Spaces on Wheels: Exploring a Driverless Future

We’ve designed seven autonomous vehicles as a visual exploration of how fully autonomous vehicles could one day enable a more fulfilling, everyday life. Alongside the designs themselves, we’ve launched a SPACE10 app where you can experience booking a Space on Wheels in Augmented Reality. Download the app.

We’ve also published a research report that provides a deep dive into all things most relevant to self-driving cars—including challenges, opportunities and examples of self-driving initiatives transforming urban environments today. Download the report.

Ultimately, Spaces on Wheels invites more people to envision the profound paradigm shift the development of self-driving cars could have on our everyday lives.

The Spaces

Office, Flexible Workspace

In congested cities, an average person driving to work spends 75 minutes commuting. About 30 of those minutes are lost to congestion. This means that over 32 years, the driver will have spent two years stuck in traffic.

Office on Wheels, on the other hand, helps people reclaim some of that lost time—whether they want to get a head start on the day’s work to free up time for later or get an early meeting in with colleagues.

Cafe, Coffee On The Go

Studies show that the quality of people’s relationships directly influences how happy they are. But in hectic, urban lives, people often have limited time to socialise; it’s also been found that the older people get, the less time they spend with friends.

Enter Cafe on Wheels—a mobile space which enables people to catch up with a friend over a coffee when they need to keep moving on a busy day.

Healthcare, Mobile Treatment

Transportation difficulties are one of the three major barriers curbing access to healthcare, especially for low-income communities. It’s known as ‘the last mile’ problem: health solutions tend to make it as far as medical outposts—but won’t reach end users.

Healthcare on Wheels solves ‘the last mile’ problem by getting medical professionals to visit people in need, not the other way around.

Farm, Fresh Delivery

Especially for people in low-income communities, difficulty getting to a store or market that sells fresh, healthy food is a significant barrier to local food access.

In contrast, Farm on Wheels brings local food to people wherever they are, all while enabling local farmers to expand their businesses.

Play, AR Joyride

Augmented reality is set to revolutionise the gaming industry and become the next big educational platform. As the technology advances, it’ll increasingly play a role in autonomous vehicles by providing real-time content for the passenger that’s intimately tied to the vehicle’s surroundings.

In Play on Wheels, augmented reality windows enable people to try a new game in AR as they travel, or experience educational content that responds to and reflects their surrounds.

Hotel, Urban Sleepover

More people are traveling than ever before. But air travel raises individual carbon footprints faster and higher than any other activity; in fact, the aviation sector is responsible for an estimated 4.9 percent of all human-made global warming.

In contrast, Hotel on Wheels is an electric vehicle powered by clean energy which contains all the perks of a traditional hotel room. It takes people to their destinations while they’re getting their shut-eye and enables them to reduce their carbon footprints.

Shop, Pop-up Store

While brick and mortar stores enable retailers to connect with many people, some don’t live close enough to retail locations to go there that often. And although online shopping typically lets people buy, it doesn’t really let them shop—which is where Shop on Wheels comes in. Shop on Wheels will come to people wherever they are—letting them try, buy and explore on their own terms.

Book your own Space on Wheels

The new SPACE10 app lets you book your own Space on Wheels and explore it from every angle in augmented reality. Download the app now and experience the future of urban mobility.

The SPACE10 app lets you explore our latest research and experiments in exciting new ways. Built around a conversational interface, it represents a more digestible and engaging way of interacting with some of our projects.

The app is currently supported for iOS mobile devices only.

The Why

We are on the verge of what could be the most significant period of change in the automobile industry. Technologies like electrification and connected and automated driving are making notable progress. One day, in the not-so-distant future, fully autonomous vehicles could be a common occurrence on our everyday streets. This would not only change how people and goods move around our cities, but also redefine the very fabric of our daily lives.

The day fully autonomous vehicles hit our streets is the day cars are not cars anymore. The primary function of transportation disappears to give rise to other functions. Comparing an autonomous vehicle to a car will be like comparing a car to a horse: it will be something different altogether. So, what would we like it to be? That is what we want to trigger conversations about with our seven autonomous vehicle designs.

Specifically, we’d like to make more and more people think about the vast promises surrounding what fully autonomous electric vehicles could enable: from increased safety on roads to better health in cities, greater convenience, more efficiency, reduced environmental impact and increased mobility for more people, we aim to elicit a broader dialogue on how we should perceive and design these spaces.