Self-Driving Cars, Electric Vehicles and the Future of Hitting the Road
Photo Credit: A Tesla at a hotel charging station. Electric vehicles are changing the anatomy of the road trip, but driverless cars will be even more impactful. Tesla
Skift Take
The sharing economy hardly puts a dent in the fact that most American road trips occur with owned cars. But look out for brands adapting to electric vehicles before driverless cars change things completely.
Road trips are evolving all around — rising in popularity, flooding national parks, attracting international visitors, and turning from a DIY low-budget project into a packaged luxury item. And yet, there's one trend that could be more impactful than any other, once it actually goes mainstream: autonomous vehicles.
Self-driving cars could make the road trip unrecognizable. A road trip with no driver input, passengers completely distracted in the back playing a video game, or listening to a hologram John Muir guide everyone through Yosemite — that would be something.
“We over-romanticize the actual driving part of it,” said Devin Liddell of design firm Teague. “What we actually love about road trips is the social part of them, being connected to each other in that space … The task of driving is something that we’ve become liberated from, but we’re still in control. It’s not like a train, where we’re beholden to the train schedule.”
“Autonomous cars, part
