http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/12/autonomo-concept-is-half-car-all-driver/
Minority Report, amongst others.
RAMA
Minority Report, amongst others.
RAMA
Now doesn't this look familiar?
- Thread starter RAMA
- Start date
I was thinking of the light-bikes from Tron.
All fun and games until a cat or raccoon runs into the road, a pickup truck drops anything or there is more than 1" of snow on the ground. Like a motorcycle, you'd have to store it in the winter....
From what i understand the infrastructure won't need to change at all.. that's the point. The car would establish a spontaneous network of equally equipped cars to maximise traffic flow.. no need for external control.
However it is a radical concept and the obstacles are huge.. chief amongst them the willingness of people to even adopt such radical ideas. People love their cars as they are now and i don't see them happily squeeze themselves in a tube that's almost entirely computer controlled.. that will need one hell of a marketing drive to convince people (and it has to be cheap.. it will fail automatically if it costs the same as a standard car).
Ideas like this though is what drives innovation.. a hundred ideas may fail but the one that gets through may change it all.
The problem is that Western societies have become extremely conservative. We're a long way from the industrial revolution. Today people seem content to grow old with much the same accouterments they had when they were young, just spruced up and inlaid with computer technology.
It's a shame, but transportation technology is stuck in a doldrums, not because of any inherent limits or obstacles as seen from this prototype and countless more in automobiles and aeronautics, but because of cultural conservativism, government regulation and status quo-ism, and a resistance by incumbent players, including major corporations, to take the risk of losing their current advantages.
What I always wonder about is why they come up with these totally strange designs. All you need to do is to make current cars intelligent. There's no need to make them look like spaceships. A car need to be practical, it needs space for 4+ passengers and their luggage. And you certainly want to look outside the window. And so forth.
Yet there's no apparent reason why these two things should be in conflict. We can very well have intelligent, self-driving cars that also look like spaceships - or like anything else. Instead we have discussions by the National Traffic Safety Board for a blanket federal ban on mobile devices in cars. Why the devil doesn't the board argue for the more rapid development of self-driving automobiles which have the potential to save far more lives than a law that will be disobeyed by millions of drivers as a matter of course?
Kurt Anderson has a great article in Vanity Fair on the declining pace of change in popular culture, and mentions this phenomenon with regards to car design as well:
"The Aeron chair in which you’re sitting is identical to the Aeron chair in which I sat almost two decades ago, and this morning I boiled water for my coffee in the groovy Alessi kettle I bought a quarter-century ago. With rare exceptions, cars from the early 90s (and even the late 80s) don’t seem dated. Not long ago in the newspaper, I came across an archival photograph of Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell with a dozen of their young staff at Morgans, the Ur-boutique hotel, in 1985. It was an epiphany. Schrager’s dress shirt had no collar and some of the hair on his male employees was a bit unfashionably fluffy, but no one in the picture looks obviously, laughably dated by today’s standards. If you passed someone who looked like any of them, you wouldn’t think twice. Yet if, in 1990 or 1980 or 1970, you’d examined a comparable picture from 27 years earlier—from 1963 and 1953 and 1943, respectively—it would be a glimpse back into an unmistakably different world. A man or woman on the street in any year in the 20th century groomed and dressed in the manner of someone from 27 years earlier would look like a time traveler, an actor in costume, a freak. And until recently it didn’t take even that long for datedness to kick in: by the late 1980s, for instance, less than a decade after the previous decade had ended, the 1970s already looked ridiculous."
Link:
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201
^Yeah, I've had a pet theory for a long time that visual media stifles style. Even Kurt's examples are similar to the one I use. Take men's formal wear. Today it's a tuxedo or nice suit. 100 years ago, a tuxedo or nice suit. 150 years ago, around the time of the first photos/visual media, its still a tuxedo or nice suit. 200 years? hose and nickers.
With the rise of visual media spreading the idea of what clothes should look like, fashion has pretty much halted for men. Yes, the details may change, but if you plucked a guy in a suit from today and dropped him off in 1900 he wouldn't grab much attention.
With the rise of visual media spreading the idea of what clothes should look like, fashion has pretty much halted for men. Yes, the details may change, but if you plucked a guy in a suit from today and dropped him off in 1900 he wouldn't grab much attention.
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