IBM recently released a study into where the automotive industry is heading over the next 12 years, in collaboration with 125 heads of industry running the business today.
Key points, from the summaries I found plastered everywhere:
- Consumers will want more flexibility. Why own a city car AND an SUV, when you can only ever drive one at a time? Future ownership models will see you hand in your weekday car keys to swap it over for a weekend trip.
- Intelligent vehicles that make transport simple. Think: just get in and tell it where you want to go. (This is one close to my heart, since with the trend to multitasking, I believe distraction is going to result in more crashes and fatalities over time. Why not have the car do the driving, communicating with a central traffic system to take care of picking the best route etc, while you check your blackberry, listening to your mp3. For those drivers already doing this while they drive as well, please avoid the roads I’m likely to be on.)
- Integration - have the car of the future able to link up with the train you catch long distance. Facilitate Multi-mode travel, in other words, so you can pick the right vehicle/ transport option for the leg of the journey you’re on.
- Collaboration. Reading between the lines, this means that electronics and other industry technology are probably going to have to move to some kind of open source model. That or they’ll have defined standards set by a central authority, much like the html standards in the early days of the internet. Like that, I wouldn’t be surprised to see additional non-standard functions built in for competitive advantage - like IE recognised some commands that weren’t standard, Netscape had its own, and neither would work on the ‘wrong’ browser until they were incorporated into later html standards.
I haven’t read the entire details of the study, but it seems to me that if the heads of 125 automotive manufacturers and industry leaders (I didn’t know there were that many big auto companies) all agree that the current private transport model is not going to last the next 12 years, it’s probably a good bet that it’s already well on the way out.
Posted on August 22nd 2008 in Alternative Personal Transport, Future Alternative Vehicles, Future Alternative Vehicles News
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