We just bought our first EV. OK, so we’re not always the earliest of adopters (it does replace a hybrid we bought 15 years ago). Much of the EV Future is already somewhat evenly distributed, but there’s still a very long way to go (so to speak).
Having a new piece of technology (and that’s most certainly what modern-day cars, especially EVs, are) is the best way to start to understand what the Future of that technology might look like.
Our car has so many (literal and figurative) bells and whistles that learning how to use even a small percent of them is a big challenge. Seems like a natural application for an AI large language model, no? That’s probably “just down the road” a bit.
Thinking more broadly, as complex as the car’s UI (user interface) is, the UI only touches the surface of the set of adjustments that can actually be made. For instance our EV has a few different “drive modes” which set specifics of items like acceleration, fuel efficiency, climate controls and steering stiffness. But each of these parameters could really be set independently and precisely.
How is this type of feature overload addressed in other pieces of technology? Similar to our new car, the device provides just a limited subset of the most popular features, sometimes giving access to others through some sort of “advanced” section, scripting capability or API (application programming interface). Think gaming mods or open source software.
So maybe that’s where advanced car technology is going: open source! Program your own car. An open source car presents some obvious challenges, safety being perhaps the biggest one. Any “Open Car” Future will likely remain in the hands of only a very select advanced few, a distribution unevenness which really applies to open source technology in general.
But Open Car is a Future possibility that is very interesting to think about. Would there be an open source set of 3-D printable schematics for the car hardware itself? A carOS open source operating system of some sort? And then a set of APIs for the software-tunable features?
Of course Gibson tells us that every Future is here already, and in this case, Wikipedia (an excellent harbinger of the Future) seems to agree. But an Open Car Future has a very long way to go before it even pulls into the driveway of somewhat early adopters like us. I wonder how many new cars we’ll go through before it does.