Designers conjure up wacky 'car of the future' The Mike & Maaike design studio is well known for its work on HTC’s G1 Android-based phone and the Xbox 360. Now it has turned its attention to thinking how the car of tomorrow will look and operate. ATNMBL_04 M&M's ATNMBL: the car of tomorrow? The ATNMBL - short for Autonomobile, apparently, though it seems more like a …
...I'm really looking forward to entrusting my life into the hands of the car's software programmers, and loving the idea of doing away with seatbelts and those horrid airbags. A car run by GPS is going to be rendered completely useless if the US ever start a war and scramble the GPS signal. Oh and it looks like it hit every branch when it fell out the Fugly Tree.
Not without merit... however would never happen like that as apart from anything else the Health and Safety brigade would rather that we were strapped in place using webbing harnesses and then spray mounted in foam. Actually sitting comfortably and not stressing about the journey is the least of their concerns. Of course, the little issue of motion sickness would be a serious one...
In any case, whack ideas are good - they push boundaries and sometimes useful parts of them even make it out into the real world.
*face palms* Seriously? Will all of the world's so-called futurists just go ahead and *die* already?
This is, hand down, the God-Damned ugliest piece of shit anything that I have ever seen. It looks like someone put a glass shower stall on its side and jammed some wheels on it.
Epic fail, go directly to jail, and fuck right off "Mike & Maaike".
But where is the toilet, I don't want to sit in a living room without a toilet. Maybe there could be a trailer for that.
Oh yus, the trailer of the future for the "Living room on wheels" of the future. Other possible trailers could be:
Beer fridge trailer
Pizza oven trailer
Roaring fireplace trailer (For the winter)
Television with footie on it trailer
Snooker table trailer (May get tricky around corners)
Anyhoo, you get the idea, think "Living room" then think what else you would like near or in one.
Beer, from the Beer Fridge Trailer Of The Future TM!
So in the future, we can look forward to forgetting almost everything we know about...
- Aerodynamics
- Passive safety
- Suspension (is there *any* allowance for wheel travel in that car?)
And what a big room made of glass is normally used for, particularly on sunny days. (Hint: it doesn't involve the comfort of warm-blooded occupants.)
I suppose the "but... but... but... it's full of TECHNOLOGY!" driving-itself bit was added as an afterthought when they realised it was fundamentally rubbish in every other aspect? I suppose when you think about it, it would *have* to drive itself. Nobody else would want to.
There doesn't seem to be any engineering basis or reasoning behind why a car would look like that. It's pure speculation - which sounds like an art project to me. I wonder how they get funding to create these designs..
It would be ok if they introduced some ideas of what a car should look like, but they haven't. That mockup doesn't seem to address issues of aerodynamics, cornering and accelerative forces on occupants, where the energy storage will be, how the vehicle will behave in a crash...
I mean, how will you seen what's on the TV with a large window infront and behind it? Why would you have a TV in the first place, when there's a large glass panel you could make your display (this is 2040 after all. They have windows that are also 150" monitors. That are touchscreen.)
I agree with Chris 219. It looks just like the JohnnyCab from Total Recall. It will never be built. I'm hoping that by 2040 we'll all be teleporting wherever we want to go like in Niven's Known Space stories. Otherwise, we won't have to worry about seatbelts, aerodynamics, or any of that rubbish because the roads will all be in a state of perpetual gridlock and nothing will be able to go more than 2-3 mph, if you're lucky. So you better well have a living room on wheels, with a bathroom, beer fridge, and other nourishment, because by the time your morning commute is over, it'll be time to start back home again.
It's nice to see that we will still be living in souless rectangular concrete houses, and enjoying a largely subterranian existence, in passageways painted with hazard-warning colours. Furthermore, The Haircut Of The Future looks like it will be so bloody awful that even goths will have finally found a reason for looking so miserable. The Future's Black: The Future's Gothic!
The country ground to a halt today as every 'wacky car of last year' spontaneously attempted to drive around the M25 whilst playing "I'm on a road to no where...." at full volume. Motorists trapped in their cars are advised to conserve food and water and hope that a plan can be made to rescue them before they die of starvation.
+1 point for a design that's not claustrophobic.
Epic fail for aesthetics, suspension, aerodynamics, safety, comfort, privacy, personal freedom, and not realizing that amusement park trams suck. The design studio only needs to add a beanbag and detachable scooter to the design to complete their dot-bomb failure.
There's a certain pleasure in driving yourself, controlling the machine, enjoying the curves in the road and going through the gears. This passionless piece of crap may be great for people that would otherwise take the bus, and for getting around when intoxicated, but that's about it.
And it's about as likely to actually be produced as the "flying cars" that everyone was predicted in 1950 to be driving by the year 2000.
The safety comes from all the passengers sitting on giant dildos, stopping them sliding off the seats when cornering or slowing down (or even after they lose all motor control after realising what they just wanked away all their money on)
On a more topical note: I've been to the future the new cars have less wheels and more propellers. And life vests.
The plus sides to this design are: it looks light. And, er, it's nice to look out of a window while being driven around.
There's a reason all cars currently look mostly the same: they work, they're efficient (spatially) and they don't require a whole fucking car park to themselves.
A fold out car would be far better, small parking footprint, expandable to meet needs, requires lightweight materials though. Or crazy nano-shit that morphs around you and jets you off like the Rocketeer.
Nothing in the quoted design is technically infeasible now, it could be built. They have BWMs that drive by radar and infrared, add gps and voice recognition and off you go.
Still, nice renders
it's awful. There's no engineering information, justification or anything behind it that I've found. It's produced by a company whose website's startpage is a single line of text that can't fit properly on my screen without scrolling.
It also completely removes any possibility of the owner, say, going to see the countryside. Or driving to the south of France for a holiday (roll on August!). Which means we'll end up with even more people complaining of there being no greenery left in Britain when they really mean "in London, which I've never left by road nor rail".
The solar cells will- unless there's a massive (and I mean perpetual-motion level massive) improvement in photovoltaic tech in the next few decades- be of very little use. Especially with the extra passenger temperature control (lots of glass, big doors) and other tech (TVs, dimmable windows, vast computing power). And according to their website the screen can slide up to reveal a bar. Which means the drinks will have to be kept cool all the time.
As someone else has pointed out above there's nowhere for the wheels to go. The wheels are tiny, meaning that small bumps will be felt more- and also increasing the number of revolutions needed to cover a certain distance, increasing wear. As for their claimed improvements in "efficiency" have they heard of aerodynamics?
Also, it looks very much like you can't see where you're actually going, just to the side of where you are. And what if you don't know where you're going? You know, if you're looking out for a business whose name you can't remember- but you'll know it when you see it.
And they appear to be pushing hub motors as a new, innovative tech when Porsche did it about a hundred and eleven years ago.
Well, leaving aside the hideous design, does voice control really appeal to anyone other than science-fiction writers who need characters to speak commands so that the audience will know what is being asked of the computer? Cars are like tools - physically operated and thus regarded by the brain as an extension of the body, and consequently much more controlled and controllable.
But, of course, that depends on understanding why cars exist - usually because there isn't any public transit or because the driver wants more personal control. Something like that monstrosity, where you step in and say where you want to go, is basically personalized public transit, and if there are going to be advances, one hopes it's there (energy efficiency, etc). For anyone who wants their own personal transport vehicle under their own personal control, voice commands might make sense for computing on the go, but mostly just seem stupid.
I'm glad that there are people out there prepared to think for longer than 2 seconds about what the future of private transport may look like and serve as. Because, judging from the pathetic comments from the utter cretins above, we would still be sitting in nothing more advanced than a 1900 Daimler. Clueless luddites. The world turns round the sun you know. It's not flat either. And there are no witches beyond Hereford too.
When you've stopped picking at the scabs of your knuckles from where they've been scraping the ground, just try and think for a moment. Consider the stress and risk placed on you and other people when you mindlessly travel from point to point, demonstrating to the world your substandard abilities behind the wheel. Try and think about the fact that driving for pleasure went sailing out the window in most countries many years ago. Consider that all those hours you waste being bored, annoyed and embarrassed could be spent doing something productive in work, family or social perspectives. Now you may begin to understand that vehicles in the future will change. Not necessarily into this Utopian greyboxmobile (emotive needs of owners will be pandered to, which sadly means we will be suffering the delicate egos of BMW owners for some time to come for example), but as a carriage to take you to another place in safety while allowing you to get on with other tasks at the same time.
So before you embark yet again with your parrot squawkings on software/crashes/fugly/ (what is this abomination of the language? Grow up for heaven's sake!) I-have-no-brain-and-so-will-compare-to-my-1997-Mondeo, do try to understand the wider context of personal transport. Or better still, have a go at creating a vision yourself with the crayons your mummy gave you yesterday.
Rant over? I haven't even started sunshine.
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