You can already talk to your smartphone with a push of a button and the latest Android phones even allow an ongoing, touch-free conversation. That will only improve in the coming years and make driving safer. But what about when you have to actually look at the display or get information from your car? We're not far off from upgrading safety in that department, either.
HeadsUp already intends to make checking your phone safer by summer next year. They want to provide an easily-installable product that mirrors important (or, at least, desirable) information from your smartphone on your windshield. While glancing away from the road ahead is never safe, it's a heck of a lot safer to shift your eyes down for a split second than to look straight down. Since you generally need to look lower to change the radio or the temperature in your vehicle, checking an alert on your windshield should prove less hazardous.
As for gaining information from your car, we've already made some progress with the
Automatic Link. It's a $99 device that can plug into any car made after 1996 (and earlier, in some cases) that communicates with your smartphone in order to track your gas mileage, the location of your vehicle, how well you're driving, and if any issues arise. If you're in an accident, it'll automatically call for help. This is all pretty great now, but we can expect further integration in the future. You can already get a lot of information from generic Bluetooth-enabled OBD2 sensors—essentially what Automatic is—and use existing apps to read the data. As car technology progresses, we should be able to monitor even more data and automatically find out about fixable problems before they occur.
Your Car Will Heal and Clean Itself
You've probably heard of
RustOleum Neverwet, a coating that very little will stick to. If you coated a shoe with the stuff and squirted mustard on it, the mustard would just fall off. You can actually buy this pretty amazing stuff already, but it's just the beginning. What if you never (or, at least, rarely) ever had to clean your car again? Or touch up small scratches? The folks over at GizMag found out this isn't too far off:
Researcher Catarina Esteves of the department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at TU/e and her colleagues claim to have solved this problem with the development of surfaces that place the functional chemical groups at the end of special "stalks" that are mixed through the coating. When the outer surface layer is removed by scratching, the "stalks" in the layer underneath re-orient themselves to the new surface to restore their function.
The researchers say this will enable the creation of highly water-resistant coatings that could be applied to cars so that superficial scratches heal themselves and water droplets roll off the car, taking dirt with them.
We'll see these coatings on newer vehicles first, of course, but those of us with appropriate knowledge and skill set will be able to apply it ourselves in the future. While car enthusiasts probably won't want to trust the coating to keep their vehicles spotless, it will help reduce the amount of work in the beginning. Hopefully in the next decade we'll have the option of never washing our vehicles again.
Usually at Lifehacker, we only talk about the tips and tricks you can use right now. This post is a part of a (probably) ongoing series that breaks that rule: it's all about the future of life hacking. In it, we'll explore what we expect to be able to DIY and do better in the next three, five, and 10 years—or, in some cases, maybe even farther out. If there's a brand of future life hacking you'd like us to explore,
let us know at tips+thefuture@lifehacker.com.
Photos by
Nelson Marquez (Shutterstock) and bark. The Future of Car Hacking