Automobile

A photograph of the original Benz Patent Motorwagen, first built in 1885 and awarded the patent for the concept

A photograph of the original Benz Patent Motorwagen, first built in 1885 and awarded the patent for the concept

An automobile, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor.

Most definitions of the term specify that cars are designed to run primarily on roads, to have seating for one to eight people, to typically have four wheels, and to be constructed principally for the transport of people rather than goods.

However, the term car is far from precise, because there are many types of vehicles that do similar tasks.

There are approximately 600 million passenger cars worldwide (roughly one car per eleven people).  Around the world, there were about 806 million cars and light trucks on the road in 2007; they burn over 1 billion m³ (260 billion US gallons) of petrol/gasoline and diesel fuel yearly. The numbers are increasing rapidly, especially in China and India.

Driverless cars

A robotic Volkswagen Passat shown at Stanford University is a driverless car

A robotic Volkswagen Passat shown at Stanford University is a driverless car

Fully autonomous vehicles, also known as robotic cars, or driverless cars, already exist in prototype, and are expected to be commercially available around 2020.

According to urban designer and futurist Michael E. Arth, driverless electric vehicles—in conjunction with the increased use of virtual reality for work, travel, and pleasure—could reduce the world’s 800,000,000 vehicles to a fraction of that number within a few decades.

This would be possible if almost all private cars requiring drivers, which are not in use and parked 90% of the time, would be traded for public self-driving taxis that would be in near constant use.

This would also allow for getting the appropriate vehicle for the particular need—a bus could come for a group of people, a limousine could come for a special night out, and a Segway could come for a short trip down the street for one person. Children could be chauffeured in supervised safety, DUIs would no longer exist, and 41,000 lives could be saved each year in the U.S. alone