New ways to travel

"Do you want to own a car?" Pose this question to 100 people and at least 95 will say "yes". Fed up with inefficient public transport systems and yearning to climb up the social ladder, most people give priority to owning a car.

But there already are cities where the residents do very well without ever buying a car. Even if they have one in the garage it is hardly used, apart from a drive to the countryside or an important occasion. The secret - the public transport systems including taxis are so good that it is just not worth owning and maintaining a car.

But what if every city followed suit? In fact, with the advancements being witnessed in autonomous driving, superfast rail systems, shared ride services such as Uber and smart cities, owning a car may become a 'dead' concept in as little as 25 years.

Technologies such as self-driving cars paired with transportation networks such as Uber will really kill the need to own a car in 25 to 30 years, says Jamais Cascio, a futurist and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Obsolete

Cascio says the traditional car model will become more or less obsolete because self-driving cars are simply more efficient. People will not own cars because it makes more sense for them to use a network of self-driving cars that will show up on demand when needed. Just get into your personal transport pod and direct it to the address you want. If you still want a human operator, you will be able to hail a super efficient hydrogen or electric powered car and be on your way.

His idea makes perfect sense: "It may not be the vehicle that brought to you where you are and you may not be in that vehicle later in the day, but transportation is a service that is almost without notice. It's individualized without being individually owned. It's individual without being personal."

This sort of on-demand service model would most likely be confined to regions such as towns and cities. To travel from region to region, other advanced transportation systems such as high-speed railways will be adopted. Japan has already demonstrated a MagLev train that exceeds 600 km/h, which almost makes plane travel obsolete too.

In just 15 years, by 2030, the self-driving car market is expected to reach a staggering US$ 87 billion, according to a recent report by Lux Research. Not surprisingly, almost every car manufacturer is working on self-driving cars, apart from tech giant Google and shared ride taxi operator Uber.

Expensive

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has made it no secret that his company sees a future where we drive without our hands on a steering wheel. "The reason Uber could be expensive is because you're not just paying for the car, you're paying for the other person driving the car," Kalanick said at a conference. "So the magic there is you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away." Bill Gates recently endorsed Uber as the company that would make driverless cars mainstream. Indeed, there is no need to buy and maintain a car if you can use an autonomous car anytime you want.

But just how 'intelligent' are these cars? Recently, two self-driving cars from Google and Delphi successfully avoided a real-world (not simulated) accident on their own, without any human intervention. Perhaps a human operator at the wheel would not have been so lucky. The test self-driving autos are outfitted with radar, laser, sonar and video sensors. This gives a 360-degree perspective of the street ahead and behind, which a real person could never match. The Google self-driving cars have been going more than 2.5 million Km across California, USA and despite a few missteps, they have figured out how to really stay away from genuine mishaps. Whether you like it or not, driverless autonomous cars are coming to a city near you.

Vacuum

But what if you want go a little further away from the city? Don't think of taking the car right away - the Hyperloop is coming. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla electric cars - has proposed the Hyperloop, basically a 1220 km/hour train that runs inside a vacuum tunnel either above or underground. (That, incidentally, is faster than most planes). The first (8 Km) test track will be built in California next year, so the technology is already taking off. Musk says the open source technology would be much cheaper than existing train technology - for example, the proposed San Francisco-Los Angeles high speed rail link is estimated to cost US$ 70 billion, but a Hyperloop would cost only around US$ 16 billion. Still not peanuts, but far more cheaper. And the Hyperloop could replace intra-city subway systems as well.

There will no doubt be a lot of resistance to 'the end of the car'. There is a measure of 'romance' attached to driving that no robot car will be able to match. Driving is an art, a craft, a skill that you have to master. Do you want to give that up? Do you want to give up that long drive down winding roads, enjoying the world passing by, as the conversation flows freely?

Extinct

Human operated cars will not go completely extinct because people will hold on to them for reasons of nostalgia. It could become a hobby - long after horse-drive carriages are gone, some people still have horses. It could be the same with cars. And some classic cars will never go out of style. Some popular cars of today will become classics 50 or 100 years down the road and people will pay millions of dollars to collect and cherish them. We do have a special relationship with cars, even though they are inanimate, because they come to life with the turn of the ignition key and help us enrich our lives in turn. That special bond will not go away, no matter how far autonomous transport pods take us.