Tom Tjaarda
Tom’s view on how the autonomous car would affect driving enthusiasts and car design was one of several columns written before he died in June
Today we are used to advances in technology forcing us to replace dated concepts, but self-driving cars have created a negative feeling amongst those who love to drive our vehicles. Who would want a Ferrari with no steering wheel? Or to be unable to take control of one of those pick-up trucks that can take off-road excursions through rocky terrain?
Going from A to B is one thing, but guiding a powerful off-road vehicle takes skill and training. As does driving in the evening mist or on an icy road that’s covered with fresh snow. But if the selfdriving fanatics have their way, being able to take control in such a situation will be a thing of the past, because vehicles will have a trip programmer to replace the responses of the human driver.
Six months ago the prominent CEO of a large auto company stated that in five years its production would be dominated by self-driving vehicles. It’s a timescale that passes very quickly, so it will be interesting to see what the situation is in five years’ time. For car designers, though, such a future does not look very interesting, because I feel that their skills will be less in demand to create the design and styling of automobiles that will essentially be robots.
Compared to the days when we had to make beautiful sketches and scale models, today the computer-created sketches of hundreds of car designers have a tendency to be similar. These days it is the design manager, the person who oversees the work of the car designers, who guides the process of the styling concepts and ensures that what they are creating comes within the brand image of the company. If one wants to make a career in shaping the future of car design, becoming a design manager has to be the aim.
Maybe I’m being too pessimistic. In the past few years there has been a heartening rise in the number of classic car shows all over the world. Once there was only Pebble Beach and a few others, but today it seems that this automobile enjoyment was only put on the back burner for a while and now it’s more popular than ever. It seems to be a regular reaction to the aftermath of economic crises – after a while people miss not having fun and not participating in activities. This is expressed through the joy of outmoded means of travel like cruise ships, sail boats and bicycles, which are more popular than ever.
The self-driving car is a technological breakthrough that is both critical and complicated and must be developed into a crisis-free mode of transportation or it will not catch on. There will be accidents in the process of this development, in the same way that there were during aeronautical development. But self-driving cars will probably become a separate and individual mode of transportation, developed to a point where those who use them will no longer be permitted to drive the normal cars of today – or their Ferrari. How sad.
Even if designers and car lovers in general are hesitant to face up to this new mode of transportation, we still have many years to enjoy our passion for driving. The day may come when we are no longer even permitted to take control of a car... but until then, let’s have fun while we can.