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posted by martyb on Monday November 13 2017, @11:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-prefer-the-Age-of-Aquarius dept.

Bob Lutz, former General Motors Vice Chair, opines:

It saddens me to say it, but we are approaching the end of the automotive era.

The auto industry is on an accelerating change curve. For hundreds of years, the horse was the prime mover of humans and for the past 120 years it has been the automobile.

Now we are approaching the end of the line for the automobile because travel will be in standardized modules.

The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you'll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway.
...
The vehicles, however, will no longer be driven by humans because in 15 to 20 years — at the latest — human-driven vehicles will be legislated off the highways.

The tipping point will come when 20 to 30 percent of vehicles are fully autonomous. Countries will look at the accident statistics and figure out that human drivers are causing 99.9 percent of the accidents.

Is he right? Is the age of the automobile coming to an end?


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  • (Score: 1) by WillR on Monday November 13 2017, @05:24PM (2 children)

    by WillR (2012) on Monday November 13 2017, @05:24PM (#596322)
    Mate, nobody younger than you even experienced "the good times" in the first place. They ended with the oil crisis, and by the time you guys dragged engine technology forward to a point where we could have horsepower (and speed limits above 55) again in the 90s, there were too damn many people on the road to enjoy driving.
  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 13 2017, @07:25PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 13 2017, @07:25PM (#596390) Journal

    That happened before the oil crisis, depending on where you lived. In fact, depending on where you lived the "open road" was gone by the early 1950's. Even when it existed it was always the "property" of a small minority. In the late 1950's I lived in a rural setting, and there we generally had an "open road"...but not always even then. (I couldn't legally drive, but that didn't keep me from observing.) Our current ideas of the "open road" are largely the creation of Madison Avenue.

    Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman was about the time of the Civil War, say the 1860's plus or minus a bit, but what he was talking about was travel by foot, and at that time travel and travail were the same word. And again, this "open road" was the property of a small minority, mainly vagrants, though I believe there were still some "mountain men" and other hunters.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @02:56AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @02:56AM (#596631)

    I'm old enough to remember "No Speed Limit" signs in California. I remember paying $0.35 per gallon for gas and thinking it was steep. I remember hearing my parents talk about the long Sunday drives they used to take for entertainment and how I thought that was such a stupid idea. Driving for entertainment on a perfectly good Sunday afternoon? Even back in the 60s and 70s driving had become a bit of a chore for a lot of us. Personally, I look forward to the day I get get in a vehicle and order a destination then sit back and relax. If that service existed I'd donate my car to charity right now.

    I am skeptical though. Haven't there been a few reports in the past month or two about how the so-called autonomous vehicles are a lot more limited than we're being led to believe?