Luxury is a relative term and it has always been that way for decades. But what if you can have something that is unprecedented and never seen before?
Imagine a car with a sofa inside it along with a screen in front of you. There is no steering wheel or accelerator paddle and the car drives itself however, it drives on how you command it to. Now take your imagination a bit further and imagine that instead of doors, there is a clam shell shaped roof and instead of that usual “Ducking and uncoiling” movement that you usually make when getting out of a conventional car, you get out in a grand way, but wait there’s more as you step. In a style statement, befitting a king, the car projects its laser on to the place of your exit and mimics a red carpet. How cool is that for a car? Isn’t this car just too good to be true?
Rolls Royce thinks otherwise as it revealed its concept Luxury driverless car, the 103EX, a year ago. The company believes that this car could be on the roads in the next three decades, which means it will be commercially available by 2040s, but going by how fast things have progressed in the legion of driverless cars, this car could be a reality ten to fifteen years earlier than even its makers predict. Rolls Royce is not alone as Mercedes also revealed a similar concept luxury driverless car of its own. This signifies growing interest of firms in adding the ultimate luxury to something that itself will guarantee comfort to its passengers.
Driverless cars mean luxury by their very idea. The notion of not being required to actively drive a car and instead relax and do what you want for the entire duration of your commute is immensely luxurious in its very sense. A highly safe artificial intelligence based system will take care of the complex task of driving, while you sit back, and while you sit back you can do a lot of things, opening up a huge arena of endless opportunities for the manufacturers of these very cars to let their imaginations run wild on what kind of luxury options they can provide the passengers with.
Already promising a staggering $5.6 trillion in global savings, if they become mainstream, driverless cars will be something that will definitely be too enticing to ignore by anyone living on this earth. But where is the industry headed when it comes to adding luxury to this marvelous piece of human ingeniousness? We definitely need cars to move us around from one place to another and we again, definitely have to sit in them during the whole duration of getting from that one place to another, and we are not driving, allowing us the chance to look more as to how the car looks and feels like and what are the options it can provide us with when it comes to making those trips immensely enjoyable and privileged.
Firms like Rolls Royce and Mercedes Benz have shown us just a glimpse in to the possibilities of redefining the term luxury. A screen, comparable to the best television sets in the world, could catch our attention, akin to sitting in the first class cabin of an airline like Qantas or Emirates. We could certainly do away with those confining seats and spaces and replace them ultimate luxury arrangements like the sofa shown in the 103EX concept car. The car, which is already connected to an immensely powerful computer could system that allows the AI onboard to drive the car, could provide us with unprecedented infotainment options. Watching your next season of Game of Thrones on Netlfix while commuting back from your office couldn’t be such a distant reality. These cars could in fact change the way we define luxury in its truest sense today and that, is by no means, a small achievement.
Luxury driverless cars could be a tad bit on the expensive side with all these amenities, unimaginable for today’s car, and be fit for the millionaires and billionaires of that time, but as we have been always witness too. Something as good as this, that has the potential to blanket the entire planet its appeal and want initiation desire, will eventually go mainstream with the costs coming down substantially enough that a wider range of people could afford them.
The driverless concept holds tremendous untapped potential and could help resolve a lot of issues like making the roads more safer, bringing down insurance costs, release traffic jams that cause a high amount of economic losses to commercial industries, increase productivity prodigiously and above all, be the onset that propels the world to the next stage of economic growth. Luxury will certainly play a big role in ensuring that the ride to all of these advantages is not dull and boring and rather filled with another set of wondrous elements that only movie characters from sci fi films could have enjoyed and that too, for lifetime.
About the author:
Rachael Everly is a passionate blogger and an avid luxury car lover currently associated with Alfa Romeo Central Florida, dealers of luxury cars in Orlando Central Florida. For more updates follow him on twitter and Facebook.