In recent news many car manufactures have presented the next generation of vehicles and smart cars at this years Consumer Electronics Show. I recap their highlights and allude to what this progress means for the future of transportation.

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Hello and welcome to NerdSanctum, today we will be talking about the current news about smart cars and self-driving cars and what this means for the future.

Recently a lot has been happening for both smart and self-driving cars. At this years Consumer Electronics Show or CES we saw numerous car manufactures take the stage with prototype concept vehicles. BMW, Mercedez-Benz, Audi, and Volkswagen all showed progress in building the next generation of cars.

BMW’s car could be paired with a mobile app or smart watch which would enable your car to drive out of a parking space and pick up you up anywhere all by itself. Volkswagen also had automated parking abilities; but this technology isn’t really new, feel free to check out a video I already made covering self-parking apps like Valeo. Audi’s car drove itself 550 miles to CES in Las Vegas from San Francisco; but that’s nothing compared to the 700k+ miles Google’s self-driving cars have covered.

One presentation I did find impressive though was Mercedez-Benz. They had a car that drove itself onto the stage and boasts lots of immersive electronics and smart technologies. They had lots of digital dashboards surrounding the car, gesture recognition, and in general they made the car feel like a living room. It’s a luxurious experience that you relax, possibly socialize, and don’t even pay attention to where the car’s going.

But on-top of that one exciting announcement that should be a headline is that Google is now in serious discussions about providing it’s proprietary automated car technology to car manufacturers. These partnerships will kick-start companies progress by years and make automated vehicles a lot closer to reality.

Now with that in mind, lets look forward to what this means for the future. Some people predict billions of dollars saved in productivity. Imagine deliveries, both small personal ones and large commercial tractor-trailers being automated and not needing drivers. Google has already been doing personal deliveries in the Bay Area of CA for years now, so I don’t see this being a big change. They could even do taxis too, which is probably VERY likely because Google invested $250 million into Uber; one of its largest investments ever.

Of course this will temporarily disrupt the employment market, but it will eventually move elsewhere and stabilize. Overall I think this is a very interesting topic to follow through 2015; Google’s technology is tested, reliable, and easily integratable so I’d like to see what and how fast other companies use their work, and how we as a society react to becoming even more dependent on tech in the future.

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