If you look at at typical car of today, it’s built with a seemingly endless number of considerations and technological achievements involved. Whether it’s the dashboard’s impressive infotainment features, the heating elements in the windscreen, or the aerodynamics of the exterior for performance purposes. However a lot of them are there to keep us safe, such as airbags, crumple zones, support beams and many more and all of them influence the shape, size and function of the vehicle as a whole.
However what happens when automated cars take over and we no longer need to be concerned with crashes? Chances are there will still be the odd unexpected bump, but for the sake of an exercise, let’s consider that driving is no longer dangerous at all. Nobody crashes, ever.
What might the cars look like then?
That’s something that artist and designer Dominic Wilcox has been playing with and he’s designed a car purely designed around sleeping, with a beautiful cathedral-like, stain-glass roof and sides.
Image source: Sylvain Deleu
It’s a pretty stunning idea for a car, with a built in bed and little else. While a vehicle like this would be unlikely designed with speed in mind – just think of the amount of dead bugs on the front of that thing – it would be a very comfortable way to get somewhere long distance. If you’re sleeping the whole way, it wouldn’t matter if it took eight hours.
While Wilcox isn’t convinced this is exactly what the future will bring, he does see driverless cars becoming very commonplace:
“In fact, there could well be motorways on which only driverless cars are allowed,” he said (via The Guardian).
This design of his was unveiled back in September at the London Design Festival, where Wilcox explained the idea as one that was simple to come up with, because once you stripped out all of the features of current cars that are related to control and safety, then all you have are some reclining seats and an entertainment system. Why not make a beautiful bedroom on wheels?
Other concepts for the driverless car he’s mulled over include a hot-tub car, a sun-bed car and one that includes a small cocktail bar, though you would imagine that any hard braking would cause a lot of problems for at least two of those ideas.
His designs are certainly very different looking from projections we’ve seen in past films and TV shows about what the future will be like. However it’s become an increasingly common trend that technology of the future, will fade into the background and become absorbed by society rather than dominate it.
Do you think that’s a future we can look forward to? Or are we still heading towards something more akin to Minority Report, with aluminum everywhere?
