“What if the clock showed 25 hours in a day? What if you could have 1 extra hour?” This is the motto for an Audi campaign that shows the new luxury car equipped with features that assist the normal day driving. The Audi A8 is equipped with traffic jam pilot that allows the driver to use his time in a different way in case of a traffic jam, since the car manages the driving44.
This technology is trying to buy us some time, in order for us to do everything that we planned in the morning.
And if we think a little bit in all the time we waist on the day-to-day commute we can get really nervous. A recent study of the European Mobilities Observatory shows that the Portuguese are the ones that most use the car to go to work, compared with other European countries, and that spend an average of 8h 11m traveling during the work days45, in different ways of transportation. The home-work commute still take a big part of our lives.
In the US, due to the big distance between cities and the use of cars as the major, if not the only, way of transportation, we can also see a rise on hours on the road. Average values from diferent sources show that the Americans spend around 1h driving46.
However, if tomorrow was given a full hour inside an AV, what would we do? An enquire done in 2014, shows that 41% of people, when questioned about the activities that they could do inside an AV, fells the need to look at the road, even if not driving47. People are not comfortable with this technology just yet, and identify the motive of their reluctance to a fail in the system48. But wouldn’t be great to catch up on our sleeping hours on our way home in the end of the day?