author: Michael Cheng

Several automakers, insurance brands and city infrastructure designers have made out-of-this-world predictions about the effect of driverless technology on daily living. Some notable projections include residential designs without garages and urban planning with less parking lots.

NewDealDesign, a San Francisco-based design firm, is the latest establishment to make elaborate predictions about autonomous vehicles. The company's insights go further than other suggestions made in the past, as it also applies the technology to surrounding businesses and services. This level of autonomous integration and influence on daily activities is known as Autonomics. Such concepts challenge the applications of self-driving cars by extending their use beyond traditional commuting and private transportation.

"The goal with Autonomics was to imagine a world where getting from point A to point B wasn't just about the journey's end, rather everything that happened in between," said Reid Evans, lead designer of Autonomics and Strategy Design Director at NewDealDesign.

Decentralized Lifestyles

With the proliferation of driverless cars, the design firm foresees a huge increase in productivity. The company predicts that businesses will move away from centralized frameworks and cater to customers while they are on the road. As highlighted by NewDealDesign, in the future, a hungry passenger inside an autonomous vehicle might be able to order food and receive it in real-time. Instead of picking the order up from a restaurant or navigating through a drive-thru window, a small autonomous pod, like a small Starship Technologies delivery vessel, will bring the order directly to the customer. When executing a delivery, the driverless pod attaches itself to the self-driving unit carrying the passenger. Payments and the issuance of e-receipts are conducted wirelessly, assuming that paper-based cash (banknotes) will most likely be phased out by the time Autonomics comes to fruition in urban locations.

This type of autonomous service can be applied to a wide range of businesses, including flower deliveries, online package deliveries and even local services. Imagine ordering a haircut and having it done on a mobile hair salon on the way home from work. Interestingly, these decentralized concepts are not new. British architect Ron Herron made similar predictions 50 years ago, suggesting that cities will become mobile in the future.

LeechBots and ZoomRooms

NewDealDesign's autonomous pods have different classifications, based on their usage and applications. A one-wheeled LeechBot is a mobile vessel with docking capabilities, which could be used for small deliveries, as explained earlier in the article. ZoomRooms are large mobile, commercial establishments that allow self-driving cars to attach themselves to the vessel and ride along while engaging in services or business transactions. A combination of LeechBots and ZoomRooms is called DetourCity – a pop-up community that could be used to supplement the urban experience in rural areas.

"One other possibility, if I wanted to go more, sci-fi, is that along the highways you'll have moving, crawling communities," said Gadi Amit, founder of NewDealDesign.

In addition to disrupting mainstream lifestyles, the design firm also has extravagant plans to end vehicular oil consumption through the deployment of EVs. The company's solution involves expanding current EV charging networks and making them more user-friendly.