Heading down the road of the 'autonomous' car - a private and yet public mistake

A Melbourne designer set to become a global leader of car design says that within 12 months, car companies will have the capacity to produce "autonomous" or driverless cars. 

Michael Simcoe with the 1969 Holden
 Hurricane - he says we will have
"autonomous" cars within a year.
 

Michael Simcoe has achieved something no one from outside the US ever has, he has been appointed to the top design job at General Motors in Detroit.

Mr Simcoe has come a long way since his days as a student at Koonung High School in Melbourne's east and later RMIT - he will now head a design team of about 2500 in 10 design centres around the world for a company that produces 10 million cars a year.

And what does the 33-year veteran of GM Motors see as the next big change in design? Autonomous cars.

He said the public's perception of autonomous cars had changed.

"Once upon a time if you asked a customer or someone in the street about autonomous driving, no driver, no steering wheel, they probably would have laughed at you," he said.

Read Jason Dowling’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Watch out! Cars that can drive themselves are closer than you think.”

(Cars, be they driverless, autonomous, electric, or otherwise are not in and of themselves the issue, rather it is the private ownership of those cars and their anarchical-like use of them that demands an energy and space intensive infrastructure that is wasteful and a significant contributor to the worsening of Earth’s climate system – “worsening” in terms of how our activity is bringing changes to the weather that are antithetical to human needs.

The “driverless, autonomous, electric, or otherwise” car of tomorrow must be part of a public owned and used fleet, linked with an equally intensive public inter-town/city public transport system, that users book with their smartphone and then once they have completed their “movement”/journey the car returns to its predetermined based awaiting another user.

Such vehicles would be more convenient for the user, the road infrastructure would be more compact; energy would be saved in every sense; deaths and injury resulting from road accidents would be almost non-existent; parking would no longer be an issue, and congestion would be little more than a memory – technologically it is possible right now, psychologically it is so utopian that most people haven’t even yet imagined the idea – Robert McLean.)