There Will Be Self-Driving Apartments

This week Business Insider predicted that there will be ten million self-driving cars by the end of this decade. That sounds ambitious, but their estimates include vehicles which are mostly automated but still require a person behind the wheel. Regardless, I would be surprised if my own unborn children ever need to learn to drive a car–it’ll all be robots twenty years from now. Here’s what’s interesting–we can project what we’d like now onto that distant future. But it’ll be a whole different paradigm in two decades. For example, right now we can infer that vehicular deaths will drop precipitously as drunk driving and human error plummet. And we can fantasize about taking a nap on the way to or from work, or all that real estate freed up by the end of parking garages (your car will find a spot while you’re at work, or you could even rent it out as a robot taxi until you’re ready). One group is thinking about entire mobile rooms. Picture a modular component of your house, perhaps the size of a minivan but tall enough to stand in. Now imagine this “room” detaches from your home every day and drives itself to your office, where it re-attaches at work. You could field phone calls en route while seated at your desk. Or, say you wanted to drive from New York to Los Angeles. Your spare bedroom would become your very own personal sleeper car. The room could pop off your house when you tell it to, then drive non-stop to California, taking only bathroom and fuel breaks. Or perhaps sleepovers will become the vogue again, when we realize we can affix our bedroom to a friend’s house temporarily instead of sprawling out on their futon.

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