Have you ever sat in traffic, had a look around your car and thought there was something missing? Some piece of tech which, if you had it, would make your driving life instantly and immeasurably better?
Actually, who are we kidding? Everyone who’s ever spent a significant amount of time in a car has probably had that thought, even if it last happened when they were very small children.
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We shouldn’t ignore those thoughts either. After all, inventions like ABS, park assist and rear-windscreen heaters must’ve been thought up by people who just wanted to make their driving experiences better.
But what should we look for in the next great wave of in-vehicle technology? And how much further can we go when, as the tagline for this site points out, our cars are rapidly becoming gadgets in and of themselves?
In order to find the answers to those questions, we could have assembled a panel designers, engineers and futurists. We could have asked them probing questions and let them engage in lengthy, serious debates. We could have, but we didn’t. Instead, we went to question and answers site Quora, and this thread in particular, and we think what we’ve found is a lot more entertaining anyway.
1. Side parking
Parallel parking just isn’t efficient enough for people like Fabian Lim. And he’s got a point. Imagine how much space we could save if we didn’t have to manoeuvre in and out of them and could just drive up next to one, flip a switch and drive in at 90 degrees.
It seems fans of this kind of parking are in luck too. Ford reckons that the in-wheel electric motors it’s working on could well be used to make sideways parking a reality.
We’re pretty sure we once saw this on an episode of Pimp my Ride. That said, Shreevant Tiwari’s suggestion that cars come with in-built coffeemakers probably makes sense to anyone who’s ever had to negotiate their exhausted way through traffic at the end of a long day.
We can however see things getting pretty disgusting if you aren’t fastidious about keeping your in-car coffeemaker clean. Oh and someone should probably tell Shreevant that it’s been an option on the Fiat 500L for a little while now.
3. DVD players, Cable TV and in-seat tablets
Image: nvidia.corporation via Flickr.
We’re not entirely sure Christopher Barooni understands the nature of the question. Sure his answer comes from 2013, but the technology he’s describing is pretty much all present in the current crop of luxury vehicles.
Check it out:
built in dvd players can be a refreshing plan or automatic integrated cable television or as well built in tablets that can be surfaced for use among the cars chair.
Even if you don’t have all that stuff built into the car, you can pretty much just buy a tablet, load it up with with video-streaming services of your choice and build this universal in-car tablet holder. With enough data, your rear passengers will be kept entertained on even the longest road trip.
We can’t really quibble with Prasanna Pathade and Neeraj Wagh when they say that the technology aimed at connecting cars is missing. We mean everyone knows that there’s a great deal of work happening in the space, but it’s not really there yet.
Until a large portion of the cars on the road, regardless of how much they cost, are talking to each other, then we can’t really talk about connected cars at all.
5. Nothing
While Vijay Kumar’s assertion that “Technology improves over years so how can anything be missing?” seems pretty sensible at first, it’s kind of missing the point. I mean the technology to put a coffeemaker in a car clearly existed before Fiat decided to actually do it, but the point is no one had.
Anyway, we think our readers have more imagination than this lot, so go on, tell us what pieces of car tech you think are missing.
