We may use empty vehicles during the day, for instance, to drop off packages, or to pick up things from stores-on-wheels. What happens to mobility in the next 15 years? There is a great deal of talk about how car-sharing will save space (we only use 4% of roadway surfaces even during peak transit times), reduce waste (less pollution and fewer idle vehicles) and cost (by up to $100 billion a year in fuel) and reshape the urban experience, but what if platooning cars could also help reconnect us with other people? Let’s go for a ride and find out.”
Comment on Facebook We’re betting those stay the same—that humans will still need to sleep, to eat, to work, and to move from place to place. That last part is what we’re interested in here. “We’re definitely thinking about vehicles as a much more social space, where you could have face to face conversation and socialize in a much richer way while you’re in transit.”
Imagine, too, destination events – a sort of next-generation tailgating – in which the spaces of the vehicles used to take you to and from a place become temporary spaces inhabited or otherwise utilized by those same attendees, rather than dead loads to be dropped off. Beyond that, though, we might come together in new and different ways, too, at portable parklets, coworking space and open-space offices that migrate, congregate and dissolve on demand. With legislation in place to keep wheels in cars for the foreseeable future, there may be intermediate steps. But our basic needs? More of us will live to be 100. Stuff will get faster and cheaper. Still, none of these ideas are a particularly radical departure from the present, just a natural extension of how we already socialize, carpool and use public transit.
