Past, Present, and Future of the Car | Full Documentary

We live in a world our ancestors would barely recognize. Around the globe, the impact of human ingenuity is now everywhere. We've pushed back the limits of our planet at speeds, depths, and heights that would have left our forebears breathless. Driving all these achievements is humankind's extraordinary gift for invention. Through genius and inspiration, we've created exceptional solutions to complex problems. From the everyday to the spectacular, some good and some not so good. This series celebrates the million ways our great inventions have transformed our world. That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. For most, it's the first thing we travel in and the last. Among the greatest inventions to transform our world, few come close. I mean, a car has to be one of the greatest inventions ever. Every minute, 150 are built. Built for luxury, convenience, for work. Ultimately, they're this little kingdom that we reign over and no one can control. We reveal its secret history. And when one of these things exploded full of fire and boiling hot water, the results could be absolutely catastrophic. And the many surprising ways this invention has changed our world. For the first time in history, two young people can go off in their own little private space in this car and connect intimately. We explore its incredible evolution and that we are only just realizing its true cost. Can the car survive or must it undergo its most dramatic evolution yet? Today, there are more than a billion cars on the planet. More than at any moment in history. The average American drives 20,000 kilometers and spends 13 full days in their car every year. We have grown to depend on cars in cities and in the countryside. We race them, pimp them, buy treats from them. They are so part of our lives that it seems impossible to imagine surviving without them. And yet somehow, we did. So back in the day, before we have any kind of combustion engine, the only way to get around is either with your two feet or if you could afford it, on the back of a horse. Nowadays, the horse is a racing machine, a recreational animal, a luxury. But in the days before mass car use, the horse was an essential part of life, a workhorse. As cities grew, so did our dependence on horses. And in the 1900s, the greatest concentration in the world was in London. It's quite amazing to think that just two generations ago, or about 100 years ago, humans were getting around town with horses. And in London, you needed about 300,000 to make that city function. And so obviously, traveling by horse is great because, I mean, they're much faster. You don't have to expend energy yourself, with the exception of having to fill them up with grass every now and then. They're a pretty good way to get around. Fuel may have been cheap. But inevitably, all that hay created a heap of problems. Horses poo out 15 kilograms of manure a day, and they urine 10 liters per day. Multiply that by 300,000, and you've got a huge amount of waste material as a result of this particular type of transportation. And of all the problems the Victorians faced, this one was a stinker. All of this waste just lies on the streets until someone cleans it up, causing huge health problems. Attracting flies, which can transfer typhoid fever and cause other enormous health problems for the population. The situation was so bad that people were paid money to clear crossings in the street so that people didn't have to step in manure as they just crossed the road. Flies spread killer diseases like typhoid, a disease which still kills approximately 150,000 people globally a year. And flies are drawn to horse dung like bees to honey. There had to be a cleaner alternative to the horse-drawn carriage. As luck would have it, a cleaner alternative to horsepower had been around for decades. Steam. In fact, it was the ancient Greeks who first recognized the potential for steam power. So the story actually starts in ancient Greece with a guy called Hero from Alexandria, and he came up with this device that looks very simple. It's just a sphere like so that you fill with water and you heat with a fire, and that creates steam. The point is that it has these nozzles that allow that steam to come out, and because they're arranged in a certain way, that produces jets of steam coming out of this sphere which then causes it to rotate. So that's a very early example of a steam engine. For 2,000 years, Hero's steam-powered spinning sphere remained a novelty until 19th century engineers discovered a way to turn steam into motion. The key innovation when it came to harnessing useful work from steam was the invention of the piston. At first, steam-driven pistons powered simple static devices like water pumps. The invention of the crankshaft turned steam power into forward motion. What that means is that you can use the expanding steam to push the piston down the length of the cylinder, and then by using a kind of crank arm, you can turn that linear motion into rotational motion, which can drive a machine or it can drive the wheels on a train, however you want to use that energy to do useful work. The steam engine, or external combustion engine, turns water into steam. Inside a narrow chamber, the steam expands, pushing a piston. The piston rod then pushes a crankshaft. Its clever design uses the linear motion to rotate an axle, and if you join the axle to wheels, welcome to the steam age. Steam engines saw people traveling faster than ever before. The first public railway opened in 1825 in northern England. A journey in Britain that used to take 15 hours by horse could be done in three hours by steam train. The steam revolution still governs our world today. Steam-powered turbines provide us with over 85% of our electricity needs. And modern renewables, like this solar power generator in California, uses 170,000 mirrors to focus the sun's rays to superheat water to power generators. The external combustion engine would transform the world. But would it be the answer to the horseless carriage? There's so much excitement about what steam could do, that they wanted to channel the steam into every type of transportation, whether that was in steam trains, steam ships, even steam cars. For a while, it looked like steam cars were the future. So these first steam-engined cars all of a sudden meant that not only did you have this amazing form of personalized travel, but before, the only way you could go faster than what your two legs could do would be on a back of a galloping horse. Maybe you could get to 30, 40 miles an hour, but now suddenly you could go 50, even up to 100 miles an hour. In 1906, a car made by the American Stanley brothers set a land speed record of 204 kilometers per hour. It seemed that the horseless carriage had truly arrived. So why aren't we driving around in steam-driven cars today? Well, they were a huge pain in the ass. You had to, like, not only bring along a ton of coal to fuel them, but you also needed to bring a bunch of water. And these things are really heavy and labor-intensive, not to mention annoyingly dirty and probably a bit dangerous to deal with. Steam cars came with a serious health warning. They did suffer from a terrible image problem because, you know, we all forget these things were handmade. Every single one was, in effect, a prototype. And when one of these things exploded, full of fire and, you know, boiling hot water, the results could be absolutely catastrophic. Engineers also discovered that steam power had its limitations. An external combustion engine is extremely inefficient. Even, like, the absolute top-of-the-range steam trains could only achieve an energy efficiency of, like, 7%. The best cars, that was even way less. I think they only achieved, like, 1% efficiencies. So engineers started to look for a safer, less bulky engine that ran on a more energy-efficient fuel than coal. In Germany in 1885, an inventor ditches coal and water for oil. His patent names Ligroin as the fuel to generate power, removing the need for steam. So cut to the 1880s and a guy called Karl Benz, you might recognize his name, he decided, well, what if you can take this external combustion and make it happen inside the casing of the engine? Maybe that will be a more efficient process. The key fuel, Ligroin, was a by-product of oil manufacturing, best known as a household cleaner. He used Ligroin oil as a form of fuel for combustion within the engine itself. And so by cutting out these various processes of having to heat steam, transferring that steam to a wheel, you're actually having the combustion reaction all in one place, which meant it was much more efficient. It works like this. A piston draws a mixture of Ligroin and oxygen through a valve. Into a combustion chamber, the valve closes and the piston compresses the fuel and the oxygen together in an energy-rich mix. As the piston reaches the top of the chamber, a spark ignites the combustible mixture, causing it to explode. This explosion rapidly heats the compressed gas, making it dramatically expand, forcing the piston away. A second exhaust valve opens, allowing the returning piston to push out the exhaust fumes and ready the chamber for another cycle. Benz's patent is one of the earliest versions of the internal combustion engine, fueled not by coal and steam, but by Ligroin, as seen in this 1930s demonstration. Benz's Ligroin engine is more efficient, cleaner and safer than a coal-powered steam version. It had to be a success. Well, actually, no. No one really bought his car. So as genius as Benz's new invention is, unfortunately, no one wanted to buy one because they still had their horses as a convenient way of travel and people were basically... They didn't believe that a car would be able to take them any kind of meaningful long distance. But Benz's wife Bertha had a fantastic idea. One morning, she got up early and took her sons to Carl's workshop and borrowed his prototype car. She just took the car, without telling him about it, with her two sons and decided to make the 200 kilometer round trip to a nearby town to prove all the naysayers wrong. It was effectively the first grand theft auto. Bertha wanted to prove that her husband's car was reliable over a long range. But it wasn't long before things went wrong. The brakes started to disintegrate. The brakes were basically just this wooden block against the wheel. Now, the car had never been this distance before. It had never braked this many times and the wood wore down. So Bertha was stuck. If she couldn't find a new alternative, then this car wouldn't reach its destination and she would never prove that it was the future of transport. So Bertha found a tanner and asked him to cover the wooden brake blocks with a strong leather covering. The bemused craftsman complied, not realizing that he had just created the world's first brake lining. Car brakes today, like these disc brakes, are technical marvels, but still follow the same basic principle of applying pressure to the wheel to slow it down. Some modern brakes even allow cars to go from 100 kilometers an hour to a standstill in just over 30 meters. But for Bertha, the brakes were just the start of her problems. Then disaster struck. Bertha was about to run out of fuel. This car was powered by Ligroin. It's a cleaning product that you could buy in pharmacies or drug stores. So Bertha took a little detour to a tiny village store and purchased all the Ligroin she possibly could, much to the confusion of the pharmacist. Ligroin is similar to another byproduct of oil called gasoline. Today, there are approximately half a million gasoline filling stations around the globe. But it's thanks to Bertha that chemists became the very first. Bertha had no idea that she had started a revolution. That secret trip kick-started the global petrochemical industry. Today, oil dominates our world. We refine it for industry and plastics. But above all, it's to power our cars. Over 70% of all oil is sold as fuel. Gram for gram, refined oil holds twice the energy of coal. And instantly flammable, it's a great source of energy. When Bertha and her sons make it back to Benz's workshop, they are hailed as heroes. They've proved that the car isn't a novelty. It's a real form of transport. It's the future. So this design that Benz creates is unbelievably important. It's basically the granddaddy of all the modern petrol engine cars that we see today. Together, Carl and Bertha Benz will change the world. Every car you see today, from sports car to taxi, from racing car to the family car, owes its lineage to this patent and the ingenuity of the wife and husband team. But the motor car wasn't ready to take over the world just yet. In the early years of the 20th century, the motor car was a highly specialized piece of machinery. Each part taking highly skilled workers days to make, as demonstrated here in a film made by the Ford Motor Company. The framework, the carriage, the engine, the wheels, the upholstery. Every part of the car needed a specialized craftsman. It was expensive. And early cars seemed destined to become a luxury only the super wealthy could afford. The story now moves to America's Midwest and a rural farmer from Michigan, Henry Ford. Although he grew up on a farm, Henry's obsession was engineering. At only 15 years old, he would entertain himself by taking a pocket watch apart and putting it back together. It's this skill at breaking things down into their component parts that influences young Henry Ford's thinking when he dreams of building cars, alongside an important lesson from farming. Actually, he'd looked at abattoirs and how they stripped carcasses of, you know, bits and pieces of meat to make sausages and so forth. And he'd suddenly had this brainwave that he could use the moving production line that were found in these buildings, and he could adapt that to making the car. So instead of having two or three men building an entire car and having to know every aspect of how to construct the car, you could have one person working on one individual job, then move the part to the next person who was expert in another job. And suddenly you have this conveyor belt of individual experts, each producing their job to the highest standards, which meant that you could produce cars in hours rather than days and weeks. Ford's assembly line, first introduced in 1913, sees the time it takes to build a car go from more than 12 hours to just two and a half hours. The amazing thing that Henry Ford's production system did was to radically reduce the price of a car. So when it started, I think the Model T was $850, and just 10 years later, it was half the price. And a few years later, it was about $300. Suddenly, the car comes within reach of families with even modest incomes. And of course, among the first to benefit were the remote farming communities that in 1915 made up over half of all Americans. He needed to design a vehicle that would be ideal for people in very, very remote areas, you know, in the Midwest, anywhere across the states where there weren't roads, that they could actually really get around in. The effect on agriculture is dramatic, with farmers reporting a 68% increase in their efficiency, thanks to their new set of wheels. And farmers buy them by the million. On the 26th of May, 1927, the 15 millionth Model T rolls off the Highland Park assembly line. Ford's genius has created arguably the most important invention of the 20th century, the assembly line, a concept that is used to this day for the mass production of cars. From 3 million cars a year in 1925 to almost 6 million cars a month today. Mass production has touched every part of our lives, even changing what we eat and what we drink. And with simplicity at each stage of the process, robots replace people, speeding up manufacturing even further. Today, we take for granted the benefits of mass production, but it was Henry Ford's vision that helped transform American industry. Exported around the world, everyone can benefit from affordable, personalized transport. And car ownership explodes. By the 1940s, just 30 years since the birth of the Model T, car ownership in America has risen a thousandfold. It's a car's world and everyone benefits. Doctors could get trauma victims to the hospital in record time, saving lives. Firefighters reach blazing buildings before they are lost. Bad guys benefit from a quick getaway. And it isn't long before the cops are hot on their tails. What I find absolutely amazing is how quickly America responds to the mass introduction of cars. The whole country is rebuilt around vehicles. Not just roads are made and tarmac for the first time, but whole freeways and turnpikes are built to accommodate this vehicle. Motels are introduced, driving movies come along, petrol stations. What it does is it starts to expand the city out towards the horizon. America becomes the first nation dominated by the car. New types of businesses spring up for car users. Filling stations appear everywhere to fill thirsty cars. And drivers refuel in roadside diners. And the new mobility of people around the country has a vast effect on the economy. From the late 1930s onwards, car driving tourists across America spend $700 million a year on fizzy drinks, hot dogs, even golf. Today, golf is worth $84 billion to the U.S. economy alone. It's a sport that couldn't exist without the car, with so many courses in remote places. From just a few hundred golf courses in the U.S. in the 1910s, thanks to the automobile, there are now nearly 20,000. It doesn't take long for the car bug to spread. Post-war West Germany falls in love with an idiosyncratic beauty, the Volkswagen Beetle, from only 9,000 made in 1947. By 1955, the millionth Beetle had been built and sold. There was a big celebration in Germany to mark the one millionth people's car since the war. Over 150,000 people were present to take part in the jollification. This included a stage performance by French can-can girls, and it's just not true that one is given away with every Volkswagen. The Beetle not only provided West Germans with jobs, but also engineering to be proud of. And West Germans loved it so much that by 1965, over 10 million had been sold, helping drive the nation's economic miracle of the 1950s and 60s. The car was transforming economies around the world, but it was also affecting the design of our cities. Thanks to the car, workers could live further from the workplace, creating another American first, the suburb. Since the car became affordable in the 1920s, suburbs in the U.S. have grown at a remarkable pace. Before the car, cities were pretty grotty places. They were full of people because people had to be near work. They were full of horses, and the side effects of having lots of horses brings with it. And they were smelly, grotty, not particularly nice places. Having a car meant that you didn't have to live in the city. You could work in the city, but live outside of it and drive in. And this has led to the development in Adelaide of suburbs. Through having a car, you could go from living on top of one another in the city, not particularly wanting to venture outside, to having space and freedom to grow in suburbia and actually wanting to go outside. Sit in the garden, have a barbecue, the car brought that to you, and then you could simply commute into the city, do what you needed to do there and go back home to this paradise. Beyond commerce and city planning, the car was about to have a major impact on families themselves. Particularly the younger generation. Mass car ownership itself is all about escapism, and the effect on the family means that you can escape the family. This must have been extraordinary for teenagers, those that first wave of teenagers who could actually get away from it all and escape and not have to worry about being watched. It's very exciting. Back in the early 20th century, family life was a distinctly local suffocating affair. So in a rural community like that, the family would have been very insular. If you look at that, you know, around the turn of the century, if, you know, if a boy liked a girl, they would probably come, you know, to have dinner, you know, over at the girl's house and that the parents would be there and they would be chaperoned all the time. But then the car comes, all of a sudden, they can go for a drive. They can be alone. They can have this space that actually promotes intimacy as well, which is kind of something you don't think about with the car. With the car, you could just get into the car and drive it and go places. So it opened up America because you didn't have to think about the logistics of actually getting to where you wanted to go. You could just get into the car and do it. And people did. And within a few decades, the car has become more than a workhorse. It's a work of art, a thing of beauty. And we fall completely in love. Between the 1950s and 70s, car ownership continues to explode, doubling every 10 years. In the new century, there is one car for every six people on our planet. Today, the automotive industry continues to dominate global manufacturing. In Germany alone, it employs almost a million people, producing over five million cars a year. But among the car's most alluring qualities is speed. Speed is like a drug. When you hit the accelerator, you have that adrenaline rush and you have that because what's happening is the fear of kind of going faster, kicks in that sort of that response of like hyper awareness of what's going on. But at the same time, you have that part of the brain that kind of feels it's in control. So you're in many ways walking that balance between danger, but also control. So it's a very powerful position to be in. Originally, the speed of a car was a measure of its quality. You know, to be able to sustain a vehicle over, you know, 30 or 40 or 50 miles an hour before 1900, that was a feat in itself. But speed soon becomes an end in itself. But to actually start hitting a few of the, you know, the sort of magic figures, 100 miles an hour, that would have been 160 kilometers an hour. It started to get people focused on actual speed record breaking. And engineers are soon exploring the interplay between car and atmosphere. Aerodynamics. The problem with trying to make anything go fast down here at ground level on Earth is that we have this thick soup of air that we have to travel through. And the faster you go, the greater the force that the air molecules exert on the vehicle. So it requires more and more energy to make something go faster and faster. And so this sort of created the study of aerodynamics, because the shape of the vehicle has a really big impact on how fast you can go. As designers try new profiles that allow cars to slice through the atmosphere, the car evolves. From the blocky cars of the 1940s to the sleek sports cars of today. Even racing cars go from engines on wheels to streamlined machines that slice through the air. I mean, you must have felt this yourself when, you know, when you're swimming. If you try and put your hand through water with it flat, you can feel the force. It takes a ton of effort to do it. But if you put your hand like that, it slips through the water really nicely. And so this same principle applies to car design. You want to have something that's nice and pointed and creates, sort of allows the air to flow around it really, really smoothly without creating any kind of turbulence. Aerodynamics is critically important in the breaking of speed records. One of the early speed pioneers was 1960s British driver Donald Campbell. It's not climbing and it's not flying, but it's going as fast as possible. So it requires, you know, nerves of steel. It requires ingenuity. It requires risk-taking behavior and it requires belief in oneself. Using the same principles of aerodynamics that apply today, helping the vehicle channel the air over the car body, Campbell and his team managed to break both the land and water speed record in the same year, 1964. But the problem with going really fast is that at some point the air resistance isn't just a drag problem, but if it gets underneath the car, it can actually create lift in a similar way that happens with planes that take off on a runway. But you really don't want that when you're in a car that doesn't have any wings and if it goes in the air, it's going to come back down very badly. It's this effect that Campbell experiences not on land, but on water in 1967. Campbell's life comes to an abrupt end, chasing a speed record. Campbell isn't the first to succumb to the speed bug. He won't be the last. It isn't long before the problem becomes an epidemic. As the domestic car becomes a killer. With the invention of the car also came the car accident. A new branch of engineering develops to combat the problem. Passenger safety. From the 1950s onwards in Europe, safety becomes a priority. And that means that we started decades of work to try to make these new vehicles safer. Cars are built of metal. Humans are merely flesh and blood. In a high-speed crash, we don't stand a chance. The problem is you're going to keep going forwards until something stops you. And that could be the seat in front of you, the steering wheel, the inside of the car, which is now stationary. These are all rigid things that are going to stop you incredibly quickly and do a lot of damage to your body. The first major safety developments are basic waist belts, which can save lives if used properly. As this public service announcement from America shows. Wearing seat belts, Alice was badly shaken up. I'd have to get Alice over to Dr. McAllister right away. Then we discovered something that gave us both a genuine shock. What if this had been Nancy? But the waist belt was far from a perfect solution. The majority of injuries in car accidents are to the head. It left the head and upper body vulnerable. 1959, and a Swedish engineer suggests a simple improvement to the waist belt. Niels Bohlin was an aviation engineer who specialised in ejector seats. He understood that full body restraint was the key to saving lives, as seen here in a US military film from 1949. Knowing how an unrestrained body could be damaged in an accident, he proposes the V-belt, the principle of all seat belts today. A three-point belt that connects across the stomach and chest. It was a simple improvement that has saved many lives when it was used. But no one could force everyone to buckle up. So car manufacturers look for a solution. That doesn't rely on perfect behaviour, but on technology. The key to safety is being able to slow you down over as much time as possible. That's what's going to reduce the force that is going to potentially cause damage. So one possible solution is by having this air cushion that will slowly decelerate you down to zero. It takes engineers another 20 years before a more effective, but elaborate safety system is unveiled in Germany in 1981. The airbag. And that is the principle behind the airbag. It's an air cushion that just increases the amount of time it takes for you to stop compared to if your head just hit the steering wheel. A simple idea, but one with a lot of challenges. The airbag has to be fully inflated before you land on it because you're filling this thing up quite quickly. And so that is forcing the airbag out. So if you're hitting something that's already sort of expanding towards you, that's like it's hitting you even harder than it would have done otherwise. It really has to fill incredibly quickly. In fact, in under one twentieth of a second, filling an airbag in this short space of time presents a real engineering challenge. The answer is found through the precise choreography of engineering and chemistry. The airbag needs to very rapidly detect that the car has come to a stop. It's got just a few milliseconds before you come into contact with the wheel. So the way this works is that a small electronic accelerometer detects if there's a sudden change in speed of the car. And if that happens, then it sends an electrical signal to basically a small packet of chemicals behind your steering wheel. The electricity heats it up and it causes the chemical to decompose, releasing a huge amount of gas very, very quickly. That inflates the airbag like a balloon. The most widely used compound in airbags is sodium azide. Normally stable, chemists know that when heated, the compound instantly releases a huge amount of non-flammable nitrogen gas. The reaction is so fast that just 130 grams of sodium azide can produce 67 litres of nitrogen in the blink of an eye. A brilliant cross-discipline solution that has saved countless lives. The car has come to dominate our modern world, from helping first responders save lives to becoming our preferred form of transport. But the car's success may also spell its downfall. There are now more cars on the road than ever before. And more cars mean traffic, traffic and more traffic. In central London, cars move slower at rush hour than the horse and carriage did in 1900. And in China, in 2010, a 60-kilometre traffic jam lasted 12 days. And traffic jams exacerbate a major problem. Pollution, contributing to the major issue of the 21st century, global warming. Gasoline-powered vehicles have one big disadvantage in this day and age, and that is each one is a miniature power station. The sort of mixture of particulates and noxious emissions from petrol engine vehicles is harmful to health. I think we're reaching a point in society where we're not prepared to put up with that anymore. Along with poor air quality, motor vehicles are now believed to be one of the largest contributors to climate change. The great invention that has transformed our planet may end up killing it, unless something radical changes. One possible solution was there right at the start. This car from 1900 is electric. Electric cars have been with us for more than a century. Instead of the internal combustion engine, an electric motor drives the wheels from between 55 to 240 kilometres. But the first electric cars had a limited range and were overtaken by Henry Ford's longer range petrol cars. But now the tables are turning back to this cleaner alternative. An electric car engine is essentially an electric motor and a battery with a power controller unit in between the two. And all that happens is that we charge up the battery, we put energy into the battery system, and that energy is drawn down by the electric motors which drive the wheels. It's a very, very simple process. We're not burning anything, we're not burning any fuels, we are producing no emissions at all. Electric vehicles have always been part of our lives. From the lunar rover to the Japanese bullet train, electricity is a proven way to transport us. But for the domestic user, recharging is not as quick as refuelling. Obviously at the moment when you're at the fuel pump, it perhaps takes you a couple of minutes to fill the tank up. And that tank of fuel provides you with quite a long range, typically in excess of 300 or 400 kilometres. But charging with electric vehicles is typically anywhere from 30 minutes to maybe several hours, dependent upon the type of charging station. So there's a great deal of infrastructure and high-speed charging infrastructure that's required in order to see electric cars being taken up to their full potential. But even with its challenges, the electric car will be the next step for this great invention. The electrification of cars should hopefully make the car sustainable. It won't be this polluting beast choking us all and shortening our lives. It will be something that emits nothing and can be charged from solar power and is completely sustainable. I think it's very exciting, and the advent of electric cars could possibly save the car itself. And safety is entering the electronic arena too. Cars are now fitted with smart electronics, radar, even laser-equipped radar, all in an effort to remove the most dangerous aspect of a car journey. You, the driver. The self-driving car. It's a dream long held as science fiction. This futuristic film from 1956 takes a glimpse into the world of 1976. Car journeys are controlled by a central computer. We're heading for Chicago. Please route us through. Synchronize your speed and direction. Which plots your best route. We're all set for auto control. You're now under automatic control. Hands off steering. And make sure you go as quickly and safely as you can. All you need to do is have a drink, even smoke a cigar, as your car whizzes along under the watchful eye of the control system, which means less traffic and fewer accidents. Happy driving. Now the future is here. And it's very different. Each car has its own controller, an onboard AI computer. A breakthrough technology in this quest is called Light Detection and Ranging, LIDAR. So a LIDAR system uses a laser beam to effectively range find, to work out what's out there and how far it is away. And it does that by bouncing a light signal off objects in the environment. And those points, those measurements that are made in the environment can be created into something called a point cloud. So in other words, what is physically out there around the vehicle, which the vehicle needs to avoid. By using lasers, the technology paints a picture of the world around it, reacting to danger in the blink of an eye, and fundamentally changing our relationship with the car. The car was the thing that allowed us to be in control, to go as fast as we wanted, wherever we wanted. And that's going to feel like it's being taken away. But on the other hand, you've got to imagine that the reason that we have so many car accidents is because all cars are autonomous. We all have our own brains thinking about where we want to go and what we want to do. Eventually, when we have driverless cars, they will be on a network understanding where each other is going, which means it will be profoundly more safe. But what would a driverless reality mean for drivers? Do driverless cars spell the end of the car as we know it? Most drivers who like the response of a gasoline-powered vehicle, they feel that it's going to respond to their commands. A driverless vehicle is not going to take any notice of what you want. And so, you know, driving as we know it is going to be over. Or is it the beginning of a brave new world? What's really exciting is what happens now. The reset button is essentially being pressed. That's why the future of the car is going to be so exciting. And some designers are even looking to take the car off the road and into a new dimension. But whether it's in the sky or on the ground, the car remains one of humankind's great inventions. The car has to be one of the greatest inventions ever because, you know, not only is it... this gives us the autonomy about where we can go and takes us from A to B safely, but it also is absolutely revolutionary because it saves us on our most precious resource, and that is our time. We can get places that before would take weeks or even months to get to within a day. The car, a great invention that's transformed our world for over 100 years and may be about to transform it again.