THE FUTURE BEYOND CARS
Tech firms mull options amid rising cost of car ownership and traffic congestion
LAS VEGAS
CARLESS commuting is cruising in the fast lane at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), with companies showing off electric bicycles, scooters, skateboards and more aimed at making the internal combustion engine a thing of the past.
As the ranks of people around the world living in cities has grown, so too has the cost of car ownership as well as traffic congestion.
Nowhere was this more apparent than at the annual tech gathering in Las Vegas where some 170,000 conference goers jammed the streets.
“In a lot of big cities, cars aren't tenable anymore,” said tech analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates.
An AFP reporter testing the car-free concept through the week at CES by relying on a freshly released GenZe electric bicycle consistently sailed past clogged traffic near the convention center and on the famed Las Vegas Strip.
Riders too tired or lazy to pedal, meanwhile, can twist a throttle to glide along at close to local street speed limits.
GenZe spokesman Tom Valasek, a former auto industry marketing executive, said several carmakers had come to check out the company’s CES exhibit.
“There is a lot of curiosity right now about where things are heading,” Valasek said.
The popularity of smartphone summoned rides from services, such as Uber and Lyft, are playing into the trend, with technology giants investing heavily in self-driving capabilities that could soon see automated vehicles available on-demand.
“We believe car ownership makes no sense in the future,” Lyft chief executive John Zimmer said at a CES dinner event.
A boom of autonomous cars would likely prompt vehicles to evolve to be more akin to rooms on wheels — sleeper cabins in trains, or private offices, he added.
A shift away from owning and relying on cars was also expected to result in traffic and parking becoming less of a priority in urban design.
GenZe, a US-based division of the Mahindra Group in India, this week announced its e-bikes will be added in April to a Ford GoBike ride-share programme in San Francisco.
Despite negative publicity about hoverboards a few years ago — centred on their tendency to explode — the manufacturer Swagtron was at CES with some of those devices along with skateboards and bicycles boosted with electric motors.
Its chief operating officer Andrew Koven saidhe saw alternatives to cars was an “absolute necessity” that was part of a “systemic shift” towards getting around in ways that are economical as well as socially and environmentally responsible. AFP