Think Driverless Cars Will be Modern-Looking and Reduce Traffic? Think Again.
Cars from Timeless Toys and Collectibles. Photo: Matthew Bedworth/Flickr

FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Think Driverless Cars Will be Modern-Looking and Reduce Traffic? Think Again.

Get ready for a slow-moving traffic jam of self-driving ads.

I'm cruising around the country on my nearly 40-foot long "Immortality Bus" that's decked out to looks like a giant coffin. It's my brazen attempt to get attention to my third party presidential campaign, and fortunately, the wacky bus is doing its job. On the Golden Gate Bridge, in rush hour, hundreds of people are staring at it, and some are honking and yelling. My website is painted on the bus in big letters, and you can watch the hits to the website literally rise anytime I'm in traffic.

Advertisement

Signs.com, a Utah-based company with 85 employees, reports on its website: "According to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, it is estimated that during an average day, a car advertisement can reach up to 70,000 impressions. That's a lot of eyeballs! In fact, vehicle advertising reaches more people than billboards, radio, direct mail, local group mailers and mass transit advertising. "

What does this have to do with driverless cars not being modern looking and causing more traffic? Lots.

There's a moment in time coming when driverless cars will become cheap enough—perhaps because of solar power or far more efficient batteries—to send them out in rush hour traffic simply to advertise. Covered totally in ads, these "spam cars" will justify operational and maintenance costs. And they will drive endlessly, making money for their owners from advertising sales.

Naturally, every major company (and probably nonprofit and government organizations too) will buy a fleet of these ad cars to do this. Surely, the automobile industry will experience a new boom.

The Immortality Bus. Photo courtesy Zoltan Istvan

But there's more. Why buy a normal car—with heated seats, radios, and air conditioning—that will never have drivers in it? In fact, why not produce a car for a soda company that looks like a can of soda? Look, there goes a Pepsi car! Or the Heinz ketchup vehicle. Or the Oscar Meyer Wiener bus. There go a hundred of them—all driving themselves around the country.

Advertisement

The road may soon look like a Walmart coupon page.

So far, this ad-car stuff rarely happens in the real world because it's not cost effective. But when that changes—and it may start in as soon as 10 years time—expect a whole new generation of cars (some maybe just totally covered in television screens) to be ubiquitous and to cruise everywhere.

Of course, with such an influx of advert vehicles on the road, normal drivers will experience traffic everywhere that resembles the 405 Freeway at 5 PM in Los Angeles—considered by millions one of the most aggravating experiences on Earth. The thing with ad vehicles is they are designed to make you pay attention to it, instead of the road. And that will help create more accidents and congestion.

That's probably why ad vehicles will soon be a major point of contention, reaching all the way to the US Congress, who will have to decide to allow them or not, and in what capacity.

In America, you can paint most anything you want on a car body, and even on some nonessential windows, depending on the state. Additionally, companies like My Free Car use vinyl cast to cover people's cars who drive for them. Their websites says some drivers can make $400 a month just by converting their car to an advert.

On the Immortality Bus, I'm trying to raise life extension issues—by provocatively telling people they don't want to end up in a coffin—so there's no money in it for me. But driving down the highway, it's easy to see how the future of advertising will change dramatically if it became cheap enough to send out autonomous vehicles to do capitalism's bidding.

Zoltan Istvan is a futurist and 2016 US presidentialcandidate of theTranshumanist Party. He writes anoccasional column for Motherboard in which he ruminates on the future beyond natural human ability.