We’ve all seen them – artists’ and futurists’ visions of what the car of the future might look like and how it will work. We’ve heard scientists like Dr. Michio Kaku give us valuable educated insights into the technologies that will be integrated into the vehicles that will populate and dominate tomorrow’s roads.

In the eyes of these visionaries, the car of the future will represent significant advancements in technology that will radically change our views of terrestrial transportation in general. They envision the transition to alternative energy sources to drive our engines, vehicles that will drive themselves with the help of GPS, the implementation of extravehicular control systems that will practically make traffic a thing of the past, the possibility of driving at extremely fast speeds in total safety, total integration of man and machine in vehicular design, cars that will park themselves, and much much more!

But what if I told you that you can get a glimpse of the car of the future today, running on today’s technology, built into your own car, whatever kind of car it may be? It’s true that many of the advances that I mentioned above are still a long way from being implemented on a commercial scale, but my intention is not to give you false hopes about owning a car that functions the way that the visionaries of our time describe the car of the future. Instead, I simply want to provide a glimpse of what it might be like and a good idea of how some of the technologies that will define the car of the future have already begun to be developed.

Most people are not aware that some of the technologies that we find so normal now are the basic building blocks of elements that the car of the future will utilize. Cars of the future, for example, will drive and park themselves using GPS technology. Even now, GPS technology is slowly pervading the way we navigate our streets and plan our trips. GPS also continues to become more and more reliable, and is able to provide more and more accurate positioning data. GPS already allows us to plan paths and find the quickest route between two points. All that’s needed now in order for cars to be able to drive themselves is a refinement in GPS systems’ accuracies and hardware that will allow cars to steer themselves along the paths created by the GPS systems.

Cars of the future will be aware of their surroundings. As you travel, the car of the future will sense whether there are other vehicles around it and make decisions as to how to behave in the road environment they find themselves in, and do all of this automatically. But environment sensing technologies already exist for vehicles nowadays in the form of parking sensors. Further refinement just needs to be made to make them more accurate, and to analyze and integrate in real-time the measurements they produce in a system that will make the necessary driving adjustments.

A more complete integration of the man and the machine will become commonplace in the cars of the future. Everything that a driver needs or wants can easily be activated or de-activated without diverting the driver’s attention from the road. Development in this direction continues to progress, especially after the advent of Bluetooth technology – effectively unwiring many devices and placing them in locations where they are more easily accessed by drivers.

Finally, all these innovations in the car of the future will culminate in a system where the drivers will practically be non-existent. Instead, cars will drive and navigate themselves between destinations with minimal human intervention. The role of the human will shift from the work of navigating the vehicle to enjoying the journey with few distractions. Perhaps, one day, we’ll just be lounging around in our cars watching movies on the road while our cars drive themselves – and we’re already seeing more and more entertainment options available for the enjoyment of the occupants of a vehicle in systems like on-board DVD players.

Just look through the catalogs of any online wholesale electronics shop and you’ll be surprised to find out just how close we really are to making cars of the future a reality. We may not live to see all these changes in terrestrial transportation take place, but at least we can say we were part of the technological generation that made such innovations possible!