The automobile of the future

摘要

What will motoring be like 100 years from now? What sort of vehicles will we be driving? And will there even be any cars in the year 2104? Maybe the Delphic Oracle could answer these questions; we humans certainly cannot. What is sure is that nothing will seem more outdated in the future than the predictions we make today—at least, that is, if we dare look too far into the decades and centuries ahead. A brief look at the past reveals that focusing too far into the future can often turn out to be far too short-sighted. Take the notorious example of European futur-ologists who in the 19th century quite rightly concluded that mobility and travel would continually increase for an ever-growing number of people as time progressed. Their forecast was based on the knowledge available to them at the time, meaning it was based on apparent logic. The predicted dramatic increase in travel and in the movement of goods inevitably led them to presume that there would be an ever-larger number of horse-drawn vehicles in use. In 100 years, they therefore presumed, urban centers would be inundated to the point of suffocation with horse dung. As things turned out, the car was invented in the meantime and horses were led back to the stables. Such is the possible outcome when we underestimate the kind of potential the future holds.