When I was in college, my mother bought me a new, cheap car for my 21st birthday. It lasted me for 19 years and 209,000 miles–my companion through two or three chapters of my life–before finally dying of a seized engine last month. Finding a replacement in a hurry plunged me headlong into the world of cars, and a side effect of all the research and car inspections I did before buying a new one was an understanding of how future technology will revolutionize cars and the industries related to them.
Better designs
My old car was a Chevrolet Cobalt. Over the years, I’d learned a lot about it from working on it in my driveway, so it was sensible for me to consider buying a new one, but the model was discontinued in 2010. That led me to consider its successor, the Cruze, which I assumed would share many design elements with the Cobalt.
Unfortunately, I discovered the Cruze has an average-at-best reputation among compact cars thanks to problems with its engine and some of the components directly attached to it. The use of lower-quality components was the main culprit, and there was also a case to be made that some aspects of the engine design itself were not as well thought-out as they should have been.
I bet GM’s engineers didn’t know about these problems, or at least didn’t know they would turn out to be so pronounced, until after a million Cruzes had been sold and at least two years had passed so the problems could be exposed through real-world driving conditions. I also doubt the problems would have arisen at all had those engineers had access to the kinds of advanced computer simulations we’ll have in the future.
Using hyper accurate, 1:1 simulations of materials and physical laws, car designers could test out unfathomably large numbers of potential car designs and experiment with different components and combinations of components until optima were found given parameters like maximum cost and minimum performance. Each simulated car could be “driven” for a million miles under conditions identical to those in the real world, thus revealing any design or material deficiencies before any vehicle was actually built. (These kinds of simulations already exist, but are so expensive to create that they’re only used to model things like nuclear weapons and stealth bombers.)
Thanks to this, cars in the future will be better and more reliable than they are today, and there won’t be such things as specific car models like the Cruze that have bad reputations for unforeseen problems. All vehicles will be optimized and all car companies will use the same tools for designing their products (which I also imagine would lead to many convergences).
More diligent maintenance
With the Chevy Cruze out of the equation, I considered another compact car, the Nissan Versa. My research quickly led me to discover that Nissan cars have become infamous among owners and mechanics for transmission failures. This is because most Nissans have “continuously variable transmissions” (CVTs) instead of traditional 6-speed automatic transmissions or 5-speed manual transmissions.
CVTs are cheaper to manufacture than the traditional transmissions and improve the fuel efficiency of the cars they are integrated into. However, CVTs require more maintenance because they get hotter during operation and produce more metal particle debris due to more metal-on-metal contact between moving parts. Replacing the transmission fluid and filter largely solves the problem and should be done every 30,000 miles in a Nissan car with a CVT.
To put this into perspective, a 2013 Toyota Corolla with a 5-speed automatic transmission only needs the same transmission service every 100,000 miles. Most car owners still expect that kind of maintenance interval in all new vehicles, and this mismatch between expectation and reality explains most of the Nissan Versa’s bad reputation. It doesn’t help that Nissan itself has downplayed the higher maintenance requirements of its CVT vehicles, or that the kinds of cash-strapped people who buy Versas tend to know little about cars or how to take care of them.
More broadly speaking, improper maintenance is something that car mechanics constantly complain about (even if it generates a huge amount of business for them). Most cars die prematurely due to owners ignoring obvious problems and not properly maintaining them. Some “bad” cars like the Versa aren’t actually bad, they just need more maintenance than others to stay functional. However, learning about this through research and then staying mindful of your particular vehicle’s maintenance requirements is too much for most human car owners thanks to a lack of time, energy, and sometimes intelligence.
Intelligent machines won’t have those same limitations. Future cars will have better self-diagnostic capabilities, and will be maintained by robots that will never skip preventative care. And since machines will work for free unlike today’s human mechanics, the costs of this will be much lower. Even poor people will have enough money to change the transmission fluid in their Nissan Versas.
Gentler driving
Facebook Marketplace was my primary source for my used car search. In a huge fraction of the ads, the owners wrote their cars had “Salvaged titles” or “Rebuilt titles.” That means the car sustained so much damage that its insurer declared it “totaled,” meaning the cost of fixing it exceeded the resale value of the car in its state. Instead of being scrapped, many cars like this are bought at very low prices by mechanics who fix them themselves and resell them for a profit. Those profits tend to be small because having a Salvaged or Rebuilt title is a scarlet letter in the open market because buyers know such a vehicle was badly damaged at some point, and can’t be sure of the full extent of the problem or of how fully it was remedied. I ignored all the cars without clean titles.
Why do cars end up with Salvaged or Rebuilt titles? Mostly because they were in serious accidents, floods, or caught on fire. Autonomous vehicles will, once fully developed, drive much more safely than humans and get into far fewer accidents. Eventually, they probably won’t even have steering wheels or pedals, making car thefts and ruinous joyrides impossible.
As I discussed in my blog Hurricane Harvey and Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, autonomous cars could also avoid floods by keeping watch of their surroundings and driving to higher ground if they were at risk of being submerged. Better monitoring systems would also reduce instances of car fires since the cars would be able to shut down their systems if they sensed they were overheating, or to immediately call the local fire department if they caught on fire.
More careful driving and avoidance of other hazards will sharply lower the odds of a car having to worry about getting a Salvaged or Rebuilt title. Gentler driving that stayed mindful of the car’s engineering limits and avoided exceeding them would also lengthen vehicle lifespans since components would take longer to wear out.
Conclusion
In the future, vehicles will drive safer and will last much longer than they do today. They will be designed better and will incorporate more advanced materials like future alloys. Moreover, once battery technology reaches a certain threshold, the vehicle fleet will transform to almost 100% electric in a few decades, and electric vehicles are inherently more robust than gas and diesel vehicles we’re used to because they have fewer parts and systems.
On a longer timeframe, autonomous driving technology will achieve the same performance as good human drivers, and the average vehicle will become self-driving. Machines will drive much more safely and gently than humans, making it much rarer for cars to be damaged in accidents or by driving behavior that overstresses their components.
Future technology will also benefit car maintenance. The vehicles themselves will have better inbuilt self-diagnostic capabilities, so they’ll be able to recognize when something is wrong with them and to alert their owners. The proliferation of robot workers of all kinds will also lower the costs of maintaining cars, meaning it will not be so common for owners to skip maintenance due to lack of money. The robot butler who hangs around at your house could work on your car in your driveway for free, or your car could drive itself to a repair shop where machines would service it for low cost.
Under all these conditions, the average car’s lifespan will be over 500,000 miles in the future (today, it’s about 200,000 miles), being stranded because your car broke down will be much rarer, and personal vehicle transportation will be within the means of poorer people than today. Ultimately, cars might only get totaled due to unavoidable freak accidents, like trees suddenly snapping in the wind and smashing down on one of them, or to deliberate vandalism by humans. Likewise, after humans discover the technologies for medical immortality, we’ll only die from accidents, murder and suicide.
These technology trends will also upend the used car industry. With machines carefully doing and logging all the daily driving and maintenance, secondhand buyers won’t have to worry that the vehicles they’re looking at have secret problems. With highly accurate data on each car’s condition, haggling would disappear and pricing would reflect the honest value of a used vehicle.
People in the used car industry who make a living off of information asymmetries (the worst example is a car auctioneer who only lets potential buyers examine a car for a few minutes before deciding whether to buy it) would lose their jobs. In fact, AI and autonomous vehicles would let car manufacturers, fleet owners like rental car companies, and private owners sell their vehicles directly to end users without having to go through any middlemen at all. AIs that work for free would replace human dealers and would talk directly with customers who wanted to buy cars. A personal inspection and test drive could be easily arranged by sending the autonomous car they were interested in to the buyer’s home, no visit to the car lot needed.