Cars will become soulless homogenous blobs

COMMENT

The car of the future will be boring.

Safer, greener, connected and probably a lot more comfortable, but batsh*t boring.

Attending the world's biggest technology conference, previously the sole reserve of massive LCD TVs, virtual reality headsets, drones of all sizes, wearable tech and robo-maids, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is now a bigger deal for car companies than most motor shows.

It's was my first time at CES in 2018 and it was amazing on so many levels.

But I've come to realise something. The passion and emotion that cars generate today, that we know and love, is slowly being whittled away by technology, like termites slowly hollowing out a didgeridoo.

Some people call it progress. I'm all for it. Autonomous cars will reduce the road toll, electric and hydrogen cars will improve the air we breathe, and it'll be a cleaner, safer world for the next generation of humans, such as my six-year-old daughter.

But progress hit me like a cricket bat in the solar plexus at CES, as I attended tech conferences by semiconductor corporations and IT giants whose primary focus was not the cloud, robotics or virtual reality videogames, but cars.

I'm equally excited and scared by just how different the automotive landscape of the future will look – and it's coming sooner than we all think.

As computing hardware and software become the new V8 engines of the car world and Silicon Valley's role in the evolution of the modern motor car becomes all-pervading, car companies will operate increasingly like tech companies themselves.

And as plug-in and/or hydrogen fuel-cell cars take over (which in itself is a fascinating betacam versus VHS battle), the most expensive and development-heavy part of each and every car built for the last 100 years will become obsolete – the internal combustion engine.

By supplanting a hugely complex petrol or diesel engine with a super simple electric motor or two, and replacing the driver with a self-learning AI that is designed to be way safer than you and I will ever be on the road, the emotional element of owning and buying a car is gone.

Then, as the interiors of autonomous vehicles become more important than their exteriors – as that's where we'll spent a lot more time hanging out with friends and colleagues while stuck in increasingly lengthy traffic jams – consumer priorities will change.

Vehicles will become considerably cheaper as battery technology improves and car-hailing services and robotaxi companies like Uber and Lyft will demand hundreds of thousands of cheap, nondescript vehicles that go from A to B with no fuss.

Younger generations are already spurning cars and will shop for the best deal, or none at all.

I bore witness to Dr Herbert Diess, the CEO of Volkswagen, telling an audience of hundreds at CES that "the future of the car is very exciting, brilliant". Maybe for agoraphobics.

He understands that "many, many people also think it [the future] will be a lot of shared mobility. We all will drive boxes around, like autonomous taxis.

"I'm not so sure about this. The car is much more than transportation," he intoned.

But the reality is that, in big cities at least, people hate driving and will happily trade a funky exterior and mechanical substance for comfort and autonomy. Just get me there, okay? Life's too short.

"You want your own environment, your own smell, your own taste, your own music," said Dr D.

Luc Donckerwolke, head of design at Hyundai and luxury offshoot Genesis, reckons cars won't turn into boring blobs either.

"I think that everybody will want to have a certain amount of individualism. Even if you're sharing it you'll go for the most aesthetically pleasing," he says.

"There's different levels: companies like Google might say "I want a homogenous design", but you will see other companies doing things differently.

"The world will be split between different users of cars, typologies of cars, that I don't think there will be one universal solution. That never worked, apart from the Swiss knife, maybe," he says.

It's a cogent argument from both leaders of industry, but money talks and cost will be the ultimate decider as cars become moving objects that require no more interaction than verbalising where you want to go. "To the organic frozen yoghurt repository!"

Cheaper, more homogenous cars will dominate.

American-born Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, sees it differently to his European colleagues.

He likens cars of future cars to laptops or cell phones. They'll all look pretty much the same but some will have more computing power than others. And they'll be far more disposable.

He says car-sharing will occur out of necessity as the population – and number of cars on the road – explodes.

"A little bit more than 10 years from now there will be another billion people that come into society," he said.

"It's estimated we're going to increase traffic by a factor of three -- three times -- from the 15 trillion miles travelled each year to over 40 trillion miles per year."

As cars become autonomous and crash-less – in theory – safety systems car be removed. Expensive, complex passive and active safety systems and high-strength safety cells can be ditched and vehicles will become cheap and disposable.

Progress, my friends, is going to make the car of the future a soulless homogenous blob.

I personally hope there's always some cool, emotional stuff for enthusiasts – and I reckon there will be – but for better or worse mainstream cars will probably turn into one-use commodities.

Enjoy this golden era while you can.