“Location, location, location” might be the mantra of the real estate industry, but that mindset could change radically with the advent of autonomous vehicles. It may take a while, but once driverless cars are adopted by consumers on a wide scale, everything from land usage to property values could shift as parking space is freed up and workers become more mobile. Some experts say we could see fleets of driverless cars on the roads by 2022, others predict that it’ll be closer to 2030, but either way, they’re almost certainly coming.

Autonomous electric vehicles are expected to reduce travel costs, commute time and congestion while boosting safety, and experts believe they’ll also free up millions of parking spaces and allow people to live longer distances from their workplaces. Automobile manufacturers are reflecting these expectations with designs that incorporate zero-emissions electric cars right into the home or double as mobile spaces for working, dining, shopping or even as a new form of housing on wheels.

Autonomous Cars as Mobile Living Spaces

The most obvious and immediate change that commuters would enjoy as driverless cars become the norm could be the freedom to do whatever we want during our travel time instead of driving. That could include getting ready for work, eating meals, working on projects or taking a nap, activities that can be difficult (or impolite) to do on public transit. The spaces remain private – a consideration that’s often cited as a primary motivation to drive instead of taking the bus or train – and even solo commuters could add hours back to their day that they’d normally spend cursing at traffic.

Concepts like Renault’s new EZ-ULTIMO, the latest in a trilogy of concept cars “illustrating the future of shared mobility,” act like first class mobile lounges. The EZ-ULTIMO cabin is designed to make passengers feel like they’re in a millionaire’s living room. The brand’s SYMBIOZ car and residence combo takes that a step further by making the car a room within a room, entering the home to provide additional seating and make the transition between home and travel as seamless as possible.

Hyundai’s Mobility Vision concept may not be quite as self-consciously highbrow as Renault’s, but it employs a similar idea, blurring the line between architecture and automobile in a whole new way. A driverless car powered by a hydrogen fuel cell to eliminate dangerous emissions plugs into the house once travel is complete, with a single large door opening its cabin up to the living room. The driver’s seat slides right out into the living space, so you don’t even have to stop what you’re doing when you arrive or depart.

Volvo’s 360c fully autonomous vehicle aims to make us as comfortable as possible while traveling, potentially eliminating the need to take short flights (which could help significantly reduce greenhouse gases, by the way.) All-electric and covered with a glass dome, the car acts like a mobile bedroom with seats that can be converted into a bed.

Volvo points out that while it believes many people will still want to own personal vehicles, cars like the 360c could be integrated into sharing services, too. In fact, none of these concepts necessarily have to be accessible for ownership. The beauty of autonomous cars is that we could summon them whenever we want them and send them away when we don’t. But it’s also not hard to imagine people choosing to purchase an autonomous vehicle just to sleep in, especially if they’re on the go a lot.

Offices, Restaurants and Shops On Wheels

Honda’s IeMobi, IDEO’s Work On Wheels and a new series of concept spaces by IKEA’s “future living lab,” SPACE10, abandon all attempts to make autonomous vehicles sexy in favor of more space. That makes them more functional as extra “rooms” you can still use once you’re at home, or to serve a greater number of people. Honda’s boxy concept is envisioned as “ a guest room to invite friends or a mobile pantry for weekend shopping,” while the Work On Wheels pod is a mobile office for your entire team.

The SPACE10 concepts go beyond commuting to present autonomous vehicles as unstaffed, driverless mobile services that can go virtually anywhere, from mobile cafes and hotel pods to farm stands and medical clinics that venture into underserved areas. The design team notes that autonomous cars won’t just change how we get to and from various destinations, but also how we interact with cities.

“Transportation difficulties are one of the three major barriers curbing access to healthcare, especially for low-income communities,” says SPACE10. “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.”

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Nomadic Futures Self Driving Cars Could Change How We Interact With Cities

In the future, will our autonomous vehicles simply sit within our homes like a part of the living space, eliminating the need for garages and parking spots? Probably not. At least, not for most of us. Concepts like the new SYMBIOZ car and house combo are clearly made for the richest among us, and it’s not likely that most existing housing will be retrofitted to accommodate our driverless cars, especially since many people will likely use car services instead of owning their own vehicles. But Renault’s concept shows off one vision of how some of us might integrate autonomous cars into our lives in the decades to come.

“The way we use our cars is changing,” says Thierry Bolloré, Renault’s executive vice president and chief competitive officer. “Already a car is more than just a way to get from one place to another. It’s becoming an interactive and personalized space that connects passengers to other cars, people and objects around them. Looking to 2030 we imagine new scenarios with more efficient energy use, connectivity and autonomous driving scenarios that will improve how we live and travel.”

Presented at the 2017 Frankfurt Motor Show, the SYMBIOZ concept envisions the emissions-free,  all-electric car as a room within a room, entering the home to offer additional seating and make the transition between home and travel more comfortable. It’s easy to move objects and children back and forth between the home and the car, and once the car is brought inside, it starts to charge from the home’s energy systems automatically. The car can even act as an energy generator in case the power goes out.

Clean energy means the car won’t bring in nasty exhaust fumes. The car-home combo shows it parking on a special circular pad that can be raised up to the second level on demand, freeing up space below and keeping the vehicle secure. Inside the vehicle, you’ll find a retractible dashboard and front seats that pivot to the back to enable easy conversation between passengers. What do you think – would you take advantage of technology like this, if it were accessible to you?

A Ford van zooming around the Washington D.C. area last month, seemingly without a human in the driver’s seat, wasn’t self-driving after all: it was a man in a ‘seat suit.’ A fake driverless car might seem like a weird experiment, especially considering the fact that there’s an entire fake town for testing self-driving vehicles at Ford’s disposal. But as it turns out, they have their reasons: observing how people react to seeing it. While Virginia Tech has already been testing autonomous vehicles in the area, they’re still using human overseers to take over the wheel in case something goes wrong.

In the video above, a few people muse aloud, “Is that a self-driving car?” Slow-motion shots show the vehicle passing by with a seemingly empty driver’s seat. But the fact that there’s a man camouflaged as a car seat is almost more interesting, anyway. After learning of the stunt, Adam Tuss of NBC Washington followed the car around until he could pull up next to it at a red light and get a shot of the interior, revealing the driver’s hands and legs. “Brother, who are you?” he asks in the video. “What are you doing? I’m with the news, dude.”

This is one of the strangest things I've ever seen @nbcwashington @ARLnowDOTcom pic.twitter.com/8ipKEnkeiq

— Adam Tuss (@AdamTuss) August 7, 2017

John Shutko, a Ford self-driving researcher, divulges some answers in a piece on Medium.

“We’re teamed up with [Virginia Tech] to test our communications method and to explore how pedestrians and bicyclists react to self-driving vehicles with no human in the driver’s seat. Of course, we do need someone in the seat right now, so we dressed a human up in a seat suit to make it appear as though there was nobody inside our simulated self-driving Ford Transit Connect. This seat suit allowed us to collect real-world reactions to an autonomous vehicle driving on miles of public roads in northern Virginia, without actually using an autonomous vehicle.”

Six different drivers wore the suit throughout August, reporting that they started out on a test track before moving onto the streets, and that the suit was definitely uncomfortable. Ford hasn’t released detailed results as yet — there is a lot of data yet to be gathered. Eventually, though, they aim to share their findings with standards-making organizations and collaborate on future industry-wide safety measures.

It’s a tale as old as time, or at least: science fiction films — an autonomous grocery store on wheels (staffed by a holographic assistant) that can deliver late-night snacks as well as everyday essentials.

The Wheelys “Moby Mart” looks the part as well, sporting a trapezoidal shape, illuminated display in front, vintage neon sign on top, and mysteriously uniform boxes on the shelves inside.

But that retrofuturistic look is just part of the package: fueled by solar panels on the roof, this driverless shopping center operates staff-free 24/7.

When it runs low on stock it returns itself to a warehouse automatically for reloading — eventually, its makers hope to task a fleet of rooftop drones to do those pickups (maybe they could be extended to make deliveries, too).

Like other new grocery store prototypes, there will be no need to check out — items taken are automatically tallied and added to a shopper’s bill. If you need any help, the aptly named Hol (a holographic store assistant) is on hand to assist.

To top it all off, the Moby Mart has the potential to be carbon-negative, at least in terms of its urban travels — soaking up the sun for fuel, it also captures and cleans smog on its grocery runs.

A project of Himalayafy, Hefei University and Wheelys the first prototype is currently being tested out in Shanghai, a sweet spot for cyberpunk fans but a bit far for some of us to travel. But don’t worry: if all goes well your city may get one soon, too.

Somewhere between pagan magic, modern science and quirky satire, this installation project uses salt circles but also the logic of traffic lines to lure in and ensnare unsuspecting autonomous vehicles.

James Bridle‘s Autonomous Trap 001 employs familiar street markings found on divided highways – per the rules of the road, cars can cross over the dotted line but not back over the solid line. It sounds a bit absurd, but consider: driverless cars with various degrees of autonomy are already hitting the streets, and these do rely on external signals to determine their course. As these technologies gain traction, it is entirely likely that serious attempts will be made to spoof and deceive their machine vision algorithms.

“What you’re looking at is a salt circle, a traditional form of protection—from within or without—in magical practice,” explains Bridle. “In this case it’s being used to arrest an autonomous vehicle—a self-driving car, which relies on machine vision and processing to guide it. By quickly deploying the expected form of road markings—in this case, a No Entry glyph—we can confuse the car’s vision system into believing it’s surrounded by no entry points, and entrap it.”

“The scene evokes a world of narratives involving the much-hyped technology of self-driving cars,” writes Beckett Mufson of Vice. “It could be mischievous hackers disrupting a friend’s self-driving ride home; the police seizing a dissident’s getaway vehicle; highway robbers trapping their prey; witches exorcizing a demon from their hatchback.” It has elements of cultural commentary that stem from acute awareness of real conditions, bordering on the absurd but also quite sobering.

In fact, Bridle made his trap while training his own DIY self-driving car software near Mount Parnassus in Central Greece. “Parnassus feels like an appropriate location,” he says, because “as well as [having] quite spectacular scenery and [being] wonderful to drive and hike around, it’s the home of the Muses in mythology, as well as the site of the Delphic Oracle. The ascent of Mount Parnassus is, in esoteric terms, the journey towards knowledge and art.” Meanwhile, Bridle continues to work on other pieces related to contemporary technology, tackling subjects from machine vision and artificial intelligence to militarized tech and big data.