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Royal College of Art, London

Dale Harrow, RCA

The need for personal mobility will still be with us. I hope it’ll be better than what we’ve got now –easier to drive and navigate, kinder to the environment.

If we move away from internal combustion, the possibilities for packaging and interaction between the car and the city are staggering. We’re moving from a mechanical age to one about interaction, electronics and information. Biggest change in vehicle architecture for 100 years.

There will be social changes in the next 10 years with an ageing population that demands mobility. Instrumentation and graphics will improve, ingress-egress will improve. It may become possible to integrate things like electric wheelchairs more easily. In the UK, more than 30,000 drivers are aged over 90 today – it’s valuable to them. Rural communities are getting older and are still remote from the advances in public transport that cities are seeing.

New market have the potential to be quite radical. In China, predicted growth lets you start from scratch to an extent.

Family groups are changing too. In Southern Europe, it’s normal to look after your parents and grandparents.

Vehicles will get lighter and more recyclable. In 10 years time, we’ll have a better idea of End of Life strategies. Cars may become more adaptable and reconfigurable. It may become possible to upgrade them more over their life. These could be operations performed locally.

Craftsmanship will disappear and will be replaced with new techniques in rapid prototyping, which could conceivably deliver 3D parts to people in their homes.

Car clubs could grow to become a market in themselves with products featuring self-cleaning paint and interiors.

The appearance.
New formats made possible by new architectures. We could see different interior configurations, moving away from a traditional cockpit to a round-table.
There’s also the issue of what cars do when they’re parked. We could use them to power our houses.

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