Self-driving cars will become the brothels of the future. So say two academics from the universities of Surrey and Oxford, professors Scott Cohen and Debbie Hopkins, predicting that autonomous automobiles will replace “hotels-by-the-hour” rooms as the no-tell-motels of the Digital Age.

The study also envisions other paradigm shifts, such as budget travellers sleeping in their cars while travelling overnight between cities rather than using airline travel and/or staying in hotels. The authors — Cohen teaches tourism and transport at Surrey, while Hopkins is a research fellow in Oxford’s Transport Studies Unit — also wonder if guided tours (“coach trips,” as they’re called in Old Blighty) might become a thing of the past as the aftermarket supplies third-party “tour” software to augment the experience of a car that already drives itself.

And if these self-driving car tours really do take off, it would mean tourist shops and destinations would probably have to pay — shades of Facebook and Google — to be included in the cars’ automated routes. These somewhat less than idyllic prognostications are just some of the predictions that the full report, published in the Annals of Tourism Research, makes for our supposedly autonomous future.

Naturally, the projection of the autonomous automobile as bordello on wheels is its most licentious. Nonetheless, the authors are serious about this possibility, noting that, “while SCAVs [shared, connected autonomous vehicles] will likely be monitored to deter passengers having sex or using drugs in them … such surveillance may be rapidly overcome, disabled or removed.” Besides, say Cohen and Hopkins, personal connected autonomous automobiles “will likely be immune from such surveillance” and “it is just a small leap to imagine Amsterdam’s Red Light District ‘on the move.’”

The auto industry has made such prurient predictions easier by showcasing the future of autonomous automobile interiors as mobile living rooms. No longer constrained by requiring a driver facing forward behind a steering wheel, the future of the car interior has been portrayed as long comfy couches surrounding miniature coffee tables where commuters of the future play gin rummy or make productive use of their time while working at a computer. With some automakers predicting multi-position interiors that can be automatically altered into any configuration desired, it’s not hard to imagine being able to get more “comfortable” in a chaise lounge while speeding along the highway at 120 km/h.

Actually, the only startling thing about this study — at least for a paid cynic like Yours Truly — is that it’s hard to believe such titillating predictions are making headlines. Humans started having sex in cars pretty much right after the automobile was invented. The only difference is that now, thanks to the wonders of connected, self-driving software, you don’t have to be parked and you don’t have to climb into the back seat.As for transactional connubial relations being conducted in four-wheel vehicles, I’m pretty sure that’s not a recent invention.

The bigger issue — one not in the purview of tourism and transportation professors — is that there are far more troubling, though admittedly less bawdy, unintended consequences of automated driving. Motor Mouth has long predicted that the rise of the self-driving car will result in more, not less, congestion. Suburbanites, no longer restricted to actually “driving” their tedious commute, can either now sleep — as the report envisions — or make productive use of their time by getting a jump on their work.

The daily commute has long been considered the worst attribute of the move to find cheap real estate. Self-driving cars would alleviate, if not totally solve, that problem, rendering our highways, bi-ways and downtown cores even more congested than they are currently. And, if those self-driving cars are electric — i.e., cheaper to endlessly drive than hunt for an increasingly costly parking space — then we could have a serious problem with empty cars trolling around while their owners lunch at le-bistro-du-jour or catch a play at the Pantages Theatre. Not exactly the reduced-congestion future autonomous protagonists have been promising, right?

And none of this even touches on the moral dilemmas so adroitly constructed by Driving’s Lorraine Sommerfeld last week, nor the various problems with hackers taking over control of these now-vulnerable vehicles. We have also already seen the devastating consequences of having a lone terrorist take over one traditional vehicle and running amok in crowded city centres. It doesn’t require Hollywood scripting to imagine how a fleet self-driving trucks could be put to even more nefarious use and, because there are no human drivers, rendering the threats even more difficult to contain.

Nor can we discount the possibility of increased personal crimes. Kidnapping, rare as it is in our country, is a huge issue in other jurisdictions and will only be made easier if it can be done remotely. Politicians, business tycoons and just about anyone worthy of a self-driving “limousine” will be at risk. Perhaps even more troubling is that children (being driven to school autonomously), the elderly and the infirm will be especially vulnerable to such subterfuge.

The automobile, as house of ill repute on wheels, may generate the most salacious of headlines — but mobile whorehouses will hardly be the worst of unintended consequences should an autonomous future go wrong. We are being constantly bombarded with predictions of a supposedly idyllic, driverless future — Cohen and Hopkins describe it as the “enchantments that underpin often-utopic visions of automated urban futures.”

Perhaps we ought to more strenuously consider the unintended consequences of our automated future, even if they are not all as salacious as massage parlours on wheels.