52 What variants of the car future are presented in this text? Which do you agree with?
There are broadly two routes down which the car can wind to 2040. The first is the model we are familiar with: car ownership. There are more than 34.4m cars on British roads. It’s clear the British still love their cars. Automotive manufacturers across the globe would love nothing more than the current model of private car ownership to continue. A car parked outside every home, new models bought on registration plate changes and regular servicing at your local garage, just with the car able to drive itself there for a robot to do the work. That route could see the car transform from a vehicle into a moving personal space. Once it drives itself, there’s no need to have the traditional layout – or even to face forward.
The other road to the 2040 car is the exact opposite. Once cars are fully autonomous there’s no reason they couldn’t become a service rather than something you buy and own. Car clubs such as ZipCar already offer cars without ownership, while services such as Uber and Lyft provide on-demand transport wherever you want to go. Take the human element out of the equation and it’s not hard to envision a world populated, not by cars, but by public transport pods. (Samuel Gibbs, The Guardian)
53 Choose one of the future car trends.
Read the corresponding text and prepare its summary
In groups discuss and evaluate* these trends according to the following criteria:
| flying cars | self-driving cars | V2V | |
| How useful is this trend? | |||
| How cost-effective is this trend? | |||
| How viable is this trend? |
*on a scale of 1 to 5
Text 1. SELF-DRIVING CARS
In California and Nevada, Google engineers have already tested self-driving cars on more than 200,000 miles (321,869 kilometers) of public highways and roads. Google's cars not only record images of the road, but their computerized maps view road signs, find alternative routes and see traffic lights before they are even visible to a person. By using lasers, radars and cameras, the cars can analyze and process information about their surroundings faster than a human can.
If self-driving cars do make it to mass production, we might have a little more time on our hands. Americans spend an average of 100 hours sitting in traffic every year. Cars that drive themselves would most likely have the option to engage in platooning*, where multiple cars drive very close to each and act as one unit. Some people believe platooning would decrease highway accidents because the cars would be communicating and reacting to each other simultaneously, without the on-going distractions that drivers face.
In some of Google's tests, the cars learned the details of a road by driving on it several times, and when it was time to drive itself, it was able to identify when there were pedestrians crossing and stopped to let them pass by. Self-driving cars could make transportation safer for all of us by eliminating the cause of 95 percent of today's accidents: human error.
*platoon – объединяться в колонны