This year at CES, just as in the previous few years, autonomous cars have been at the forefront of nearly every automaker’s agenda—or at least their messaging. So, too, have so-called smart homes and the Internet of Things, a network that connects everything from refrigerators to cars to home thermostats. Hyundai has decided to one-up its competition with a new concept entirely: the car and the home, together as one being.
Indeed, the automaker’s Mobility Vision concept, which is really more of a home display than a car, adds a physical connection beyond the expected digital tendrils connecting the car to the home. See that hole in the wall in the photo above? My, the space beyond sure looks like . . . a car interior! It is, since Hyundai’s “concept” is really a method by which a futuristic home might physically dock with a futuristic car, bringing the two together to share space. In Hyundai’s words, the vision “suggests how the car could shed the image of a conventional vehicle, integrating itself with the living space when docked, before becoming a mobile living space when customers need to move around.”
The transport pod is just another room in the house. By extension, the car’s interior becomes almost part of the home furniture collection. In fact, the front seat—the driver’s seat?—itself becomes another mobility device, motoring around via unspecified means (it appears to float) to fetch its human cargo from the home’s nether regions and transporting them back to the car.
The supposed benefit of the car’s intrusion on home life, per Hyundai, is a seamless home-to-car experience, aided by the car’s hypothetical secondary functions as the home’s climate-control system, another audio and visual output for in-home smart devices, and an emergency generator. (The hypothetical car in this scenario is a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle capable of generating electricity from hydrogen fuel.) It is, of course, only a concept, but the moving/floating chair reminds us of the hover chairs in the movie Wall-E, the ones that schlep around an increasingly sedentary, overweight, media-placated, and socially dissociated human race while their world slips under the control of a single Big Brother–like corporation. But that could never happen in the real world, right?
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