Not to be outdone by my friend and colleague Omar Rahim, who posted last week about what’s happening with automotive technology – I am not quite a car buff, but I do have a couple of soft spots when it comes to cars – I wanted to add my two-cents, based on some work that our partner Texas Instruments has done on “Driving the Future.”
The video linked here is as good as anything I’ve seen on what the future of driving will look like. Akin to concept cars, this is a concept video of what the automobile experience can be like in the future. I don’t know how many of these ideas will show up in production cars, but it’s sure fun to think about.
It touches on the camera/vision areas that Omar wrote about, and also gets into some of the other very interesting technology that may be in place. Things like biometric security, so that the doors will only open for the right people. Personalization, so that the ride is customized for each individual – temp, seat position, etc. Virtual dashboards, which are very cool.
They also demonstrate sensing technology that could inform you if you’ve left something on the roof. In the video, it was a coffee mug, but I understand that it can be something else. (Ok, I confess, I once left a customer site with my iPad on the roof of the car. After driving half an hour I realized what may have happened and returned to the scene of the crime to find my iPad destroyed in the roadway!)
Although assisted parking has been around for a while, I particularly liked the demonstration of automatic parallel parking that occurs when the driver is completely out of the car. Not that I want folks to forget how to use this important skill. But there are plenty of people who have to parallel park so rarely that they end up with two wheels on the sidewalk, and the hood of the car halfway into the street.
For those interested in more details on what the future of driving looks like, here’s a link to a paper, “Driving the Future: TI’s Automotive Perspectives 2013.” It’s obviously written from TI’s point of view, but it gives a pretty broad overview of where technology will be taking our cars and driving experience in the not-so-distant future.