Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are two sides of the same coin — they are both betting on the future. And often times there isn’t a single alternative that will just take time to develop, the future may harbor many realities simultaneously. This is certainly true of smart cars and this is an attempt to divine what comes ahead.
Future #1: The Electric Future
You leave home in the morning to go to work, hop into your electric cars that zips smoothly through well ordered lanes. The electricity has been produced in the most eco-sustainable way possible, much of it solar and wind. Gotta love clean air all around. No need to drive obviously since your car is guiding itself, taking the best route at any given time. You park the car at your office where you recharge it in a few minutes. After a full day of work you come back to it and head over to dinner and find parking within a few seconds, thanks to your phone’s intelligence.
What needs to happen for this future? For one, the most basic of things — being able to cover the distance which has two components.
The first component is going average distances comfortably, say a typical commute. Tesla, arguably the foremost EV today, has a range of 265 miles in its 85 Kwh model. Its pricing is expected to come down dramatically to become comparable with other commute cars. So in many ways we can realistically envision the problem of covering average distances solved.
The second component is covering large distances, where you will need to recharge. The same Tesla currently takes almost 8 hours to recharge using conventional plugs. That number needs to come down by two magnitudes for people to decide to take long trips with an electric car. We will need major breakthroughs in battery technology and a pervasive electric grid for that to happen.
Future #2: The Collaborative / On Demand Future
You leave home in the morning to go to work, your phone is aware you are about to leave, a shared car pulls up. There are three other people in the car who are going to a similar location, only one of whom actually owns the vehicle and is driving that day. The payment is handled automatically to the owner. Full day of work and now you are heading out for a dinner. You walk outside and a cab just for you is already waiting because your phone had already taken care of it. You payment is obviously once again handled automatically, most of which goes to the independent driver leasing the vehicle from a company.
Walk in San Francisco or New York and you will already see many parts of this future coming together. Chariot and many other startups provide shared rides, Uber and Lyft do the cabs on demand, all of them handle payments. One of the keys for this to work is arguably density ie it will be economically sustainable in dense areas, which will invariably be mostly urban.
The other key is people’s minds since sharing resources raises questions around privacy, liability and safety. But the revolution is already here — consider how AirBnB has created a completely new market where people are renting their own homes to strangers. At the core of the shared economy is the idea that only some individuals need to own the resource, if the cost of coordinating is low then sharing is indeed optimal for individuals, communities and society overall.
Future #3: The Navigable Future
You leave home in the morning to go to work, hop into your car, and it navigates itself to exactly where you need to go. The highway is busy today so the car takes some shortcuts while you are brewing coffee inside and answering emails on your laptop (old school but you prefer the larger screen). In the evening you are heading for a dinner a little farther away and the car decides to put some soothing music to match the mood. You think you even catch a few winks while the car parks itself.
Google most famously has been testing self-driving cars in the streets of Mountain View for quite a few years. We already have cars that have driven by themselves from Atlantic to Pacific. The challenge here is AI — deep learning methods require large amounts of data. Some of it will come by mapping areas exhaustively, much of it will come through inexpensive satellites monitoring geosynchronously real-time.
Getting people psychologically comfortable will arguably be the bigger challenge. There is a loss of control in letting someone an automated system drive a car and it will take a bit of getting used for most of us. Never mind that much of our transportation, from planes to trains, is run fairly autonomously, but cars will make it much more evident. And we still need to figure out how to handle the 0.1% cases where someone will indeed need to take up the wheel because of something unexpected that a computer isn’t programmed to handle.
We live in exciting times — what else do you think will be in the future for cars?
