Toyota's autonomous vehicle concept signals the death of the car

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By Matthew Griffin Future Transport 10th January 2018

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

By 2040 the concept of the car will be dead, replaced instead by autonomous multi-modal pods, and this is Toyota’s vision of a possible future.

As we begin to stare the death of the car in the face, with even companies like Audi realising that societies eventual move to fully autonomous modes of transportation will mean they have to envision new types of vehicles, or pods, such as their new Long Distance Lounge concept, companies are now starting to let their imagination wander and not just re-imagine transportation and logistics, but re-imagine the world of on demand services as a whole.

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Now, adding more fuel to the fire that the car as we know it is dead, or will be, Toyota have launched their latest concept – a delivery van, a restaurant, and an Uber all rolled into one. It’s the car as a blank canvas.

Toyota calls their latest pod the e-Palette, and it was the centrepiece of the company’s press conference at CES 2018, and the automaker plans to let these autonomous vehicles loose at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. For now, the e-Palette represents Toyota’s platform-driven future of tomorrow, so naturally it’s fully electric and self-driving.

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Company president Akio Toyoda called it a “plug and play” open standard that giant companies or small businesses could use for just about anything. Clearly this minibus could be a driverless ride-sharing vehicle you hail from your phone, and indeed, Uber is one of Toyota’s early partners on this program, and Amazon is another, for obvious reasons.

The demonstration video for e-Palette shows these pods carrying cargo to and from distribution centers, where, say, a smaller pod would pick up your Amazon delivery and drive it to your home, and anything that fits into an e-Palette could become mobile.

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Toyota asked the crowd to imagine a future Burning Man festival serviced by these self-driving Toyota pods turned into food trucks or shops, or, one of the autonomous vehicles could come to your house to pick up things you want to send to your storage unit.

It’s a great vision and it only serves to show how transformative autonomous vehicles will be, because, after all, if you don’t need a driver’s seat and a dashboard, then the traditional design of “what” a car is goes out the window, and anything goes.

Matthew Griffin / About Author

Described by NASA as a "Walking Encyclopaedia of the Future" and one of the world’s most in demand keynote speakers Matthew Griffin, Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm, is a multi-award winning Futurist and strategic foresight expert, author, lecturer, mentor, podcast and YouTube host.

With a distinguished career running global business units at Atos, EMC, and IBM today Matthew helps leaders and titans of industry from all over the world explore the impact of the inter sections of technology, culture, and leadership, then helps them create high performance organisations that can continuously disrupt, outpace, and outthink their competition.

15 times author of the hit series the Codex of the Future series Matthew's ability to identify, track, and explain the impacts of hundreds of emerging technologies and trends on global business, culture, and society has earned him a powerful reputation and a roster of clients that include royal households, world leaders across the G7, G20, and G77, and many of the world's most recognised and exceptional organisations including ABB, Accenture, ABN Amro, Adidas, AON, ARM, BCG, Centrica, Citi Group, Coca Cola, Deloitte, Dentons, Disney, Dow, EY, Google, KPMG, Lego, Microsoft, Legal & General, LinkedIn, Nokia, Paramount, PepsiCo, PWC, Qualcomm, RWE, Samsung, T-Mobile, UBS, Visa, WIRED, WPP and hundreds of others.

Matthew is regularly featured in the global media including the AP, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Discovery, Forbes, Khaleej Times, Telegraph, TIME, ViacomCBS, WIRED, and the WSJ, and his mission is to help organisations create a fair and sustainable future whose benefits are shared by everyone irrespective of their ability, background, or circumstances.