The Trend Future Cars will Take - Talking to one Another

People have certainly been talking about the flying car for long enough. There was a segment in Entertainment Tonight about 10 years ago about how the designers of the flying car were taking orders and Michael Jackson and Jay Leno had put their names down for one. People find it unreasonably entertaining to speculate on the kind of cars we might have in the future. The flying car isn't fantasy of course; that car is almost certainly going to be here soon. But what else are the designers of future cars doing? What other kinds of wondrous transportation solutions are we going to have over the next 10 years, short of a garbage-powered time-traveling DeLorean? If the cars of the future as speculated upon by Steven Spielberg in AI and by Paul Verhoeven in Total Recall didn't really float your boat, take a look at these models that follow. You'll find that real car makers really are more creative than movie prop car makers. And better still, these cars really are slated to hit showrooms sometime over the next 10 years.

A lot of the change that's coming over the next decade, as you might expect, will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. One of the trends you're likely to see in future cars is that hybrids and electrics are going to go mainstream. Ferrari, Porsche and Rolls-Royce are developing their own hybrids and battery powered cars; manufacturers do consider hybrid technology to be rather awkward and inelegant - the weight of two separate propulsion systems and power sources on one car can be rather bothersome. But there is very little choice that they have. They need to comply with the government's strict new emission norms. But future cars aren't merely going to be about the greenness. They are also going to be about how their driven.

Google has already been in the news about how they've successfully test-driven over 100,000 miles in California, an automatic car driving system that can completely handle everyday roads and traffic. While this system won't be displacing drivers anytime soon, a lot of the abilities that they've demonstrated should spin off into some important advances in car safety. One thing cars will do soon is communicate with one another to help drivers avoid areas with poor traffic conditions. Future cars are not going to be isolated systems like they are today; they could be like smartphones - completely connected and always talking to one another to smoothe traffic situations.

Case in point, is a car from GM that kind of looks like a blown-up plastic toy. It's the GM Electric Networked Vehicle. This little futuristic pod car is armed to the teeth with sensors and a radars to help it park itself, be aware of other vehicles on the street, and so on. And oh, it's completely clean - it's battery-driven. Remember when Mercedes had a subcompact hatchback called the A-Class? Well, they're bringing it back in about two years; and this time, it's going to have a radars all over the place to keep you safe from accidents.

The exciting part of course is that these cars aren't just speculation.