Electric cars, self-driving cars, cloud infrastructure and communications systems in driver assisted cars—the future of cars seems to be now with a huge selection for car buyers to choose from. You name it: luxury sedans, hatchbacks, high-end SUVs, crossovers, subcompacts, minis, and more. The big boys in the business; the Tesla, Chevy, Mercedes, Rolls Royce and Audis of the world are innovating everyday one-upping the last to bring their version of the future car. The question is, have we arrived at the ultimate utopia of cars?

There are two areas where innovation has been taking place. The exterior and interior of the cars themselves are made better every day to focus on comfort, speed, tenacity, fuel efficiency, and safety. The other important area is providing quicker access to customers.

For the former, self-driving cars is the latest technology that is gathering hype, even if with a healthy dose of skepticism from consumers, opening up many moral debates. The real turning point however happened where internal combustive engines are now being replaced by electric batteries in the hopes to be cost, fuel and environmentally efficient. Electric vehicles are being referred to as pollution shifters and many estimates suggest that they will cost about the same as traditional engine cars in the next five years.

Countries in the developed world including UK, France, Germany and Norway have already promised to ban the use of petrol and diesel cars while next door neighbour India will become an electric vehicle nation by 2030. Good friend China on the other hand, is doling out subsidies (as high as 60 percent of the costs) for electric car manufacturers. The country wants half of its new cars sales to be electric by 2020. These vehicles are paving the way for a cleaner environment with low carbon emissions, meanwhile also reducing dependence on expensive oil and gas.

On the other end of the supply chain, car buying experience is evolving as the cars evolve. Online dealerships for major brands have cropped up. More consumers are flocking at online car auctions and searching for the car that fits their needs on the web, than on foot, at the car dealership being schmoozed by the car salesman. Traditional dealerships are moving part of their operations online to fasten processes. Financing, price negotiation, back office paperwork and home delivery steps are taken online.

And did you hear about the latest deal Alibaba inked with Ford in China to use a massive vending machine to sell cars? Yes, seems to be a far-fetched idea, but it’s not a new concept. Singapore hosts the world’s largest car vending machine for luxury vehicles owned by Autobahn Motors. Cars are placed in a 15-story building and car buyers can use an app to buy their car of choice. Your car gets delivered in less than five minutes! That’s speed.

A lot of research suggests that tomorrow’s car will be autonomous and smarter. It will be a mobile space, rather than a vehicle. It will communicate with the infrastructure to choose the shortest path, it will connect vehicle to vehicle mid-drive, it will provide virtual assistance, it will help reduce traffic jams, and road accidents.

Conversely, a commentary in The Guardian argues that the future car may not be a car owned at all, but rather a service where cars are “like pods mimicking” public transportation. Owning a vehicle would be cumbersome, costly and inefficient when on-demand transportation is ready to serve. While that does take the luxury out of a luxury vehicle—surely, the charm is when you own the beauty—it offers a new perspective of what it could mean to live in a smarter world.
More importantly, with all the innovation that is taking place, perhaps, we haven’t agreed on what the future car means to us. And maybe imagining the unthinkable is how we get to the future. After all, we still haven’t brought mobile pods in the sky that were first imagined by the Jetsons in 1987. Talk about car utopia!