Maybe not for 10 years yet, but we will start to see significant declines in people buying cars for their personal transport within five years.
The reason: Self-driving cars. Google, Uber and Tesla are making very significant strides forward in their development so much so that they are already on the streets in the US, UK, Germany and other European countries.
At the moment, they are not fully autonomous as they must have a human driver sitting behind the wheel to take charge in an emergency – or more likely when the car cannot determine the road ahead.
These cars have radar which can determine the position of other vehicles around it, they have cameras which can determine white line lane markers and kerbs and very accurate GPS systems, which tell it exactly where they are at all times to millimetre accuracy.
Using all these systems the car can determine its place and speed on a road and what it needs to do now to stay in a safe position. If the vehicle in front speeds up or slows down the car will match it, and because the occupant has programmed into the GPS the destination the car knows which turns to take. It can also use local traffic information to avoid jams. When the car encounters a road with no markings or kerbs or indeed a road it has not travelled on before it passes control to the human. This is the clever bit, Tesla cars have a hive mind, yes just like the Borg.
Whenever a Tesla car encounters a road it is unsure about, it passes control to the human, the car then registers each and every input by the human as it is negotiated along that road, then sends these measurements to its base in the cloud. Once it has a few to average out, it downloads these actions to every other Tesla car so that the next one that come across this road can drive it autonomously. Tesla reckons they are currently registering more than one million miles of road a day with this system. It will not take very long for each and every mile to be stored in their system.
When all the roads have been catalogued and all the cars know how to drive them automatically and safely then there will be no need for humans to be in charge, who will then become passengers. Humans will be able to read, work or even sleep during the journey, cars will evolve to have large comfortable cabins in the rear and will not even need a steering wheel or pedals.
Then much like an exaggerated Uber system, we will simply call a car using an app and within minutes one will be waiting to take us to our destination. As we will not be buying the car for ourselves and there is no expensive driver to pay for, these journeys will be incredibly cheap, whether the car is powered by petrol or electricity. The cost of being transported to anywhere we want to go, no looking for or paying for parking, has been calculated to be nine times less than we are paying at the moment to own and operate our own cars.
Yes there will always be people who will want to keep a normal car just like there are people, who own and collect vintage cars now, but they will be few and so there will be far fewer cars on the roads, and that will lead to less congestion and less greenhouse gasses. Countries such as Bahrain, which is being choked by the car, will no longer need to build more roads and everybody will get to their destination quicker.
This is the future, it is coming, you heard it here first.
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