Today’s generations are so used to having ready and available access to vehicles that they often have little to no appreciation of the great strides that earlier generations took to bring automobiles to fruition. Everything from the way the steering wheel shifts the car’s position, to driver navigation work together to forge a driving experience that is smooth, effective, and timely. So often, we become rapidly accustomed to the luxuries that are afforded to us, and we do not often enough appreciate how those luxuries came to be. It is a unique trait that is inherently human, and it is one that we would do well to improve upon. This is very much the case when it comes to automotive transport – as once-brand-new features become the norm, their relevance falls further into the background.
The automotive industry has been through many “revolutionary” movements, all of which have come to be regarded as baseline staples in vehicles today. Vehicles are designed and manufactured to get us from A to B, but amid vehicle design, development, and evolution, we have gotten lazy in our pursuit to understand the latest developments in the technology that literally drives us. In-vehicle technology, for example, is one of the most incredible feats of automotive development. This technology literally makes driving even easier, with built-in GPS tech and distance calculation models ingrained in the average vehicle.
Despite this relative ease in automotive transparency, there is a lack of understanding about the direction that the automotive industry is gravitating towards. The vehicles of today are easy to understand – after all, we are so used to them these days. However, the vehicles of future generations will likely be more difficult to understand so easily, because they will be largely (if not completely) removed from human control. The driverless vehicle is well on the way to becoming a stark reality, but it also has a way to go before it achieves this grand feat of technological advancement in the automotive industry.
Years ago, the mere concept of a driverless car seemed impossible, a pipe dream that would never evolve to be more than the dreams built from the movie screens for entertainment purposes. These days, however, this assumption could not be further from the truth. Technological advancement and innovation in the field have resulted in what can only be described as an extraordinary feat of evolution in the automotive industry. Autonomous vehicles are being developed as we speak, and they are closer than most of us think to fruition on the streets. In fact, by 2020 it is expected that autonomous vehicles will have made their way into the market in exceptional ways, bringing to life a concept that was once deemed to be capable of nothing more than simply being a dream.
Technology has disrupted practically every industry in the modern world, but the automotive sector is one of the industries that has the most to gain (or lose) with the relative improvement and innovation of its field at the hands of technological advancement and digitalisation. As the appeal of autonomous vehicles grows stronger and stronger, the likelihood of a future with driverless vehicles has evolved from being an assumption to a near certainty.