Incidentally…

We almost forgot about this one, but TRACE wasn’t the first time that the idea of a three wheeler crossed our minds; some twenty odd years ago we dis a bit of sketching. The concept could not have been more different though..

The real reason though for this post however is a slightly different one, some thoughts we had after reading a few interesting articles about the future of the automobile. It is safe to say that changes are heading our way. What changes and how the (near) future will look like, that’s hotly debated and there are a lot of theories and concepts around.

There are technical questions, such as the propulsion issue, since it’s just a matter of time that the internal combustion engine will become obsolete. Will it be electric or will it be hydrogen? Or something completely different?

And then there are questions touching the very core of the society we live in. The idea the cars might fly one day is (with a few exceptions) pretty much off the table, but there seems to be a consensus that the car of the future will be self-driving and will ‘integrate better in our life’. And that’s where the alarm bells should be ringing… Don’t get us wrong, having a self driving car should be immensely practical. It means that we can have a drink when going out and our car will bring us home safely. And then of course it means that particularly elderly people can be more mobile even though they’re not fit for driving any more. In general we can agree that self driving cars can make traffic safer, too.

However, we are wondering: A self-driving car allows us to get from location A to location B without us having to do any active driving. It means we have time for so many other things, like… indeed, good question. But maybe we don’t even need to go to location B, because technology allows us to do whatever we wanted to do remotely from where are are. Or maybe technology allows us to completely ignore whatever needs doing in location B because some clever device will do it for us? And then we have even more time to do… what exactly?

And how does that ‘better integration’ look like that was mentioned earlier? Oh yes, we can be online all the time and do fun things online, such as chatting, updating our Facebook status, playing games and buying things. And that’s what we fear the great vision for the future looks like, that Apple and Google and other technology companies are busy developing for us: A future where we don’t need to do much and have more time to consume.

We think that somehow we are busy designing ourselves out of the picture. We are making ourselves obsolete. But is that really the future we want?