Is my teacher correct when he said this about the future of transportation?

Question

He said that in the future, we will have no use for the steering wheel. All vehicles will be compact. They will constantly be communicating to the GPS system the vehicles speed, location, and direction. We simply select our destination on a map. The vehicle will use GPS to take us the most convenient route. We won't have windows because our vehicles will do some crazy stuff, driving on the left side of the street, running stop lights, and zooming between 2 other vehicles at 70 mph, because hey... all vehicles will be in constant sync with each other to avoid collision. Just in case the system does fail, your vehicle will stop in the middle of the road. All surrounding vehicles will be alerted to maneuver our your vehicle (similar to how a car breaks down on the side of the road). Older human-steered vehicle will have GPS attached to their car so that all the GPS system can locate them. They will be the only ones required to follow traffic laws.

The system will use the smartest most convenient way to get us all to our destination.

Answer 1

Close, very close.

The steering wheel will not be needed on the highway, but you will always have a steering wheel for manual drive mode; see the movies "I Robot" and "Minority Report" for examples.

Computers can move traffic much more efficiently, avoiding accidents and individually tracking each car (via GPS). Magnetic strips planet in the road as a guide have been experimented with since the 1970s. The car on autodrive will follow the magnetic strips embedded in the road to stay in the lane, the car's computer will track it's position and course with GPS, it will use ultrasound or radar to avoid collisions and it will send radio signals to other cars to get permission to change lanes without impact. Note how the car does it all, not some central director.

Already Greyhound Buses have a radar sensor for the driver's right side blind spot. If the bus tries to steer into that lane with a car there the radar will sound a warning.

There is a luxury car that will automatically parallel park your car for you, it uses a computer, and simple radar sensors to make sure it can fit into the space and to put it there without having an accident and without having the driver do more than push a button.

However, there will always be new roads or dirt roads that are not marked or well traveled on. For those roads you will need a steering wheel.

The technology your teacher is talking about exists today and with just a few minor refinements, we could start the system tomorrow and it would help a lot with the traffic problems because it would compact the traffic floor, prevent accidents, allow the drivers to do something other than drive and it could handle faster speeds and make faster corrections than a human driver could. The car in autodrive mode would know when an intersection was coming up and a simple camera could monitor the traffic light so it would never run the light or make any errors. Stop signs would be coded in the car's navigation database; we already have palm sized devices that can handle that.

The problem is having a car drive itself with just GPS plotted points is difficult, it was done with last year’s DARPA Challenge, but the year before that all the entries failed. It is hard to teach a computer the difference between road signs and other things on the side of the road, exactly where curbs and what medians are, and several other things. So the technology isn’t quite mature enough, but it will be soon; say 5-10 years. Conversion to that system would be another matter though.

Answer 2

They are totally wrong about the windows. This far in the future, people will be used to the "scarey" maneuvers a car will make when driving itself. Some may even like it. You would probably have the option to blank out the windows if you like, but only because you would prefer to watch TV or chat over the Internet. The windows will still be there.

This kind of technology will work better for flying cars. All they have to do is avoid things on the ground and each other. A car on the surface has too many other things to avoid. The only reason we don't have flying cars, is that it's too dangerous if the engine fails. Airplanes and helicopters can generally land safely if the engine fails. Direct thrust aircraft cannot.

Want to see are really cool flying machine? Check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAWVt13K2bM

Can you tell me why this is so special?

Answer 3

Though this is theoretically possible, there are several reasons why this will never happen. First of all, other cars are not the only things on the road you need to avoid; there are pedestrians, potholes, animals, and all sorts of debris a GPS system will know nothing about. Also, people enjoy driving. Back in the 1950's, futurists believed that in the 21st century we wouldn't eat food anymore, just pills. What they didn't take into consideration is that people enjoy eating food more than pills, so even though people eat a lot of supplements now, restaurants and grocery stores are in no danger of going out of business. As for windows, people like to see where they're going. Trains, planes, buses, and even subway cars have windows just because of this.

Answer 4

Wow, that is futuristic, but the ability to be guided by gps may possibly be wrong. Some guidance and controls will be localized and restricted to certain areas. Most central information and guidance systems are closed systems that eliminate variables that can cause chaos. I don't think there will ever be a foolproof way to allow direct and independant human guidance because of the varibles in which uncontroled drivers will introduce into the system.

Answer 5

I belive your teacher is correct. There are already cars that have no sterring wheel because you can simply pick a destination. But I think that your tacher mayb be a little off in the rest of the future car. I think it will be a very long time before cars are fully automated by a computer.

Answer 6

What happens if a large dog gets loose and starts running around in this traffic? IMHO, there is fundamental missing element in futuristic ideas like this using computers. No one has yet figured out how to program common sense. It is not possible to anticipate everything that can go wrong. Humans just deal with it when it happens. The program for a computer has to anticipate every contingency.

Answer 7

They said something about that on a show called Future Cars but said it was years away they would have to put gps sensors in all the roads ect.

Answer 8

While I do believe that one day we will have cars that do all that by themselves, I don't think that we will ever get rid of the steering wheel. We may shrink it down to almost nothing and only use it in emergencies, but humans always like to have that little bit of control.

Answer 9

There are already cars that can parallel park themselves. Of course, when I was a child in the 50's we were told that by 2000 everyone would have a flying car sort of like in the Jetsons.

Answer 10

it sounds feasible, the technology probably already exists, just a matter of time til it's in full public use.
I do think gas powered internal combustion engines will become not only obsolete, but possibly even illegal in the future.