7 Comments
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Auspicious's avatar

Brilliant ideas! I am very bullish about the future of self-driving cars, and I'm sure at least some of these ideas will get implemented in the next few decades.

J.K. Lundblad's avatar

I am too. Imaging being able to sleep on a long car journey....like your own personal train.

Vince Beiser's avatar

Nice work, Sam. I did some similar writing about what life would be like without gas stations: https://powermetal.substack.com/i/154912880/goodbye-gas-stations-hello-homes-and-gardens

J.K. Lundblad's avatar

I will check this our Vince. Thank you. I try to feature radical ideas like this all the time.

Traversing Futures's avatar

Lots of great speculation and ideas here! Amazing.

I do feel it overlooks that private car ownership, and thus the need to park at all, will likely all but disappear. At least, I think that it stops making sense to own a car (with the burden of insurance, taxes, repairs etc) if subscription schemes and hail apps ensure a car shows up whenever you need one - and then drives off to serve someone else. So we'd only need charging spots, no parking spots :)

Pranav Krishnan's avatar

Loved reading this! It's tantalizing that we'll see the first real aspect of a 'sci-fi' future (apart from smartphones and nascent AI) start to take shape in a decade or less.

Californian's avatar

I don't know about this. Especially not in the sclerotic, car-brained United States. Pedestrian walkways? My utopian city vision has humans walking at ground level! Something like the originally envisioned EPCOT, or Culdesac in Tempe, Arizona, pen with cars for transporting individuals on the outside of super blocks with human scale transport on the inside.