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Transportation

Here's What Your Car Could Look Like In 2030 144

Posted by Soulskill from the just-make-sure-there's-room-for-a-cot dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes: If you took your cubicle, four wheels, powerful AI, and brought them all together in unholy matrimony, their offspring might look something like the self-driving future car created by design consultants IDEO. That's not to say that every car on the road in 2030 will look like a mobile office, but technology could take driving to a place where a car's convenience and onboard software (not to mention smaller size) matter more than, say, speed or handling, especially as urban areas become denser and people potentially look at "driving time" as a time to get things done or relax as the car handles the majority of driving tasks. Then again, if old science-fiction movies have proven anything, it's that visions of automobile design thirty or fifty years down the road (pun intended) tend to be far, far different than the eventual reality. (Blade Runner, for example, posited that the skies above Los Angeles would swarm with flying cars by 2019.) So it's anyone's guess what you'll be driving a couple decades from now.
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Here's What Your Car Could Look Like In 2030 More

Here's What Your Car Could Look Like In 2030

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  • car (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Everything will still look the same except they'll all be wired to the internet so every place you go to will be tracked, in the name of safety

    • Yes, the politicians will feel really safe.

    • because it has the potential to make "transportation service" a commodity, and rescue suburbia from rising fuel costs. If you don't have to pay for a driver, then taxi service essentially becomes short-term car rental. And if your main expenditure is the fuel/energy to run errands, then it would be very easy to live without a car, and probably cheaper too.

      Let's just hope the "killer app" status doesn't refer to its safety record.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Rei ( 128717 )

        It also deals with the parking issue. If you don't have to walk to / from parking then it doesn't matter if it's inconveniently far from where you need to go. So you can reclaim urban space. Also, automated driving would be a big time saver in many ways - for example, letting the car drive the kids to school or things of that nature. It'd also greatly facilitate shopping services - aka, if you want to buy a stack of plywood from a hardware, it's not like the store has to pay a courier to ship it to you, th

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by vux984 ( 928602 )

          Yeah, there's a lot of potentially great outcomes.

          When I worked downtown I generally drove, because the nearest trainstation was driving distance (5-10 minutes by car), and parking there plus taking the train cost as much or more than just driving downtown.

          But if the car could drop me off at the station and go home again, that might make sense to me.

          But -- its not all sunshine and rainbows. How do I get home -- its quite a bit more complicated for the car to pick me up, especially at rush hour with thousand

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bondsbw ( 888959 )

        As for safety, rear-facing seats are much safer in the event of a crash, even for adults. I hope they become mainstream with the invention of self-driving cars. There really would be no need for passengers to see the road.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by stooo ( 2202012 )

      Here's What Your Car Could Look Like In 2030 :

      http://www.extravaganzi.com/wp... [extravaganzi.com]

    • Everything will still look the same except they'll all be wired to the internet so every place you go to will be tracked, in the name of safety

      Everything will look the same, but be a half a degree warmer.

  • You'd think a 'future vision' company would know better than to provide some sort of brochure site that acts and works as poorly as this one does. Navigating through this was like trying to play a first person shooter using chopsticks to control the keyboard and mouse.

    • To combat the growing congestion and to meet ever-more-stringent environmental concerns (both for the sake of the environment and because it makes a place nicer), we'll block off most of the high density cities to standard auto traffic, and instead a city (or licensed companies) will maintain a fleet of local-only self-driving cars that work as taxis along side the few human-operated larger delivery vehicles. Whatever the form of ubiquitous computing is around (cell phones, etc) will allow on demand pickup

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by epyT-R ( 613989 )

        Until freedoms and due process rights are restored, along with new statues protecting privacy, remote controlled cars (and homes and..) will only end badly.

      • Re:As a side note, my own thoughts on future autos (Score:4, Insightful)

        by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @03:08AM (#48455547)
        The car of the future will look and act much like the car of today. In the last 50 years the basic premise of the car hasn't changed, 4 wheels powered by an engine controlled by pedals and a wheel.

        There hasn't been a radical design change to the car because there's no need for one. By 2030 we wont have fully autonomous cars either. So all cars will still have a steering wheel, pedals and a gear selector (even if it's just D P and R in EV's).

        This company is trying to pass off a futuristic looking kitchen table as a "future vision" car whilst ignoring that their glass box as an office workspace has the following problems:
        - Not aerodynamic.
        - Top heavy.
        - Glass has no protection from penetration.
        - Cars wont be without manual controls in our lifetime (if nothing else, there will be people who like to drive).
        - Has no space for energy storage or engines.
        - Has no rear or forward visibility.
        - Offers no privacy.
        - Ugly as sin.

        You can tell the company doesn't have a single engineer as they haven't even put in room for the basics like an engine and fuel tank/battery and dont seem to get that people aren't exhibitionists who like driving around in glass booths let alone considered the effects of inertia on items you place on the table.

        • How about starting with practical needs instead of futurist personal office on wheels crap. In most areas we need more trains and large buses that get people from suburbs to cities and between cities. Then we could use a large number of mid sized trolleys or shuttles to get people from the stations to their destinations. Individual rental vehicles could be available at the stations as needed to increase the flexibility of the system. We have tens of thousands of drivers traveling individually in large citi

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by migloo ( 671559 )
        I do not agree.
        Extrapolating the current situation, my best guess for 2030 is that cars will very much look like horse carriages.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rei ( 128717 )

        Here's the parts of your post that make no sense.

        "city (or licensed companies) will maintain"

        Why on earth would individuals not be allowed to also own personal self-driving cars? Why can a car not have two modes of operation, self-driving in self-driving areas and manual in other areas, if the user so wants? Why would everyone be just fine with not being allowed to have a personal vehicle that they can leave their stuff in between rides, meets their personal style preferences and transportation requirements

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      You'd think a 'future vision' company would know better than to provide some sort of brochure site that acts and works as poorly as this one does. Navigating through this was like trying to play a first person shooter using chopsticks to control the keyboard and mouse.

      Hold on there.

      These are "design and innovation professionals" not engineers. You cant expect them to have the web site working fluidly and intuitively. They've got to make sure the kerning is perfect and the corners are rounded just right.

      It's not their fault you dont understand their future vision based communication sphere.

  • I think a safer bet would be to predict that by 2030, the Average American, no longer able to afford a home or pay exorbitant rents in the major Metro Areas will turn to Self Driving RVs that feature a small smart car or scooter module for zipping around town to serve as their mode of transportation, mobile office and domicile

    • By 2030, the average American will be driving a car like Sam Lowry drove in Brazil. Apartments will look Lowry's also.

  • Because nothing says "the future" like having to run scripts to see anything on their page.

    Dense urban grids. Self-driving vehicles. Flexible workspaces.

    Sentence.

    Fragments.

    So this was just some slashvertisement to run up Ideo's page count? I'm not waiting for their site to load whatever-it-is that it was trying to load.

  • Rent your desk what a Idea (need more worker rights) as things may get so bad that people may just trun to the jail / prison as a place to live. VS being a independent contractor but controlled like a w2.

  • Cat? (Score:1)

    by dohzer ( 867770 )

    I only clicked this link because I thought it said "Here's What Your Cat Could Look Like In 2030" and read the words "cubicle", "AI" and "wheels".

  • I thought we'd have flying cars?

    Oh, I get it, this is the 21st century dream of having flying cars...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by epyT-R ( 613989 )

      No. a flying car would offer way too much freedom for the plebes. There's no way the totalitarians in power would allow this.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kuzb ( 724081 )

        Given how awful a lot of people are at driving, do you really want them in the sky too?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lbmouse ( 473316 )
      The Cubs have to be able to win the World Series first.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rei ( 128717 )

        And IIIIII will love you again! I will love you! Like I uuuuuuussssed tooooooo!

  • There's Still Time! (Score:3)

    by Bob9113 ( 14996 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @01:54AM (#48455249) Homepage

    Blade Runner, for example, posited that the skies above Los Angeles would swarm with flying cars by 2019.

    It's only 2014. There's still 5 years. Get to work, everyone!

    • Dibs on the Daryl Hannah bot.

    • Blade Runner, for example, posited that the skies above Los Angeles would swarm with flying cars by 2019.

      It's only 2014. There's still 5 years. Get to work, everyone!

      Not only that, but as I recall, the movie showed the police having flying cars, and everyone else on foot or bicycle because they were poor.

  • 3% loading...
    Page with 3 icons loads. Click on first icon. Background sound loop of birds chirping with wihite noise and gap at the end of the loop starts. That's all that happens.

    Firefox 33 on Ubuntu reports: Media resource http://automobility.ideo.com/a... [ideo.com] could not be decoded. automobility.ideo.com
    TypeError: e[0].play is not a function main.js:1
    TypeError: e[0].pause is not a function main.js:1

    Don't they test their code?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Animats ( 122034 )

      OK, here's a site with an interview with IDEO's designer. [designboom.com] It has the key pictures without the UI from hell.

      This is the Eric Schmidt vision of the future. People will still go to offices and have meetings. They'll just have better cars and presentation tools, and better delivery services for physical stuff.

      Will we really need that many office workers? That's the huge question. Given the head counts at newer companies, probably not.

      • The last photo of all the cubicle-cars in a warehouse is pretty amusing. If you install a toilet and a bed in these things, you can just put food in and get work out - no need to let your workers "go home" or anything else that could compromise productivity - just keep them locked in their transparent cells and put them wherever you need them. Seriously, how can he look at his design and not think of prisons?

    • Don't bother. The website was horrifically obnoxious even after it took 15 minutes to load. The presentation was just so annoying difficult to navigate I gave up after a few clicks. Whatever happened to simple web page layouts that present information in an easy to consume manner? Text and pictures... don't need all this flash and crap.

    • These retarded webdesigners have made me waste 50MB in this ridiculous site...

  • I've been waiting to buy one since 1962.

  • Future Office (Score:3)

    by David_Hart ( 1184661 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @02:37AM (#48455413)

    I would think that the office of the future would consist of people working from home and connecting to VR environments. The only reason why people still go into work is because the boss requires a presence and it aids in ad-hoc communications. If you can accomplish the same thing through VR (i.e. walk around the office, stop at the water cooler, catch side conversations, etc.) then most information workers (those that don't require interaction with physical objects) can simply work from home and pocket the transportation savings. Plus, it would ease road congestion.

  • Anybody who has played SimCity knows the future of city travel is train/trollys with stops at every intersection between commercial/industrial blocks and every two residential.

  • It is safer to predict that due to the quickly developing VR tech, many more will work from home because it's cheaper, greener, and better utilizes everyone's time.

    There will be no reason to meet face to face for work.

    Even today it's just the old habits.

    • Sadly no. The technology for that is here already. Has been for a long time. When you look around your office, I'm fairly sure you will not encounter any kind of "telepresence" technology that has not been available 15 years ago. Maybe not as refined and maybe not as easy to use, but everything that is actually in use in offices today has been available at least for 15 years. So I guess it is safe to assume that the telepresence technology that will be an office staple in the 2030s will be technology that w

  • I suspect that communications infrastructure will play a bigger role than vehicles and that telecommuting will become more of a norm for people than it is now.

    • I suspect that communications infrastructure will play a bigger role than vehicles and that telecommuting will become more of a norm for people than it is now.

      There's no good way to tell; here in the USA our communications infrastructure is vying with our road infrastructure for which is a bigger pile of shit. There are seriously third-world countries with better broadband penetration

  • is that companies don't want to make stuff that benefits the customer, they want to make what benefits them. So, in a nutshell, here's the core features of the car of the future.

    - Can only be in any way maintained or even repaired by a garage that has some kind of adhesion contract with the car maker. You can't do jack yourself, be glad you can still start it without paying someone through your nose.
    - Every part, even the most insignificant one, will have some patented chip that needs to be "married" to you

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sique ( 173459 )
      All your gripes might somehow be true, but are they really a problem? About 100 years ago, everyone knew how to grow their own food. About 50 years ago, everyone know how to cook their own food. Today, to many of us, the knowledge has reduced to how to buy your own food -- and even this gets more complicated with all the warning labels, ingredient lists and dietary requirements.

      My car has tire pressure sensors, yes. I have no problems with that. It's a leased car anyway, and the tires are part of the leas

      • The point is that you CAN if you WANT to. You still can grow your own food if you so choose. I don't know how to grow my own food and frankly, I don't care about it. And the same is true for my car. But I do not like that trend that we get more and more dependent on the whims of corporations. And this leads to monopolies, something that is by its very definition anathema to the creed of the free market. Only if there is someone who CAN offer an alternative you really have a choice. If you can only get your

      • I disagree with your assertion that about 100 years ago everyone knew how to grow their own food. Where did you come up with that? And, please, there is no excuse for not being able to cook if even just well enough to feed yourself.

  • From a design company?

    Shame.

  • Either way, it means fancy golfcarts for most of us, while the policymaking environmentalist nomenklatura drive whatever they want.

    Yes, there's a problem with that.

  • And this is supposed to be from a design company? I think I'll just walk.
  • Their web design looks absolutely gorgeous, but it's inefficient and not remotely fit for purpose.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Chrisq ( 894406 )

      Their web design looks absolutely gorgeous, but it's inefficient and not remotely fit for purpose.

      ... introducing the Apple iCar.

    • > looks absolutely gorgeous, but it's inefficient and not remotely fit for purpose.

      Exactly the criteria for winning a design award. You might enjoy The Design of Everyday Things, a great book.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Holi ( 250190 )

      Eye of the beholder I guess. I think it looks like the dhtml crap we saw in the 90's.

  • This looks like the perfect description of what hell would look like after apocalypse...

    • I'm guessing you're a fan of driving, not necessarily of cars. Before you complain, what are your thoughts about all cars having automatic transmissions?

      • My every day car has a 7 speed dual-clutch gearbox, and I would prefer a manual one but that was a no go if I wanted the engine I took... Sometimes you have to make compromises.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Holi ( 250190 )

        mine has a 5 speed manual, then again it's 14 years old.

  • Self-driving vehicles? Well, they are almost here, so that's not too hard to imagine, but I think changes in society are going to drive us away from the amount of traffic we see today. One of the major factors in car ownership has been the fact that owning a car was the only way to easily get from your home to your workplace; we've have seen a trend towards working from home, which, although not ideal, still seems a better alternative to many people, and I think we will see an increase in variations over th

  • Aargh!!! All those jokes about 'If Microsoft Made Cars' are going to come true!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sfsp ( 655361 )

      "Unfortunately, Rachel's maneuver placed the car in the intersection, going the wrong way. Her sudden appearance in the cross-lanes caused cars to veer in all three dimensions and windshields in at least a half dozen cars turned blue as the auto-pilots went into spastic fault-mode."

      from "Let's Go to Prague!", by John Ringo.

      In the Honorverse timeline, this is about 4020 AD.

  • Eeyow, I'm trying very hard not to rant about irresponsible child-bearing which contributes greatly to transportation problems and just about every evil on our planet ... OK, ok, I think I've got it under control ...

    There was a time when people lived in rural areas and had to provide their own water & sewage systems, and their own transportation. I was there. We idolized cars and horsepower. We souped 'em up & tricked 'em out. Today's young people have little love for cars and many don't bother to g

    • " work a farm or the oil fields of North Dakota"

      You've been in the city too long. Go 20 miles outsize of any city center and the only option for reliable, time-efficient transportation is a car. Inside any of the top 20-30 cities - sure, getting around the city is going to be more efficient on public or hired transportation. That covers about 7000-8000 square miles of the 3 million square miles that makes up the lower 48. By population, it's only about 30 million of the 330 million US residents.

      For the vast

      • The fact is that the ruling class doesn't like that. They want the middle and lower classes sequestered in the cities while they enjoy the privilege of living wherever they please. They support of high oil prices, while blocking any practical replacement for fossil fuels. They use the media to instill middle-class guilt for preferring safer, more private life in the suburbs.
  • If you can work from your car, you can probably work from home. Yes yes, sometimes people need to meet. Funkelectric's rule of work: You need to meet less often than you think, even taking into account Funkelectric's rule of work.
  • In 2030 my car will look just like it does today.

    And it will be the same year, too.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JustNiz ( 692889 )

      Thankyou. Mine too.

      IMHO, the best car is one with NO computer tech or LCD screens in it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mspohr ( 589790 )

      I have a 15 year old car which still works just fine... be interesting to see if I can keep it running for another 15 years.

  • To wait on line at store to buy bread and vodka.

  • So I'm not sure that is progress.

  • What horsecrap.

    This is just as likely to happen as all those futuristic designs that graced the pages of popular mechanics and mechanics illustrated 50 years ago.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      The problem I have is the "resources will decrease" part of it. Iron/steel, aluminum, and glass are just about infinitely recyclable. Power if the Lockheed High beta, the Polywell and or Thorium molten salt reactors go into production will also be even more available than now. Frankly it is just as likely we will live in a world with greater abundance than today.
       

      • Man, I wish I had your optimism. Perhaps I'm becoming more pessimistic as I age.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

          I will be 50 next year so it is not ageing.
          THe thing is that people forget just how bad it was in the past. In the 60s people where sure that the Bald Eagle and the Bison would go extinct. In the 1970s lake Erie was considered dead and a river in Ohio was so polluted that it caught fire. People were predicting that humans would be on the brink of extinction by 2000.
          As education and standards of living go up population growth goes down. China forced this issue in ways that I find immoral but Indias populatio

  • ...I have nothing but contempt for design firms that don't house even one real engineer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      You mean you do not want to drive a rolling green house where half the energy is used to cool the thing to keep you from cooking?

  • What if I find driving a relaxing and fun thing to do?

    When I get out of the office to go home, why on earth would I want to continue doing office work???

  • They get lucky with a hit design, which drags in new clients that never attain anywhere near the same level of success, but lets IDEO coast along until lightning strikes again?

  • ....but I sincerely hope that my car of the 2030s will be designed by engineers around the necessary performance requirements of the roads of the time, not fucking "design consultants".

    I'm more interested in how people repeatedly get paid quite hefty salaries to come up with this overproduced, artiste-crap.

  • When the presentation finally loaded and I took a look at some of it it left me with the impression that these IDEO people are just hipster douchebags. Nothing of any value or substance to see there. Next.
  • I'd say by 2030, I, and most others, won't even have a car. Instead, we'll use rideshare services like Uber, but likely with automated drivers. It will be MUCH cheaper than owning a car, and largely more convenient. Hell, I'd be surprised if I still had a car 5-10 years from now.
  • A first-glance at the headline and I read "Here's What Your Cat Could Look Like In 2030". In 2030 he's gonna be worm food. Not a pretty picture.

  • So it's anyone's guess what you'll be driving a couple decades from now.

    A donkey cart?

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