Have you ever thought about how much fun it would be to go out on a car trip? In my younger days, I did just that, I drove sports cars and motorcycles through canyons, and went on road trips just for the hell of it. Today, fuel costs, time restrictions, traffic and all those traffic rules take all the fun out of it. In the future, real drivers may be a thing of the past, we will all be required to drive everywhere or travel everywhere (in flying cars) by robotic systems, in an autonomous vehicle.
In fact, we may not own a car at all, we will even call a car (flying car) when we need to travel. Let’s talk, because there are people who are busy planning this future as we speak.
In fact, the International Transport Forum at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development recently released an interesting research paper titled; “Urban Mobility System Upgrade – How Self-Driving Shared Cars Can Transform City Traffic,” the research predicted that a fully integrated autonomous transportation system in a large city would eliminate the need for 80% of street parking, moving everyone with only about 10% of the cars . Also, commuters will cover more miles but do so more efficiently, and daily work commutes will be easy and have little if no traffic in and out of major cities.
Of course, the study also suggests that as things change in the meantime, there will be challenges and this optimal efficiency wouldn’t be much better without autonomous transportation. But once fully incorporated, the benefits will be like day and night. We can already see some challenges, for example, a recent accident between a self-driving car and another car driven by a human driver in Nevada, and the car with the human driver turned out to be at fault.
As artificial intelligence improves, our self-driving cars will be safer, and people will claim it to prevent more than 20,000 motor vehicle deaths each year in the United States. Of course, giving away our cars, especially for us die-hard drivers who really love our cars and drive them, would be a tough sell. Some people will gladly give up control of a robotic car, just free up time to play on their personal tech device and save on stress. Imagine the chaos between us drivers and those, at least initially, wealthy independent car owners or Uber-type companies with fleets of self-driving cars ready and willing to take you anywhere you can afford it? Please consider all this and think about it.