The future of the car
By UsaydIntelligence: Behold the All-Seeing, Self-Parking, Safety-Enforcing, Networked Automobile
Radar, lasers, wireless radio networks and other embedded tech will enable our cars to sense faraway traffic and stop accidents before they happen. But who will be in the driver’s seat?
Well again we seem to have heard it all, films that are based in the future like Minority report and iRobot seem to focus on such things as the future of the car. In iRobot you see that Will Smith has to put the car in ovveride to take control of it himself, and that the speed is amazingly enhanced then the petrol motorbike which he later uses. Minority report has developed on the idea of having motorways with cars simply following simple routes and all of course automatically directed by something like a more advanced GPS system. Well this article from Popular Science describes in detail how the future of the car has already started to be developed:
Flash back five months: I’m at a test track at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan, in a Lexus fitted with a pre-crash safety system. I drive down the track at about 40 mph toward a rubber post. Instinct and education make it hard to keep my foot off the brake, but a group of earnest engineers insist that I aim their $70-grand sedan straight for the post. At the last fraction of a second, when the car’s radar sensors and microprocessors have determined that the idiot at the wheel really isn’t going to steer around the obstacle, the safety system shoots into action. Seatbelt pre-tensioners cinch up, and the front and rear suspension dampers stiffen. As soon as I touch the brake pedal—better late than never—the car’s brake-assist tugs them on at max effort. It isn’t enough to avoid the crash, but the impact speed is about half what it would have been without the new system.
Well what can I say, after my post about the future of WiFi which is slowly creeping to the present, there is something that we probably all need to realise. This is the future of what we have previously experienced. Of course the human race has never been so advanced, yet we still manage to go about killing hundreds of thousands of us simply for the utility of land, power and riches. It’s amazing how advanced the human race can become, yet we will never shy away from the instincts that have made us so animal like in our actions.
August 21st, 2005 at 3:00 pm
hmm acctually i HATE this idea, i think the world is automated enough as it is
http://www.c2e.info/images/lexusconceptside.jpg
September 3rd, 2005 at 2:19 pm
[...] Well funnily all these posts are beginning to correspond. I wrote a post about WiFi and then something new came out in WiFi, and I wrote something about the future of cars and now something new has come out in the technological world of cars. Have a read: I never thought it’d be possible, but Mazda of all companies has embraced the inner geek inside me to make me want to run out and test drive one of their cars. Thankfully this is only a concept car for now, and my Honda is still running strong. [...]