shiny cars

The shiny cars we drive today are one thing – but what will they look like a decade from now?

The bad news is they may not be shiny at all! The latest   the rounds of the world’s major motor shows aren’t metal – and polymer compound cars just don’t seem to gleam like metal.

One of the latest concept cars from Honda displayed at the November 2011 Tokyo Motor Show, for example, is the groundbreaking Micro Commuter Concept car.

The vehicle looks like something you’ve knocked together out of a few lego bricks. The wheels are almost entirely covered and the tiny car – roughly he same length as the smallest Smart Car – seats three people; two in the front and one in the back.

The car has a range of just 37 miles – and top speed to match; just 37 miles per hour. But then it is just a concept car at this stage and it is intended to be only a city commuter car when anything like it is produced for real; so it may well be appropriate for commuters in the city in which it was launched.

Oh yes, and there’s even a Segway-esque electric box-sized bike in the boot to finish off your journey.

This isn’t the future in my opinion, though tomorrow’s hybrid car probably is. But it is also likely to use more electrical power than the hybrid cars of today do. The longer-term future still has the potential for electrical cars to be recharged via solar power.

This remains a long way off at present, but it certainly seems likely that he competing technologies will gradually converge in some way to form cars which are basically electrically-powered, but which don’t need to be recharged, as fuel / solar or another power source does that instead of the grid. Time will tell.