Automobile Evolution

Here is one of many recent articles on Vehicles that can drive themselves:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=self-driving-audi-automobile

The car that drives itself I believe will be an important part of sustainable transportation.  A world of Nine Billion people driving 5 Billion Cars is certainly an unsustainable and not very aesthetic world in any case.

The solution is that the personal and unique automobile needs to die and the era of the basic utility car needs to be ushered in, along with a global initiative to build an integrated mass transit system.

But to the issue of the car that can drive itself.  Instead of having 5 Billion car which sit useless 95% of the time and while in use clog up roads and parking spaces we could have perhaps 500 million  utility cars globally.

Instead of owning a car cars would be a utility owned by a service provider.  Cars would be capable of driving themselves anywhere any time.  And cars would be out fitted with a basic card reader that a user would insert to start up and then insert to record when done.  The cars would have several micro cameras for scanning the interior to keep the user responsible for abuse and damages and or leaving the car a mess after use.

In this future when you need a car you make a call, or send a text to the universal car service server and the system searches all the cars in use and not in use and simply has the nearest available unit drive to where you are, or if nearby gives you the walking instructions to get to it.   This system could extend to utility vehicles such as pick up trucks and vans for those who need such from time to time but not for business purposes.

This system could work well in High density population areas.  And most of us rarely think about it but according to government studies the average car costs you $8000 a year to own and operate over time.
That is like taking a 20 dollar Bill and flushing it down the toilet every day!  Whether or not you even use it (the car not the toilet).
Riding mass transit or getting a utility car for perhaps 10 dollars a shot would be a bargain.

Of course this would require that Global-continental-state-local integrated  mass transit system that the current power structure abhors even having a discussion about, so that no one needed a car most of the time anyway.