms of transport would become the norm.[/li][li]My car - 80% of cars are, on average, not driving on the roads. His point was that car sharing would become more & more common.[/li][li]To - with the rise of mobile and cloud computing, commuting would become a thing of the past.[/li][li]Work - the idea of having A job for ONE employer is already fading as many people freelance/work for themselves.[/li][/ul]
I don’t understand this “80% of cars are not driving on roads.” Well, then, where are they driving? Are you suggesting that “Where we’re going… we don’t need roads”? Is this person suggesting, rather, that 80% of people have cars, but do not drive them?
He’s saying that they don’t drive them literally all the time. For a typical work day, I drive about 40 minutes total - while the truck sits idle in the parking lot for 7 or 8 hours. Similarly with weekend driving, unless you’re taking lots of long trips.
This is one aspect of auto-driving cars which would be cool. You could have every member of the family using the same car to go to school or work, even if they leave at different times. Person A goes to work at 6AM, then sends the car home by itself so Person B can drive to work at 8AM. At 3PM, the car goes to Person A’s location to pick them up, and so on.
Using twice as much fuel in the process. Given that we are very likely to face an energy-poor future when oil reserves start running low i can’t see this happening.
I think there are a lot of things that will keep several of these things from happening. One of them is that, although cars may sit vacant 80% of those times, the 20% of the times when we need them are also the same times when others want to use them. This will put a severe damper on any types of widespread car-sharing initiatives in the neat future. Almost no one wants to use a car at 3:00 AM Tuesday, but a whole lot of people want to use it at 7:30 AM Wednesday, or 7:00 PM Saturday, etc.
Okay, without looking at the spoiler or reading any of the thread beyond the OP, I’ll give it a shot.
[ol]
[li]“I drove” will be anachronistic because cars will drive themselves.[/li][li]“My car” may be somewhat anachronistic because a lot less people will own cars. They’ll either ride public transportation or they will use some kind of publicly available cars using schemes similar to current Bicycle Sharing Systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_sharing_system[/li][li]“To work” may be anachronistic because large numbers of people won’t even go to work, they’ll telecommute.[/li][li]The only thing I can think of for the fourth anachronism would be that the car would be flown rather than driven.[/li][/ol]
I’m not going to claim that I believe all of these things will be true in twenty years. I’m especially (extremely) skeptical of number 4, for example. But I think these are the types of answers they were probably looking for.
Probably not. If that’s how a self-navigating car comes to be used, cars will shrink accordingly. In fact, your car might make entire round trips without you: you order groceries online, send your car to pick them up and bring them back, with the aid of someone at the grocery store whose phone tells him that grocery order #572 goes in the green Subaru with Virginia plates XYZ-123.
I think 20 years is optimistic for self-driving cars becoming the norm; I’m hoping that they’re affordable in ~25 years, when I’d otherwise be approaching the point where I’ll have to turn in my driver’s license.
Whenever they do become the norm, though, I think there’ll be a rapid evolution to car-sharing being ubiquitous, first as a replacement for a family’s second and third cars, and ultimately for all its driving needs. A big limitation on the use of Zipcar out here in the suburbs is that there are few places with enough potential customers within walking distance to support a Zipcar. Self-navigation means that if I want a car for the next few hours, it doesn’t have to be stationed within walking distance; it can drive itself to my doorstep from several miles away.
Vehicles sized for one person may give our current stock of housing and roads a new lease on life as energy becomes more expensive.
As noted the ‘drop me off and then auto-drive home’ model doesn’t really work unless gas is cheap. But if you combine auto-drive with sharing, you get something different:
At 5:50AM a (pre-scheduled) car auto-drives from the neighborhood depot to Person A’s house, takes him to work, then to the depot nearest work to wait until someone nearby orders a car. At 8AM, a different car arrives from the local depot for person B, etc. Occasionally a car needs to auto drive from one depot to another to keep things balanced, but not for every trip.
I’m not saying this system is inevitable, or even likely, but it’s possible at least.
Unless a system like this is forced on the general public, it’ll go nowhere. By now, Americans were supposed to be using the metric system and not using paper money at all, remember?
Too many people are in love with their cars for this to be feasible. If open revolution is bandied about at the mere mention of gun control, I can’t imagine what would happen if the government would start talking about taking away people’s cars. That would be total warfare.