[wdfifteen]

We were watching a TV show about 200 – 300 mph bullet trains last night and Mrs WD and I got into a discussion about the future of individual transportation.
You can have almost anything delivered right to your door these days – why not a car? Someday we may be able to subscribe to a car service that gives us the right to drive a car that we don’t own, lease, or possess in any way. We can order up a car for 8 AM and at the appointed time it will arrive at our door. We drive it to the train station and get on the bullet train, where there is another car waiting for us at the end of the train ride that we can use to get to our final destination. A lot of the parts of such a system are already in place or in development. We have self-driving cars, we can order an Uber car and it arrives in a few minutes (with driver), we already license the software that operates the cars we drive. Why not license personal transportation? You could order any size car or truck you needed at the time, you aren’t paying a driver, so you could let it sit for as long as you wanted. Put it all together with a decent rail system and 500 mile trips would be a lot more pleasant and probably faster than flying (which I have come to hate).

Like most Pelicans I like my cars, but millennials don’t share the car culture we grew up with. As a prof said in one of our business classes, “When you go to buy a drill for your business, you need to ask yourself, ‘Do I want a drill, or do I really want a bunch of holes?’” For us it’s about the drill, for a lot of people on the road, they just want transportation. This would be good people who like their cars and driving, there would be fewer of the “other” car owners on the road talking on the phone and going 50 in the passing lane.

What say you all?