The Amazing Car of the Future

This New Year’s new ideas include re-envisioning the car of the future. Take, for example, Dwell Magazine’s profile of the car of 2040 imagined by San Francisco designers Mike Simonian and Maaike Evers. Called the Autonomobile or ATNMBL, Car 2040 zooms past current envisioning around the computerized self-driving car to show the possibilities when cars without handheld control are trustworthy enough that the focus can shift away from “building a car around the idea of a driver” to building it “around all of the passengers.” This means, the designers say, changing to something that’s essentially living space.” Presuming that this living space object will continue to share infrastructure with piloted vehicles, its scale and proportions remain similar to today’s automobiles, but the similarities end there.

Essentially ATNMBL is a pod with no clear differentiation between the front and the back. The interior, revealed through floor-to-ceiling windows and based on studies of how people almost universally inhabit domestic spaces, contains a wraparound modular couch, a coffee table and a pop-up screen for displaying maps, menus, and entertainment. The power train is electric assisted by a solar panel. Navigation is driverless and voice activated. It is, says Dwell Magazine, “more like… an up market condo than …a new ride.” To see the ATNMBL and to hear Mike Simonian and Maaike Evers describe the genesis of their idea and their approach to developing it go to www.dwell.com/car2040. “This,” says Maaike Evers, “is the car I hope for by the time I’m 80.”

Other reports— Nicolas Van Praet’s “Future Car” in the Dec 31 issue of the Financial Post—quoteGM's former top executive in Russia, now a consultant based in Michigan: "The era of technology in vehicles hasn't even come close to its high point yet," says Warren Browne. While more changes are coming to the materials from which cars are made and to the design and powering of engines, most seem to agree that the future is all about mobile communications technology.

Stephen Beatty, managing director of Toyota Canada, says the “ultimate aim is to move from the car as autonomous tank (a heavy vehicle protecting passengers and operating independently of other vehicles) to the car as a sort of communal calculator (avoiding trouble in the first place by talking to other cars and knowing where it is in relation to them).”

Beyond refining these communications technologies is the challenge of responding to the upcoming demographic shift that will see, sometime in the next decade, the world's population aged 65 and older for the first time outnumbering children under five. Many seniors remain in good health and will want to continue driving. The new communication and self-driving technologies would seem to be ideally suited to meeting the challenge of keeping senior drivers safe and independently mobile.

But the transitioning won’t be easy. As Mr. Beatty says, "You don't want dumb cars mixing with intelligent cars. That's…a recipe for unintended things to happen. …Systems [will have to be introduced] over time, making cars smarter and smarter until…this new breed of vehicle takes over."

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