Automated Future: Kids Born Today Won't Ever Drive Cars, Expert Predicts

The future is moving in a very quick pace. Perhaps, it's moving too quickly that predictions of the next few years are always changing. For instance, some are predicting kids nowadays may not even have to drive cars in the future.

According to Motortrend, these future trends include that all cars in the U.S. would be electric but human-driven. Now, someone else is predicting that most cars will be autonomous. To take it a step further, babies born today may not even have to drive a car ever.

According to the San Diego Union Tribune, Henrik Christensen, head of the UC San Diego Contextual Robotics Institute, said kids "born today" may not need (or never get to) drive a car. He said autonomous, driverless cars will be here in a few decades. Within five years, we may even have driverless cars on the road.

This means not only are we expecting ourselves to not need to drive anytime soon, but we may be seeing a future where we don't need to teach children how to drive anymore.

Christensen said this is based on the question of "how much time people waste sitting in traffic and not doing something else." He said the average person in San Diego alone may even spend an hour commuting. If they can become more productive, it could be good.

This means we could be more productive in work if we are given to do something while we are on the commute. After all, there are petitions in countries asking them to consider commuting as part of working hours, given it's a contributing factor to stress among employees.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Lyft co-founder John Zimmer also predicted that car ownership may not even exist in 20 years. There may come a time that there are no parking garages. Humans can just get out of the car and ask them to pick us up, effectively becoming a service.

Of course, the idea of not owning, let alone never driving, is a completely foreign concept. 

Motortrend said the future, as Christensen and others are looking at, may not be far off. For instance, Ford may soon offer autonomous cars that do not even have steering wheels.