From self-driven cars to ‘flying cars’ – a possible glimpse of our future?
In the 80’s, teenagers were brought up with popular TV shows such as Knight Rider, which featured Michael Knight and his buddy K.I.T.T, a car controlled by a computer with artificial intelligence, autopilot and other sort of “wizardry”. Another hit movie
From a more down to earth perspective, cruise control is a system that automatically controls the speed of a motor vehicle and was a technology made popular following the 1973 oil crisis, as it promised to “save gas by avoiding surges that expel fuel”. The system is a servomechanism that takes over the throttle of the car to maintain a steady speed as set by the driver. Though not quite the hands-free technology this article proposes, perhaps this type of innovation, in being widely adopted as a standard feature within the automotive industry, helped fuel the notion of futuristic concepts being brought into the realm of everyday use as a real possibility? While this approach could be seen to have driven some of the creativity behind those 80’s shows, self-driving cars are in fact no longer some futuristic auto technology; there are already cars on the road with self-driving features.
A self-driving car is defined as a car with features that allow it to accelerate, brake, and steer a car’s course with limited or no driver interaction. Companies like Mercedes, BMW, and Tesla have already released, or are soon to release, self-driving features that give the car some ability to drive itself. Tech companies such as Google are also trying to pioneer this technology. It is estimated that by the end of the decade, there will be nearly ten million cars with those capabilities. Fully autonomous cars are further divided into user-operated and driverless vehicles. Because of regulatory and insurance questions, user-operated autonomous cars will come to market within the next five years, while driverless cars will remain a long way off.
On the other hand, the phrase “flying car” is code for a futuristic vision of transportation. The dream is that, instead of traveling in earth-bound vehicles, every day, people will be able to avoid gridlock by taking off and soaring above traffic. With most roadable aircrafts, as the aviation industry prefers to call them, the idea is that you can land at the local airport and then drive home and park in your garage.
Back in 1927, a now mostly forgotten engineer named Alexander Weygers was first to begin thinking up the design for a flying saucer that could zip between rooftops. In 1945, he received a patent for what he described as a “discopter,” a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) machine with room inside for passengers to walk around, cook, and sleep. He depicted smaller versions landing in pods atop buildings in downtown San Francisco.
Flying cars which originated from truly innovative ideas are already available for purchase like Skycar, AeroMobil or Volante and some of these are extremely advanced technologically. But one notes that none of these projects ushers in anything like the flying car lifestyle envisioned by futurists or such as the DeLorean (in Back to the Future) suggested might be possible. They don’t represent the future of the family car, since most of them are essentially either impractical dune buggies suspended by kites or high-tech roadable aircraft toys.
Juraj Vaculik, co-founder and CEO of AeroMobil, spoke recently on a panel about the future of flying cars, predicting a world ahead in which these vehicles easily merge with existing transportation. He says his AeroMobil will be on sale in 2017, and that the firm was also developing a self-driving and flying version.
The future? What one can be sure of is that cars will soon automatically contribute to a shared mesh of traffic and routing information, through vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems. In addition to providing better traffic reports, these systems through which cars will constantly transmit their location, speed and other data, are expected to make driving much safer. This is because, if a driver brakes suddenly, or makes a blind turn, the car will issue a warning to others nearby to help them avoid a collision. This type of communication (among nonhuman objects), is a part of what is known as the Internet of Things (IoT), which is the proposed development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data.
While there are clear technological advantages of IoT being brought into our cars and households (often without us realising), does this mean the robots are coming? Perhaps not yet. What we can be optimistic about is that, with entrepreneurs and technology pioneers like Elon Musk, Larry Page and Juraj Vaculik among others and the futuristic ideas they look to realise, some of us will soon be living our childhood dreams. What seemed to be science fiction 30 years ago, now definitely looks more plausible.