iRobot Predicted the Autonomous Cars, They Just Overshot the Date by a Few Years
iRobot premiered in 2004, the same year the Boston Red Sox broke the “Curse of the Bambino,” Martha Stewart was sent to jail, and three years before the first iPhone was released. It seems like an eternity ago. But while most news from 2004 is so beyond outdated that it isn’t even relevant, one concept did manage to stick around. The idea of autonomous cars has always captured our interest as humans but did iRobot accurately predict the future of transportation? Maybe.
Driving alone kills a staggering 1.3 million people every year, mainly because humans are impulsive and unpredictable. We are not patient and our attention span is far too short. Throw in the issue of driving with smartphones and our ability to drive safely plummets. Not only is it dangerous for us to drive, the cost of owning a car is higher than the cost of food, (Americans spent over 2 trillion on automobile costs last year). Not to mention we spend most of our time outside our cars. According to Lyft president John Zimmer, we only use our cars 4% of the time, meaning that out of the 250 million cars in America, 240 million of them are parked at all times. So what is the solution to all of these problems? Driverless cars.
John Zimmer predicts that by 2021, in just five years, that the majority of Lyft vehicles will be operated without a driver. But that isn’t all that he said in his futuristic manifesto that he recently posted on Medium that was a shocking statement, Zimmer said that by the year 2025, private automation ownership will “go the way of the DVD.” It’s hard to wrap your head around a world where nobody owned a car but in busy cities this is already the norm. Cities where driving is a nightmare due to congestion like San Francisco and New York, residents are happy to trade in their unused car for a cheaper alternative. In the the long run using Lyft or Uber does save the average driver more money when you calculate the cost of owning a car.
The really cool thing about this is that it is already happening. Tesla’s autonomous driver feature allows the driver to take their feet off the pedals and even switch lanes on its own. While Tesla won’t tell you to take your hands off the wheel, the level of trust required to believe this car is truly self-driving can be understood quickly after a mile on the freeway without having to do anything. Uber announced recently that it will (and has been) test autonomous rides for users in Pittsburg.
iRobot took place in the year 2035 where the world of transportation is entirely autonomous. While it might take a while for most of the cars on the road to be driverless, I believe that we will actually end up with a large part of our cars being autonomous 10 years before iRobot predicted.
