When the very first cars were built, only the rich could afford it, but now a large part of the population (in developed countries) has one or more.
What do you think will be such an evolution in the future?
better to ask, what can the average family afford now, but it won’t be so accessible in the future?
water.
(where i am now, water costs money but is still doable)
The average person will always be able to afford water because if they can’t they will soon cease to be a person. Watch out for statistical effects like that because they might mask the true horror of the situation.
That line, “Cease to be a person,” both applies to the sentiment of, “they won’t live long,” and, “when backed into a corner you see what someone can truly be.”
Wars fought over drinkable water is not some far off fantasy but very well could (and likely will) become reality for many people.
The future for our little mud ball drifting through space suspended on a sun beam is looking pretty damn bleak.
i am concerned that drinkable water could become scarce
Water for drinking isn’t the issue - that’s about 0.01% of all water usage. The issue is irrigation for food crops, which is >50% of water use in many places.
And nestle
Fuck Nestlé
nestle should be shut the fuck down
are you not concerned about the water for those crops?
I am a little, but compared to carbon emissions it’s not a big issue.
It’s a localised problem, so affected areas can solve it without needing the entire planet to agree. And we already have both political and technical solutions available to us. The only reason we haven’t implemented the fixes, is because big agriculture lobbies government successfully and it costs them no votes. But if the average voter has to stop showering because of water shortages, you can bet politicians will “solve” the water crisis in short order.
Where do you live? Where I am we were used to have drinkable water in abundance, and only now start taking about that maybe in summertime we need to restrict car washing or so… what you say is something else entirely.
I live on the edge of one of the watersheds north of cincinnati. i know of two different rivers who would like you to turn your yard into a rock garden.
Grow an organ for you from your own cells. No rejection or drugs; your body accepts it as its own.
If electric cars follow this path and aren’t replaced with something else like enviro-friendly fuels, electric cars.
I don’t have an electric car, I dislike how many artificially limit things like speed, it shouldn’t be a paid upgrade if the hardware is capable, the amount of tracking worries me too, like Tesla staff could see through your cabin cameras.
I’d rather have environment friendly fuels that work with older cars, even if that requires a new ECU+Fuel pump.
Outside of the US and Canada, electric bikes look to be the future instead of mainly electric cars. E-bikes are not just massively more environmentally friendly, they’re also radically reshaping city design to be more livable. I hope the future isn’t just a different kind of car. I hope, for the sake of the environment and society, it’s a world with fewer cars.
But what about rural areas and long term travel? My dad, for example, has to travel about 80 miles in each direction every day to get to and from work. How long would it take him to get there with an E-bike?
This is why I said fewer cars, not no cars. Most people obviously do not drive 160 miles a day. With better infrastructure and public transportation, a 2 car family might go down to 1 car, or replace half of their car trips with other modalities, etc.
Oh nevermind, I guess I didn’t read the full message properly.
It’s already past the point where only rich people have them. It’s currently one of those things where it’s actually more expensive to be poor.
I bought an EV because it’s cheaper over a few years than getting the cheapest gasoline beater car. It’s a bigger cost up front, but the total cost is smaller over few years.
If anything, only rich people will be able to afford keeping the gasoline cars. Similarly to todays vintage lead fueled classics.
I don’t know where you are, but in Europe it’s much cheaper to buy a used Gasoline car. I just got a 1L petrol car for the equivalent of $10k, I can’t find a good electric car for anywhere close to that.
Hello, fellow European. The starting price of electric cars is definitely the biggest issue (and there isn’t a sizable second-hand market yet).
If you want to spend even less find out if you can convert your car to LPG. I have been driving with LPG for about 2 years and I couldn’t be more satisfied.
According to the german Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection, there is not much difference in operating costs between an electric vehicle and a CNG/LPG vehicle. Source: PDF from June 2023
But this does not take into account the price of the vehicle as such. In this case, lpg is much cheaper.
I am in Europe. You have to look past the purchase price.
What I did was to compare the price of buying €3k beater cars throughout the next ten years versus getting an only slightly used EV for €21k that I expect to drive for the same period.
The purchase price is 7 times higher, yes, but the savings on fuel, taxes and financing makes up for it it less than 6 years in my case.
So in short, I had a pretty easy choice in getting an almost new EV instead of continuing buying and repairing scrap cars as I’d previously done for the same reasons.
My car tax (VED) is £20 a year, Vs £0 on electric. Fuel and the extra £20 tax a year doesn’t equate to the cost of an EV just yet.
EVs are definitely still a luxury, poor people aren’t going round with EVs.
Yeah well, I’m absolutely not saying that EVs are always the cheapest option. In my case it was.
There are many variables to account for when making the decision. I’d just advise people to do the calculations whenever they need a new car. Generally, It’s still not that much cheaper that it pays off to get an EV if you already have a functional car, but whenever you need a new one.
I’ve been thinking about making a webpage to compare car purchases with all kinds of variables, but it’s quite a big project to do.
Not unless they come up with some new kind of battery tech. There’s simply not enough lithium for a global mass adoption of personal electric cars.
Afaik there are such fuels, but are much more expensive. From what I read it could shift and rich will be able to ride vehicless with combustion engines using eco fuel, while us plebs will drive electric
Honestly, I don’t even care if that’s the case. Cars are becoming more like living rooms on wheels and less engaging overall (less about driving and more about being driven), so I don’t even care what I drive when the time comes, so long as it isn’t a piece of garbage with a shoddily-built interior. Hell, I’d rather just not have a car at all at that point, but we don’t have the infrastructure here (in the US) for that.
Not all EVs are crazy expensive. Some of them are basically at price parity with what a gas version of the same vehicle would cost now.
it’s worth noting (not that this makes it better) - that artificially removing features isn’t a new thing with electric cars.
It’s always been cheaper to build only the more expensive version of something, then artificially cripple it for the cheaper version. CPUs are a good example - most CPUs of a given series are basically the same hardware, it’s just that the cheaper versions will be down-clocked, or have some cores deliberately disabled.
Before the tech existed to have heated seats be a subscription service, cars that were sold without that option, would often have the heating hardware still installed in the seats, it just wouldn’t be hooked up. Hell, sometimes literally the only difference between the model with heated seats and without was whether they installed the button to turn them on
This statement about cpus isn’t entirely correct. In the manufacture of precision electronics, there is always a reasonable chance of defects occurring, so what happens is that all the parts are built to the same spec, then they are “binned” according to their level of defects.
You produce a hundred 24 core cpus, then you test them rigorously. You discover that 30 work perfectly and sell them as the 24 core mdoel. 30 have between one and eight defective cores, so you block access to those cores and sell them as the 16 core model. Rinse and repeat until you reach the minimum number of cores for a saleable cpu.
This is almost certainly not the case in car manufacturing, as while you could sell a car with defective seat heaters at a lower price point, what actually occurs is that cars with perfectly functional seat heaters have that feature disabled until you pay extra for it.
I’d also rather have magic cars, but that won’t stop electric cars from being the next wave. At this point there’s so little advancement in new fuels that it’s effectively impossible to hope for that scenario to occur before ICE fades away.
Solar panels on their homes.
Hopefully healthcare.
Full genome sequencing.
The price of sequencing continues to decrease as the technology evolves. I have already seen claims of under $1,000 for a full human genome. I haven’t looked carefully into those claims, but I think we are around there. In some years full genomes will be so cheap to sequence that it will be routine. I want to buy one of those small Oxford Nanopore MinION sequencers in the future. I’ll use it like a pokedex.
Gene editing/therapy could become cheap in the future.
Which is how we get gattaca
I think the full sequencing part would already be Gattaca but I get your point
There is a theoretical future in which full-genome sequencing is performed exclusively by large companies, hospitals, and governments, and the data is stored by them and they can access it.
But the technologies are becoming quite accessible. Unless regulations are introduced to force people to give up their genetic data, which I don’t think is so likely, there will be ways for us to get our sequences without the sequences being stored by a third party. I also think that there will be FOSS tools for us to run our own analyses.
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Oh my goodness I would kill for foldables to be mainstream
Once the crease is gone in the middle…
Once the price drops, I’d love to have a phone that unfolds into a tablet, and can then be docked to a monitor and run a full desktop OS.
All that tech is here with the galaxy flip, but the desktop OS, I’ve read is still lacking.
Yeah I agree they look really cool but the durability and wear-and-tear seem to be pretty subpar. I’m not one of those people who goes and buys smartphones every 1 - 2 years, so if I get a phone I’d quite like for it to last me a while.
If the news about LK-99 has any element of truth to it, then superconductor-based technologies and maglev transport will become much more affordable in the future.
But today supra conductor aren’t something just for the rich. It’s used for some specific application like MRI which benefit to the people needing them rather than the rich.
Finally, a monorail!
Indoor plumbing and electricity
Joe mama
I’m embarrassed to say that this was my gut reaction as well
Ah, I see you’re a man of culture as well
Probably those fancy electric and hybrid cars. In the meantime, I’ll be over here, clinging to my old gas-guzzling relic. Someday we’ll all be cruising in high-tech, earth saving, luxury SUVs.
Ever thought of smol car like bycicles (article leads to a random article i found by searching for bycicles like car)
I reckon velomobiles are a better option if you want to have pedals. Otherwise just make it a mini electric car.
Something like that would be awesome and solve a lot of problems, but it would need it’s own infrastructure, like separate lanes. Don’t want those on the motorway going 40kph, and would definitely not be good on the bike lanes either.
Someday we’ll all be cruising in […] SUVs.
God I hope not. These things are a nuisance in urban spaces and everyone would be worse off in your fantasy world, including the drivers.
A brand new Prius starts at like $25k, which is about as cheap as a new car gets, I don’t think hybrid cars necessarily fall into the category of “rich people things”
