The car of the future

Cars will be more connected than ever

Modern cars are already more connected than ever before with features including Bluetooth, smartphone mirroring, in-car modems, live navigation, over-the-air (OTA) updates and the ability to alert emergency services in the event of an accident.

Expect the connectivity trend to accelerate in the years ahead as the car of the future becomes the equivalent of a supercomputer on wheels, capable of thinking and acting for itself to avoid accidents, traffic jams and more.

Experts believe there’ll be significantly more interaction between individual cars through greater use of the growing computing power and sensors in vehicles, which will help reduce accident rates.

Creating a transport network that utilises communication between vehicles, infrastructure and individual mobile devices to more effectively plan travel has enormous potential to improve traffic flow.

In this scenario pedestrians, bicycles, private cars and commercial and public transportation traffic are all woven into a single connected network.

The arrival of vehicle-to-cloud and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication will enable your car to recommend alternative transport options when congestion is unavoidable.

Cars will drive themselves

The car of the future will be safer than ever before, with one of the most significant changes being the move towards autonomous driving.

While there are understandable concerns about the idea of cars that drive themselves, there are already millions of cars on our roads that operate with a degree of autonomy. If your latemodel vehicle has features like Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) or Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), then you’re already driving a semiautonomous vehicle.

The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) categorises autonomous driving according to six levels, from Level 0 ‘no driving automation’, to the fully driverless Level 5 where the vehicle can perform all driving functions by itself in all circumstances.

With dozens of L4 self-driving vehicle trials underway throughout the world – meaning the vehicle can manage all traffic situations by itself, albeit under certain circumstances such as on selected roads and in fine weather – and manufacturers including Tesla, Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai pushing to be the first-to-market with a fully autonomous car, it’s only a matter of time before we see driverless cars on our roads.

"When we talk about motoring in 25 years' time, we will be driving autonomous vehicles in some form."

“Obviously when it comes to safety, we cannot compromise anything, or take shortcuts, and we need to get the technology right. But it will be coming and when we talk about motoring in 25 years’ time, we will be driving autonomous vehicles in some form,” says Mercedes-Benz Australia’s Head of Sales Performance and Operations, Andre Dutkowski.

Cars will be powered by hydrogen

Hydrogen has long been touted as the ‘fuel of the future’ and the ultimate solution to the issue of vehicle tailpipe emissions. This is because hydrogen can be produced safely using nothing more than water and green electricity, and is virtually non-polluting.

In addition to its clean energy credentials, it’s the versatility of hydrogen to power everything from cars to trucks, buses and even ships, along with its ability to be transported as a liquid or a gas, and therefore exported, that has people so excited about its potential.

Hydrogen can either be burned in a modified internal combustion engine, or more commonly used to generate electricity in a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle (HFCEV), production versions of which are currently manufactured by the likes of Honda, Hyundai and Toyota.

Hyundai’s Senior Manager of Future Mobility and Government Relations, Scott Nargar, says one of the major challenges preventing wider HFCEV adoption is the cost and complexity of building the dedicated refuelling infrastructure they require.

But he also believes the combination of rising government and industry action on CO2, the declining cost of renewable energy which can be used to create green hydrogen cost-effectively, and falling costs of the vehicles and their fuelling stations, are coming together to create the ideal conditions for broader adoption of the technology.

“Australia, with its existing ports and quality infrastructure, plus our abundance of wind and solar power potential, is in a unique position to maximise the opportunity presented by hydrogen. There is no better place in the world to establish a green hydrogen industry,” he says.

Cars will use electricity-based fuels

While there seems little doubt the future of automobile propulsion will be electric, the transition to a fully electric vehicle fleet in some countries including Australia will take years, perhaps even decades.

During this time there will be a still-sizeable fleet of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles on our roads, with eFuels emerging as a promising option to ensure these vehicles can continue operating but with a much lower carbon footprint than today.

Electricity-based fuels, or eFuels, are carbon-neutral fuels produced with renewable energy to create green hydrogen through electrolysis, with the hydrogen then combined with carbon dioxide in a reactor to produce eFuel. The carbon-neutral fuel can be used as a direct replacement for fossil fuels in cars, trucks, ships and aeroplanes.

Porsche has invested heavily in the development of eFuels, partnering with Siemens Energy, ExxonMobil and others to establish a Chilean manufacturing plant that will produce “nearly CO2 neutral” eFuel for use in its race cars, and to keep older internal combustion-powered Porsches on the road.

Tasmania is also emerging as an eFuel player, with HIF Asia Pacific in the process of obtaining approvals for Australia’s first large-scale, carbon-neutral eFuel production facility near Burnie.

“At full operations, the HIF Tasmania facility is expected to produce up to 100 million litres per year of carbon neutral eFuels, reducing global CO2 emissions by approximately 260,000 tons per year, the equivalent of decarbonising 52,000 cars on the road today,” says HIF Asia Pacific CEO Ignacio Hernandez.

Cars will be powered by the sun

With its year-round sunshine, Australia is ideally placed to exploit the clean, green solar energy that falls from our skies. Householders here have long since switched onto the benefits of this free form of energy, with Australia having the highest per capita adoption of household solar in the world.

Which begs the question, why aren’t we also powering our cars this way?

Richard Hopkins, Professor of Practice at UNSW and principal of the world-record-breaking Sunswift Racing team, believes it’s unlikely we’ll see cars that are purely powered by the sun in his lifetime, although the ability for solar to power cars on short journeys and to top up batteries is certainly viable.

Several electric car makers are already using solar roofs to help charge their batteries in this way, including the Mercedes-Benz Vision EQXX concept, the Fisker Ocean and the Hyundai IONIQ 5.

Professor Hopkins says the practical limitation of fully powering passenger cars with solar is the sheer number of photovoltaic cells currently required. Despite this, there have been concerted recent efforts to launch the world’s first publicly available solar-powered car, including by Dutch company Lightyear which went so far as starting production of its Lightyear 0 solar car at a plant in Finland in 2022, before promptly shutting down just a month later after the company got into financial difficulties.

Cars will power our homes and electricity grid

As more EVs fill our roads, a growing number will offer bi-directional charging, also known as vehicle-to-grid (V2G), allowing people to unlock their vehicles not just as transport assets but also as energy assets.

Paul Sernia, one of the founders of Brisbane-based company Tritium, a global leader in the design and manufacture of DC fast chargers, sees the opportunity for electric cars to become part of our national power grid by feeding power back to the grid from their vehicle battery and vice versa.

Several different EV and PHEV models available today already offer this technology, including the Kia EV9, Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV and the Nissan Leaf, with V2G expected to become more mainstream in the future.

“I think it’s exciting if we have millions of cars every day moving energy throughout our cities. I call it the internet of mobile energy. The roads become the electricity grid of the future,” says Paul.

To some extent this bidirectional capability also minimises the common concern about the electricity grid’s ability to cope with the growing number of EVs needing to be charged, since the fleet of EVs will be able to effectively push-and-pull energy into and from the grid as required.

“I don’t believe (the grid) will need to be upgraded or that we’ll need to build more power plants to power electric vehicles. What we’ll really see is that charging will happen as a managed process,” says Paul.