Catching up to the Jetsons?
Want to spend less money on gasoline, but can’t afford a new, more fuel efficient car. No worries. A new Smartphone app can reduce your fueling costs by 20 percent according to a new MIT/Princeton study.
And that’s just the beginning of how the cloud is going to fundamentally change the auto industry — maybe even far more than the plug ever will.
In fact, do we really know for sure the plug is the future of the auto industry?
Today, companies like Virent are creating biogasoline from plant based sugars that appear to work harmlessly in conventional cars, or Virent can bioreform the sugars into hydrogen to be used in fuel cell vehicles. Others are trying to skip the plants altogether and instead mimic plants via artificial photosynthesis to create liquid fuels — a process that can be 10 – 40 times more efficient than using plants, at least based on today’s emerging technologies.
The truth is, there are potential breakthroughs in numerous technologies that could radically impact the way we power our cars, but I wonder, will we really care about what powers the cars of the future? Or will the user experience be all that matters?
Using a smartphone to reduce fuel consumption is just scratching the surface of where telematics and the cloud our going to take personal transportation.
“Gartner predicts that by 2016 consumers will demand Web-centric data connectivity in their cars, which will lead to new consumer experiences and address sustainability, digital convergence and mobility trends,” notes Microsoft’s Michael Kogeler in Forecast For The Auto Industry: Dense Cloud Coverage.
Our cars will tell us how to save fuel, how to avoid traffic accidents — even help prevent accidents — while providing immense entertainment opportunities, and that’s just in the next few years. Actually, it’s already happening. Further down the road, cars will even drive themselves. Perhaps, because of all this web connectivity and this new user experience, commuters might not want to drive, it’ll be viewed as a waste of time, especially if congestion forecasts come true.
To live in interesting times, they say, is critical to a good life. When it comes to the auto industry, we live in very interesting times as numerous technologies, once divergent, are now converging in a way that will radically and fundamentally change the automobile and personal transportation.