Hello and welcome to NerdSanctum, today we
will be talking about the current news about
smart cars and self-driving cars and what
this means for the future.
Recently a lot has been happening for both
smart and self-driving cars.
At this years Consumer Electronics Show or
CES we saw numerous car manufactures take
the stage with prototype concept vehicles.
BMW, Mercedez-Benz, Audi, and Volkswaken all
showed progress in building the next generation
of cars.
BMW’s car could be paired with a mobile
app or smart watch which would enable your
car to drive out of a parking space and pick
up you up anywhere all by itself.
Volkswagen also had automated parking abilities;
but this technology isn’t really new, feel
free to check out a video I already made covering
self-parking apps like Valeo.
Audi’s car drove itself 550 miles to CES
in Las Vegas from San Francisco; but that’s
nothing compared to the 700k+ miles Google’s
self-driving cars have covered.
One presentation I did find impressive though
was Mercedez-Benz.
They had a car that drove itself onto the
stage and boasts lots of immersive electronics
and smart technologies.
They had lots of digital dashboards surrounding
the car, gesture recognition, and in general
they made the car feel like a living room.
It’s a luxurious experience that you relax,
possibly socialize, and don’t even pay attention
to where the car’s going.
But on-top of that one exciting announcement
that should be a headline is that Google is
now in serious discussions about providing
it’s proprietary automated car technology
to car manufacturers.
These partnerships will kick-start companies
progress by years and make automated vehicles
a lot closer to reality.
Now with that in mind, lets look forward to
what this means for the future.
Some people predict billions of dollars saved
in productivity.
Imagine deliveries, both small personal ones
and large commercial tractor-trailers being
automated and not needing drivers.
Google has already been doing personal deliveries
in the Bay Area of CA for years now, so I
don’t see this being a big change.
They could even do taxis too, which is probably
VERY likely because Google invested $250 million
into Uber; one of its largest investments
ever.
Of course this will temporarily disrupt the
employment market, but it will eventually
move elsewhere and stabilize.
Overall I think this is a very interesting
topic to follow through 2015; Google’s technology
is tested, reliable, and easily integratable
so I’d like to see what and how fast other
companies use their work, and how we as a
society react to becoming even more dependent
on tech in the future.
But anyways how do you think automated cars
will affect our future, let me know down in
the comments below?
As always thanks for watching and until next
time have a good day!
