If you've, well, been alive and conscious the past several years you've no doubt heard about self-driving vehicles. From Elon Musk to Google to Apple to Uber, the hype is so palpable you wouldn't
even be surprised if your grandparents showed up in your driveway tomorrow "driving" some newfangled self-driving car.
Of course, the whole self-driving thing hasn't been
without its pitfalls. A quick search on YouTube or a skim of the news will reveal a panoply of pratfalls, pitfalls and outright disastrous crashes. While it seems logical that if the human element
were removed from driving, things might certainly improve, not everyone is down with that line of thinking.
Reminding us of reality and toning down the hype a bit, Swedish ad agency
Forseman & Bodenfors is out with an ad for Swedish transportation authority Västtrafik which dramatically hypes the future of mobility. With
dramatic music and quick cuts to words like electrified, delegated driving, sustainable, mobile connected and easy vehicle sharing it is then revealed that all of these things, all of these futuristic
benefits, all of these conveniences are, in fact, currently available...on a bus.
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Throwing shade on the self-driving car hype and calling attention to the fact that self-driving
vehicles will not solve every problem, Vasttrafik CEO Lars Backsstrom told The Verge, "We welcome, of
course, safer and more environmentally friendly cars. However, more people alone in their cars --regardless of whether they're self-driven or not--does not belong to the future. Not having to drive
yourself in shared vehicles, on the other hand, definitely does. Something our customers have been enjoying for over a hundred years.”
There's a point worth thinking about. While
people's love affair with the car would certainly be served by self-driving cars, mass transport is here right now and solves quite a few more issues than automated driving. Namely, less crowded
roads, less pollution, less burning of fuel of any kind.
Worth thinking about?