The Car of the Future: It Talks, It Thinks, and It Can Drive Itself

Monday morning, August 17, 2020, and you're off to work. You hop into the driver's seat, which, like the cabin temperature, is adjusted precisely to your liking. Even though your daughter used it to go to a friend's house last night, the car knows it's you driving now. So the satellite radio has switched from R&B (your daughter's favorite) to your preferred all-news station. The car's electric motor runs on hydrogen, and has already been topped off, automatically, from an appliance in your garage. So far, so good.

You glide onto the freeway ramp and decide to get a jump on the workweek. Setting the automatic pilot, you call up the office e-mail through the on-board computer. Guided by advanced cruise control, GPS, and sensors embedded in the roadway, the car stays in its lane, maintains a safe distance from other vehicles, and alerts you to your exit. Once in the parking lot, you check the fuel gauge and figure you've got more than enough juice to make it home. So you plug into the city's power grid to feed it electricity generated by your car -- for which you'll get an energy credit later on.

Sounds great, doesn't it? What this cheery vision of a morning commute hides is a growing sense of urgency on the part of the world's automakers. The current model for making and selling cars in the United States -- big vehicles with big fuel tanks and sky-high costs -- has almost driven the auto industry off the road. No one's predicting that gasoline prices will come down dramatically anytime soon, if ever. The pollution and energy consumption, plus the traffic, created by so many cars will simply force the industry to change.

The questions are what, and how soon. Experts generally agree that we're on the verge of an era of new fuels. "We have to find alternatives," says Larry Burns, vice president of Research and Development and Strategic Planning for General Motors Corp., and one of the industry's most optimistic visionaries. "By 2020, we're expecting 1.1 billion cars and trucks on the planet, compared to 750 million today. Imagine 125 freeway lanes running side by side, bumper to bumper, going all the way around the world."

The leading candidate to replace good old smelly gasoline is hydrogen, the most plentiful and available element on the planet. No one geographical region has a monopoly on it -- so there's little chance of a production cartel, like OPEC. And in theory at least, hydrogen will deliver superior fuel efficiency with no air pollution. Already, the major automakers are working on hydrogen-fed fuel cells. Demonstration hydrogen-powered vehicles are on the roads, and Burns predicts real consumers will be behind the wheels by 2010.

Others, however, believe hydrogen cars are much further in the future, maybe even a half-century away. For starters, the fuel cells made with today's technology are hugely expensive. Science knows how to make them -- just not how to make them cheaply. Add to that the lack of a hydrogen-fueling infrastructure, and technical difficulties of storing and handling hydrogen, and you're looking at years of work ahead.

"Fundamentally, we see no game-changing technology available by 2020," says Bob Rivard, vice president of Advanced Technology and Product Marketing for automotive supplier Robert Bosch Corp. "We'll see evolutionary steps, not a paradigm shift." Among the stages he envisions are cleaner, more fuel-efficient gasoline-powered vehicles, along with alternative fuels and new propulsion systems. Gasoline-electric hybrids, like the Toyota Prius, Ford Escape, and Honda Civic and Insight, will be more common. "As much as we'd like to be getting around in flying saucers, the reality is that by 2020 we'll still be driving vehicles that use fossil fuels," says Mary Ann Wright, Ford Motor Co.'s director of Sustainable Mobility Technologies and Hybrid Vehicle Programs. "But I do think there will come a point in time when every vehicle will have some kind of hybrid technology."

Within the next decade, expect to see more clean diesel-powered engines, like those available from Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz. These vehicles are up to 40 percent more fuel-efficient than gasoline cars, and produce about 15 percent less carbon dioxide. The downside of diesel? Oxides of nitrogen -- known as NOx -- are potent irritants. Other new gasoline replacements to watch for: biofuel and biodiesel, and natural gas.

If there's disagreement over just what will power the car of the future, there's no debate about how cool the actual vehicles will be -- very, very cool. Electronic functions, driver preferences, wireless connectivity -- it's all in the pipeline, coming at us fast. Picture this: It's 2020 and you're driving home from work on the freeway. But there are no road signs anywhere, not for stores, gas stations, restaurants or even the local exits and interchanges. There's no need for them -- your car's computer keeps you oriented and on track. (It also knows the speed limit, so you'll have no excuses with the local cop.) Can't recall if you need milk for breakfast? Your car's computer contacts your home inventory system to check. Sure enough, you need milk -- and OJ too. The interactive systems take over. Your car spots a convenience store at the next exit and zaps your grocery list ahead. When you arrive, everything is bagged and ready for pickup.

"By 2020, it will no longer be a big deal to have Internet connectivity almost anywhere, anytime," says K. Venkatesh Prasad, technical leader in Ford's Infotronics Technologies Department. He notes that the youngest of the year 2020's new generation of car buyers is about three years old right now. "That means everyone coming into the auto market will have known nothing but the Internet, and he or she will take it for granted," he says. Far-fetched? Prasad thinks no more so than what was once another radical idea -- distributing money from machines called ATMs.

Original here