The technology used to support and pilot hybrid and electric vehicles, like this Tesla Model S, is changing the automotive landscape faster than you think.
First things first: There will be no flying cars in your driveway — not tomorrow, not next year, maybe never. But that doesn't mean the future of automotive technology is boring. A growing fleet of hybrid and electric vehicles is threatening to drag the nation's aging power grid into the digital era, while new self-healing smart polymers could send auto body shops scrambling for business.
Here are the technology trends — broken down into three overarching categories — that could make the biggest impact on the auto industry and your driving experience, in the months, years and decades to come.
1. THE EVOLUTION OF USER INTERFACES
This Year: Touch-Screen Dashboards
Whether it's an epidemic of iPhone envy or a natural evolution of user interface, carmakers are beginning to replace analog dials and controls with touch-screen displays. They were used in nearly every electric or hybrid vehicle unveiled at this year's Frankfurt Motor Show, such as Volkwagen's E-Up! concept and Citroen's REVOLTe, whose touch-sensitive screens locate the nearest charging stations. Previous electric vehicles, such as Chrysler's 200C EV Concept and the Tesla Model S, show off huge swaths of touch-sensitive real estate (the 200C has no analog console controls), while other vehicles feature smaller touch-screen innovations. The decidedly nonelectric 2010 Range Rover comes with a 12-inch "dual view" display, which lets the driver check GPS directions while the passenger watches a DVD, both peering at the same display. The Range Rover also integrates more controls into its touch-screen interface than previous models, further proof that knobs, buttons and other "hard" controls are an endangered interface.
Video: Today Show: High-Tech Highway Help
This Decade: Augmented Reality
The technology is still in its infancy, but augmented reality — the combination of a real image with a virtual one — is about to grow up fast. Wikitude Drive, a relatively modest in-car navigation application for the Android mobile phone platform, offers a glimpse of AR's potential. Instead of looking at a digital overhead view of your next turn, Wikitude Drive floats the relevant data over a live view from the phone's camera. Similarly, researchers are already at work developing AR systems that use heads-up displays to tag potential hazards with warning symbols, while BMW has unveiled a somewhat wackier concept: goggles that let mechanics watch instructional videos as they work on a vehicle. In-vehicle AR offers engineers a chance to make windshield-projected heads-up displays as useful, and as ubiquitous, as they should be.
This Century: Intelligent Vehicles
Forget about the possibility of an Intelligent Highway: the long-suffering initiative to develop a network of smart roads, smarter cars and safer drivers. After decades of research and hundreds of millions in funding, the prospect of installing communication devices throughout the nation's highways is as daunting as ever. However, vehicles that speak to one another, using a combination of GPS data and short-range wireless signals, would dodge the infrastructure pitfall entirely. At the recent Frankfurt Motor Show, Audi showed an electric version of the Quattro, called the e-Tron, featuring an onboard communications system that analyzes traffic flow and traffic-light timing to present a driving route that's optimized for energy efficiency. The result of a more universal intelligent vehicle network could range from the simple, such as instant traffic advisories and collision alerts based on signals ahead, to the sublime — vehicles digitally chained together, each one dutifully following the lead vehicle's commands. Daimler tested one such "platoon" of trucks in 2003 and, earlier this year, researchers from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio conducted a similar, three-vehicle demonstration in Washington, D.C. With its combination of autonomous driving and old-fashioned drafting, platooning could reduce traffic congestion and improve fuel economy. That's just one possible application of intelligent vehicles — a milestone on the road to the fully self-driven automobile.
Read: Five Ways Your Car Can Drive Itself, Today
2. MATERIALS
This Year: Bioplastics
It's easy to oversell the novelty of so-called bioplastics — which contain varying amounts of organic materials such as corn, kelp or soy — and it doesn't mean you can gnaw on the seat cushions of the 2010 Lexus HS 250h if you're feeling a little puckish. Bioplastics are still plastic, though they contain less petroleum and result in a lower carbon footprint for automakers. The current environmental vulnerability of bioplastics, which can degrade when exposed to moisture and sunlight, makes them a better fit for interior components. But as researchers experiment with new organic compounds and more durable manufacturing techniques, analysts expect bioplastics to gradually replace traditional plastics, possibly even replacing today's door panels and other exterior components with a more sustainable alternative.
Discuss: Which of these tech trends hold the most promise for the future, and why?
This Decade: Nanomaterials
Similar to the low-key replacement of traditional plastics with organically derived ones, tomorrow's cars will be increasingly tweaked at the submicroscopic scale, with little to no fanfare. The most obvious target is lithium-ion batteries. Researchers have experimented for years with carbon nanotube arrays (essentially creating a nubbly finish, with more surface area than a flat component) to boost the efficiency of cathodes and anodes, meaning less energy lost during charging and discharging. Nanotechnology could also help researchers boost battery safety, allowing them to fine-tune the complex and potentially explosive architecture of hybrid and electric-vehicle battery packs. "Nanotech allows us to custom-make the electrodes, to look even more closely at the way the molecules fit together," says Don Hillebrand, director of the Center for Transportation Research at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. "We can push those reactive plates closer together, and get more efficiency out of the battery, but without letting those reactive materials touch." Because, as Hillebrand points out, reactive materials that do touch can set off what battery researchers call a "thermal event" — what the rest of us call an explosion.
