What's going to happen to people like us in 50 years?

As long as car video games and movies are being made, there will always be carnuts of all ages. Fast and Furious franchise and Forza/Gran Tursimo games are not letting up and have huge fan followings in young age groups. Young people have a pretty big car following in drifting and imports as well as attending cars and coffee type events. Ownership downtrends in that group are more likely due to low wages and ever increasing costs of car ownership (purchase, maintenance, and insurance).

 

"Classic" cars will be allowed to be driven with special permits at designated times (for example, to attend a charity event) or on tracks. That's about it. They will be considered too dangerous to mix with the hive connected transports people will use to get around. You'll rent these transports by the minute. Very few people will actually own a car.

Gasoline will be needed to be acquired with a special permit also as it will be considered a carcinogen and dangerous to the public.

Even worse, car repair will be a lost art. Few will be around who know what to do with them and electronic parts will be impossible to find. Mechanical parts will be available by 3d printing but will be very expensive.

Just like the horse and buggy, the day of the car as we know it will end also. We are just in the beginning stages of withdrawal.

 

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Let's see. 65 + 50 = 115. Not ma problem mon.

 

Driving will be on tracks. 3d printing will allow for all sorts of cars, look at the enw Dallara road car. However as is mooted in your post, people wont grow up gearheads with easy acess to cars. Driving a car will be a hobby, maybe an expensive less acessable one, so far fewer people will grow up with it. 150 years ago if you grew up in the midwest you grew up with guns, learend how to shoot, its was part of your life, acess was easy and a lot larger percenbtage of the population could shoot and knew guns. If you were a grearhead then maybe you became a locomotove driver. Those gun and locomotive opportunities still exists, but are very rare today and percentage wise less people experience them, but there are other substitutes.
So the gearhead from the mid 1800's their chilldren were car gearheads by ww1.

So how will gearhead kids grow up. For sure there will be less acess to mecahnical cars as we know it, thats already true since the 60s and there are less car gearhead kids today.

Using my son as an example, video games will substitute for a lot. Outddoor adventure sports will cover the physical experience bases. Paragliudign and parrasailing are big now, they didnt exist 30 eyars ago.

There will still be cars, but acess will not be as it is now, other things will substitute for many, and the few car gearheads who remain will be suepr passionate, just like horsey or steam engine people are today.

Hard core car guys, they'll find a way, just as we do now. There will be less of us, but the experience may be better because it will be pure pelasure.

Thermal in Cali is building a whole car town, with racetrack, diner, highway section etc. cars are cool, lots of peopel will liek them, it will just be an expensive and more limited hobby. But then given the population of cars today, even the population of exotics, how many of us are true gearheads.

Even today ask yourself this, on the right day, how many would choose, more accuratly how many would feel compelled by their inner being to take the 512M to get soemwhere over somehting more modern like a 488..

 

Darius,

That is a very interesting question indeed. I have the same questions and, more importantly, the same fears.

However, I believe there is room for hope. By hope I mean some sort of turn of events that somewhat counteracts these trends and half-truths the media sell us as being inevitable (namely electric cars and autonomous cars).

We as a species have to decide something: how badly do we want control? If you remove human control, you remove function. If not totally (like I advocate), at least partially.

What do we want to do? If we do nothing, we alienate: the objects and ourselves. We will find hurdles and difficult questions: for instance, progress brought us electric power windows. No one wants to roll up and down their window manually: it's tiresome, stupid, useless. Automation solved that one. And then we go about buying complex videogames like Nintendos and what have you, that award you points for moving your arms about like an idiot in the privacy of your living room, so you don't become a couch potato, which we'll all eventually become if we do nothing.

Same interesting problem has two very different answers in commercial aviation: Airbus gives priority to automation, once they argue that human behind the yoke is more prone to error while computers don't make mistakes, and humans are responsible for the very vast majority of airline accidents. They even removed the yoke from the cockpit: you just have a small joystick. Boeing on the other hand subdues automation to a role of assisting the human, once they say the human is capable of real time creative thinking and improvisation, whereas automation can only do whatever it was programmed to do (for now: I'm aware of what AI means, and Stephen Hawking is severely wary of it, for good reason too).

In case of an imminent accident scenario, in an autonomous car with a human inside it: what will the automation do? Save the human and kill a pedestrian? Risk kill the human and save the innocent pedestrian? How to calculate the odds? How to prioritize life and death situations? And if it's a car with 1 human about to collide with 2 pedestrians? Or the other way round? How to choose? Will we peacefully accept automation's life and death choices, subduing ourselves to it while we alienate and disconnect ourselves from objects, tasks and functions?

One thing is for certain: there will always be petrolheads, even if they're born in 2017 or 2027. I'm 32 and have never owned a carburetted car, but I've heard about them from my grandfather and my father, so someday I want to live that experience. It's not mandatory that the car will be forgotten, or reduced in importance to a toaster or a smart household appliance. There's still time to do something about it. A long shot I know, but manufacturers can't force a car down our throats: we ultimately have the choice of not buying them, invalidating their gamble on electric and/or autonomous cars. Consumers aren't an organized group of any sort, but they aren't helpless either.

The future isn't going to go in just one smooth direction. And another thing is certain: a properly naturally aspirated Ferrari burning proper fossil fuel will become a commodity.

Futher ranting here: https://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/posts/145681160/

Kind regards,

Nuno.

 

I can see a big market in car simulators in the future. Because "real cars" will be outlawed or too expensive to drive, you'll have simulators that will give you the impression of driving any classic car you want.

Want to drive a Countach? No problem. A 250 GTO? Sure. A 250 LM? Easy. Even the feel of the brakes and gearbox will be custom made to the simulator. The vibrations of the engine will be felt right through the custom steering wheel with the same shape and materials. The interiors will be identical to sitting in a real one

A generation raised on video games will gladly accept this substitute while keeping the planet "green" and not needing millions of dollars to buy a car and maintain it.

Think of it like an Automobile version of "Westworld".

Cars will be like art but we won't drive them anymore, just like we don't see art. It's too valuable to expose to the environment so people lock them away until they are ready to resell at a profit.

 

Thankfully we will be dead by then. Change never comes as fast as people predict.

 

Oh I disagree. Change comes much faster than we think it would. Look at what e-commerce is doing to retail now. Look at the smartphone business. Who would have thought you could have sold a $1000 phone to the masses? Look at Netflix going from nothing to a small DVD rental and mailing service to a streaming service and now a production company making it's own entertainment. Look at how many Tesla electric cars and hybrids you see today. No one 10 years ago would have predicted these would have taken over this fast.

Apple computer was a small, niche computer maker far behind the sales of Dell, IBM, and Compac before the Iphone. Now what are they?

 

Interesting perspective. I see it very differently. The first home computer was in 1977 and it took until the late 1990s before 50% of Americans owned a computer and thats a much simpler transition. The cell phone has a similar curve. In fact, most tech has a similar curve. We are not talking about software here, but a hardware transition which is much different.

It takes decades to gain saturation on hardware changes.

 

Jerry: every great leap in humankind came from a new communication

Spoken language
Written language
Mathematics
The book
The printing press
Photography
The telegraph
The telephone
Motion pictures
Radio
Television
And now the internet.

What is common about all of these? Look at the time difference between each new one coming into being. It’s accelerating.

The more people communicate the faster things change.

 

Forgot where I read it, but there was an interesting article about the speed of technology growth. For a long time, the level of technology doubled every 1000 years. Then it grew to the point where technology doubled every 100 years, then every 10 year, etc... It was suggested that at some point, the level of technology will double every 24 hours.

 

Very true. Every 24 hrs is still a little ways off, but everyday we get closer to that reality.

The speed of technology is faster then most think. Just look at robots..a not even 20 years ago, we could barely get one to walk. Now they are doing back flips.

 

I remember doing email in the '80s. Jerry's right.

 

LOL!!

In the 80's did you order anything you want on Amazon? Or did you drive to the mall, walk around and look for something you didn't know existed and didn't know if you could get it any cheaper somewhere else and then buy it and bring it home.

Did you stream any movie you can ever think of or did you go to the "Video store" and rent a DVD and return it the next day?

Did you take a picture with your Nokia flip phone and send it to your family in a matter of seconds?

Did you pay your bills by a banking app or did you write out a check, put it in an envelope, and send it somewhere?

Did you order a movie ticket online weeks in advance or did you stand in a long line on opening day hoping to get in?

Anyone remember AltaVista? The first search engine for the internet? A little company called Google killed it overnight. Netscape used to be the biggest browser. AOL was the largest internet supplier.

Things change so fast today we just expect it. Its like we cannot see the forest from the trees anymore.

 

On point and very veru true..

 

It is accelerating but not to the point where we are going to ban ICE within my lifetime. That was my point.

Ill check in with you guys in ten years

 

Maybe.... but I can see California doing it earlier than the rest of the USA and then it will have to spread.

The California market is so big that auto makers have to follow them.

 

2025 seems to be the magic number.

 

I hope one thing doesn't get lost in the next 25 or 50 years: freedom of choice.

Today, we can buy petrol/gasoline powered cars, diesel powered cars, hybrid powered cars, fuel cell cars and fully electric cars.

What scares me is that it seems the future is going forward in just one way: massification and democratization of electrification. I have a serious problem with that. When going to a restaurant, I like to have a choice of fish, meat and pasta. Even if I do feel like eating pasta, I don't want it to be the only option, otherwise I feel I'm going to eat it because I'm obliged to.

Lets see how millennials will care about cars, because ultimately one variable that makes a price of something, is how badly people want it. Although I'm 32 (I consider myself part of the last pre-millennial generation), I feel somewhat pessimistic when talking to a millennial, or reading something a millennial has wrote. Nevertheless, one must hope and avoid generalizations.

Kind regards,

Nuno.

 

What is accelerating for now is the quantity of high horsepower ICE cars. You guys are too pessimistic. A Camry has over 300 ICE hp just released. These cars last 15+ years and over that time they will increase in horsepower mark my words. The US is a very big place. Dense cities will do what they do but rural areas will not change much at all. Unlike what some have said, vehicle autonomy requires infrastructure. Very expensive infrastructure. It's part of the 5G and 6G future and the IOT which will drive the global economy for the time period under question. Its will be massive and dwarf what we saw with cell phones.

Vehicle autonomy is already delayed due to the fight between the cell phone giants and the wireless spectrum folks looking for bandwidth. This fight will last for another 10-15 years or more delaying large rollouts of full electric autonomous vehicles. There is a large and long fight for deciding which standards will be adopted. Also, the current administration has already signaled the government handouts to the renewables are headed down not up. This will impact the timeline for full electric in the US which will impact the world.

However, the cross-over is inevitable if not within the 50 year point. Will there still be ICE cars on the road? I think yes but not in cities. So be it. Will there be car lovers? Of course. Me - to quote a great commedian - I don't know where I'll be but I won't be smelling good.

 

Well, from the optimistic point of view and living in Europe i believe that this 'era' will be late. I'm 32 do, i think that we are a little bit far for this. Of course there will be some autonomous vehicles but i believe that until gasoline will be considered a carcinogen and dangerous to the public etc i will be either too old or dead!

In some point i agree with what you're saying but about your first paragraph..i think that this is something that this generation won't face.

About your last paragraph, there are already companies around the globe that they produce new electronics 'retro' parts and of course some 3D mechanical parts.

 

I live in the southern USA, where big trucks and SUVs has ~70% of the market, add in another 10-15% vans, minivans, busses and cross overs, and passenger cars are a minority...

I don't think Bubba and Billy-Roy is ready for electrical cars to save the environment anytime soon.. However in my native Norway, the socialists will likely make an EV more economical with tax incentives... so change might be on the horizon, but some areas may be much slower than others... being in my 50s I think I might be "safe"

 

I go to the CES show every year. Have since the 80's.

I've seen every "trend" you can see. Video games, VHS tapes, DVD's, flat screen TV's, 3d TV, smartphones, drones, Virtual Reality, etc.

What has been the biggest growth trend in the last 2 years?

Self driving cars. ALL of the big guys are putting a huge effort into self driving cars. And, why not? The market is huge and consumers will gladly pay to have someone else drive their cars for them. Governments will be happy to reduce traffic congestion, human related accidents, and eliminate drunk driving. Older people will like the mobility and we aren't getting any younger.

CES has become as much of a car show as an electronic gadget show.