I’ve just seen an interesting interview on GMnext and it got me thinking. Dr Chris Borroni-Bird was being interviewed by Mark Frauenfelder of boingboing fame about the design freedoms that upcoming automotive innovation could bring. Dr Borroni-Bird is working on prototype fuel cell vehicles at GM and he just talked about two themes:

1. Safety

2. Environment

In terms of safety, Dr Borroni-Bird predicted that this rather unsexy subject would get sexy, first with much more in the area of active safety and ultimately in autonomous driving vehicles. In terms of active safety, I’ve seen some rather good technology demonstrations from Philips a couple of years ago with up to six different objects being tracked in real time as the car travelled down a crowded street. It even tracked parked cars and alerted you if one started to move into your path. Pretty cool. Dr Borroni-Bird said that the whole experience of travelling by car is due to be transformed and the driver will be freed up to do other things like work on his computer, watch movies and even sleep. He asked what cars would be like when they no longer had to meet crash legislation. He wondered what would happen to car design when cars were zero emissions and so no longer needed to comply with emissions legislation.

I guess the legislation will switch to reducing the environmental impact involved in making the car and disposing of it. It is possible that cars in future could become far more mimimal without the need to protect the occupants from collision, reducing environmental impact and making the vehicle more “ideal” in TRIZ terms. It is possible that cars may become more durable and customised to the specific owner’s requirements to reduce energy invested and may even be able to have radical updates for important changes such as new additions to the family, in the same way as houses have extensions added now. The entertainment and comfort elements of the vehicle will need to be optimised from the point of view of environmental impact, perhaps some of this funtionality could be delegated to the surrounding static infrastructure. Combining the future vehicle vision with the ambient intelligence vision of distributed access to context sensitive computer capability and information, I can see a time when I could be travelling through the countryside with a display overlaying the exterior scene and highlighting information specifically for my interest profile. I’ll bet there will still be adverts though. �