With electric vehicle registrations reaching record numbers over the last year, to the many significant announcements made at CES 2022, it’s clear the world is hungry for futuristic car tech. I know I’m not the only one that had envisioned 2022 would boast chrome-coloured flying cars, fitted out with upgrades that’d look something like a Pimp My Ride fever dream.
While our reality may not look exactly like this, some of the developments in the car tech space have us hurdling closer to that vision of the future more so than ever before. While cars are primarily used as vehicles that get us from point A to B, there’s a whole lot of straight-up cool stuff that developers are dreaming up globally.
Here’s a look into three pieces of futuristic car tech that are getting us excited right now.
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BMW’s Car Theatre
Keeping kids quiet with an iPad (or, for the more old-school inclined, a portable DVD player) playing endless cartoons is a road trip ritual for parents everywhere. Now, BMW has taken the idea even further, presenting a car with huge 31-inch 8K screens at CES 2022— because the luxury of watching a movie while being driven around on the open road shouldn’t just be exclusive to kids who pyshcially and legally can’t drive.
The concept is called Theatre Screen and will come to life as an “ultra-wide display that retracts from a vehicle’s padded headliner and, at 31 inches in size, fills nearly the entire width of the car and the space between the roof and the top of the backrest of the front seats”, as previously reported by Gizmodo Australia’s Zachariah Kelly. The theatre screen features a 32:9 aspect ratio and pushes a resolution of around 8000 x 2000 pixels, allowing a 4K movie to be enjoyed in 16:9 while additional content is displayed on either side. BMW also plans to have Amazon Fire TV built-in alongside a 5G mobile connection for on-demand streaming.
There’s no date for when this will hit the market, but we can still dream of binge-watching whatever the latest hyped series is while being driven peacefully to an unknown location for now. If you do happen to luck and score one of these cars, it’s important to check your insurance covers modifications like this. For example,Bingle’s affordable Comprehensive Car Insurance automatically covers most modifications and accessories that are permanently fitted to cars, meaning customers can rely on their upgrades being insured.
Volvo’s New Auto Driver
Also announced at CES 2022 was Volvo’s partnership with lidar company Luminar and its autonomous driving software subsidiary Zenseact. According to Tech Crunch, the feature is called Ride Pilot and will be offered as an add-on subscription to an electric SUV that will be revealed later this year. Volvo owns a majority stake, has been building these capabilities since at least March 2021, and will offer key differences to Tesla’s ‘misleading’ self-driving cars.
“The key thing here with Ride Pilot is that it’s actually self-driving,” Martin Kristensson, Volvo’s VP of digital business, told TechCrunch. “You don’t have to keep your hands on the steering wheel. You don’t have to look at the road ahead. You can eat your breakfast in the car or read a book or watch a movie, and the car will drive itself.”
While completely driver-less cars are a little while off, driver-assist technology has become increasingly popular. If you do plan on purchasing a car with a driver-assist feature, it’s worth checking out what Australia’s laws are around liability in an accident as a result of driver-assist tech, as well as whether your insurance covers this sort of accidental damage.
AI Traffic Lights
While this development may not advance cars themselves, it should come as good news to drivers everywhere. A recent study out of Germany says having traffic lights use AI technology may keep traffic flowing faster and smoother – marvellous news to those who despise nothing more than being caught in traffic (AKA, every driver ever).
The Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation installed “high-resolution cameras and radar sensors at a busy intersection with a traffic light in the city of Lemgo”, according to New Atlas. The setup recorded the number of vehicles waiting for the light to change, the amount of time each had to wait and the average speed a car drove through the intersection, which then trained a machine-learning-based computer algorithm. It experimented with different light-changing patterns. They found that in the end, the best artificial intelligence patterns could improve traffic flow by 10 to 15 per cent — which could save people a tonne of time overall.
While our cars may not be fit-out with the latest tech on offer (unless you’re fortunate), there’s no better time to think about what your driving needs might look like in the future — and how to protect yourself best on the road. Checking out your insurance options with companies like Bingle will cover accidental damage, weather damage and more to keep you safe, even in the instance your new self-driving car takes the road less travelled.
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