The Future Is Electric and Driverless
In the interest of environment, country after country has set targets for phasing out internal combustion engines. While the UK and France want to see an end to petrol and diesel cars by 2040, Norway and the Netherlands want them stopped by 2025. India plans to walk the middle path with 2030 as the cut-off date, while China hasn’t even set out a date, even though nearly 50 per cent of all electric vehicles sold in the world are sold in China.
ELECTRIC DREAMS
Even though electric vehicle sales make up less than half of half a percentage point of global passenger car sales, car manufacturers are not waiting. Volvo was the first to declare that each of its models launched after 2020 will come with an electric powertrain. Jaguar Land Rover was quick to follow suit and Volkswagen seems to have come up with an atonement scheme with close to a 100 electric cars across the group’s brands. BMW already has the electric i brand and Mercedes has said that by 2020 its Smart brand will no longer feature internal combustion engines. The last global auto show at Frankfurt was full of electric concepts, whether it was the retro models from Honda or Jaguar with the Urban EV and the E-type.
SELF-DRIVE CARS GET A LEG-UP
The Renault-Nissan Alliance already has a lead with EVs with the Leaf already into its second generation and Tesla now has its fourth car model out on the roads. It seems that not only does Tesla hold the lead with electric cars but also with autonomous driving. What started off as an effort to increase safety and avoid human error has now become the second strongest trend across the industry: autonomous cars. It all started off with adaptive cruise control that gave way to emergency braking and has now reached a point where many cars can all but drive themselves, if they were allowed to do so. While Tesla’s auto pilot has been in the news, mostly because of a couple of fatal crashes, other car majors are not far behind. Volvo’s partnership with Uber is progressing steadily and driverless taxis could be a reality soon. The Audi Aicon is unique in not only their electric powertrains but also on the inside, where you would notice an absence of a steering wheel or even pedals.
FUTURE OF CAR OWNERSHIP
Circa 2040, it’s quite possible that you will not own a car but subscribe to a service that provides transport. On your smartphone, you can order a Mercedes F015, hop in to find your colleagues seated around a table, while another colleague is on a video call on the screen by the side. You can instruct the car to take you to the airport first before dropping your colleagues. The future is already here; it just depends on when you choose to live in it.
Owning a car may soon be as obsolete as running non-electric vehicles