Auto Trends

The Da Vinci Institute has a very interesting article on the future of transportation. They suggest the possibility of self automated flying transportation to begin taking over our current ground transportation systems as early as 2015. While this will certainly take some time to get the consumer used to these changes, this could mean the end of the feel of the open road within the next couple decades.

To many enthusiasts this should be a scary thought indeed. But what is even scarier is things have already gradually begun to change, and have done so without many people even noticing. Many vehicles have GPS systems which could theoretically tell anyone where we are at a given time. Some car dealers are placing devices that can shut off our cars when payments haven’t been received. Today we have cars that self-adjust to compensate for our driving habits, park themselves, and tell you when you’re driving poorly.

It is not many more steps that we will become idle passengers sitting in our own vehicles and allowing it to chauffeur us. While some may think of this as a nice convenience, others would see it as a violation of our freedom. The key to this successful transition will depend on the governments ability to convince the consumer that they have the same freedoms and possibly even more.

Their strategy would probably fall along the lines of children and elderly who are not currently able to travel in vehicles alone without a license, would now be able to. And accidents caused by human error would now be eliminated.

By the year 2050, these vehicles would become perfected with speed and efficiency and eventually the other side of the world would become like walking across the street to visit a neighbor. At this point they speculate the need for a unified government since people will no longer be tied to one nation.

On the other side of this speculation is a whole other group of thought that claims personal flying machines are a futuristic dream that will be too complex to systematize safely for decades and maybe even a century to come. There is the complexity of the vehicles themselves, the training necessary to run them, noise pollution, traffic laws, and the ability to takeoff and land vertically.

These people see the year 2050 as having found more efficient frictionless hybrid vehicle, glowing roadways, and navigation convenience packages that continue to give the consumer freedom to maneuver their own vehicle to some degree.

The “real” truth probably resides somewhere in between these two sets of thoughts!