“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

Why do most of our brand new cars still look like they were released in the 1990s? Judging by most of the concept designs released over the last few years, it seems like we’re destined to slide from the clunky, boring silhouettes of the late 20th century right into dorky, bulbous autonomous vehicles with absolutely nothing stylish and fun in the mix. According to car design engineers, the primary reason for the serious post-1970s decline in the aesthetics of everyday vehicles is simply shrinking profit margins for manufacturers. Fun and exciting car design still exists, but the catch is – of course – a very high price tag.

Ground Stealth Fighter SUV by Karlmann King

High-end auto manufacturer Karlmann King presents a luxury sports utility vehicle (unofficially known as ‘Ground Stealth Fighter’), built to perform in extreme temperatures with pretty much any luxury you can imagine at hand. Features include a limo-style rear passenger compartment, Playstation 4, mini fridge, Nespresso machine, safe, Apple TV and rainbow mood lighting. Considering that it takes a team of 1,800 people to design and 30,000 hours to manufacture just one, it’s not surprising that it costs about $1.85 million.

2018 Aston Martin Lagonda Vision Concept

Aston Martin takes its understated classic style and kicks it up a few notches with its 2018 Lagonda Vision, a fully autonomous luxury vehicle with a sleek profile and a windshield that stretches over the entire yacht-inspired cabin. The Lagonda is the first of the vehicle maker’s new line of electric cars, aiming to bring automotive luxury into the future.

Jaguar D-Type: From 1956 to 2018

Ever wish automakers would revive classic designs from the 1940s – 1970s for modern usage? The golden era of the automobile brought us a whole lot of unique silhouettes and fun styling that we just haven’t seen since. It’s certainly not for everyone, but Jaguar is re-releasing its classic D-type race car, which first debuted in 1956. Only 25 of them will be built at the Jaguar Land Rover Classic Works in England. But in this case, there’s no electric engines, no contemporary interiors. Every single part is being produced to the original specifications.

Lyonheart’s Interpretation of the Classic Jaguar E-Type

Another classic design revived for the 21st century is the Lyonheart K coupe, a reinterpretation of the Jaguar E-type. Designed, engineered and hand-built in England, the K features carbon fiber panels, an aluminum chassis and a 5.0-liter supercharged V8 engine. Price tag? About $582,000.

Vision Mercedes-Maybach Six Cabriolet

Mercedes brings us a cabriolet version of its Vision Mercedes-Maybach 6, a 750-horsepower electric concept car with 200 miles of range. Like a lot of recent concepts, it’s got one big cabin with accessible storage rather than a separate trunk. It’s full of glowing lights and buttons for the feel of a boat that’s also a spaceship. You guessed it, this one is also “luxury of the highest order” (in Mercedes’ own words) with a price tag to match.

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A Balm For Boring Contemporary Cars 14 Fun Stylish Modern Vehicle Designs

A couple decades from now, we’ll be able to summon autonomous shared vehicles both from our smartphones and from privately owned steering wheels that double as AI companions in the home, clicking into place when the car arrives. In this imagined future, ride sharing and car sharing makes higher quality vehicles more accessible to a broader range of people, requiring luxury automakers to get a lot more imaginative in order to stay relevant – like creating Bentley SUVs with snow tracks. Plus, driverless tech means cars could become more comfortable, home-like environments, with cozy lighting and built-in gardens.

Mobuno Unit

Designed with car sharing in mind, the Mobuno Unit by Xoio and the Institute of Urban Mobility is sort of like a train of autonomous smart cars that can group large parties together for efficiency or break off to pick up new passengers or take them to specific destinations. They’re extremely compact for easy urban parking, accessible via smart phone and able to squeeze tightly together. It’s not clear how the very low-riding body shape with enclosed tires would deal with inclines and bumps, and they’re certainly a bit strange looking.

Deep Orange 7 Mini Concept Car

Developed and actually built by a team of students at Clemson University in South Carolina, the Deep Orange 7 Mini concept car combines all of the traits the team expect to be desirable in personal vehicles in the year 2025 and beyond. That includes an open design with a floating dashboard, a one-piece windshield and hood, and a personalized electronic display controlled by gesture that replaces the typical static instrument cluster.

‘The Float’ Autonomous Car of the Future by Yuchen Car

Bulbous, hovering in air and ‘non-directional,’ this autonomous car of the future is a concept designed by student Yuchen Chai at Central Saint Martins, the winning entry in a competition judged by Renault. The idea is that the car is more open to the outside environment rather than feeling like a private pod for enhanced social connection. It’s made of transparent glass and uses magnetic levitation so it looks like a bubble while in transit. It can move in any direction without needing to turn around, and multiple units can gather together. It’s also got sliding doors, rotating seats and the ability to change the opacity of the glass when desired. Of course, this concept isn’t exactly street-ready, but the idea is to radically re-envision what cars can look like.

Future-Type Jaguar Concept

Another look at a future in which anyone can summon a fully-charged autonomous electric vehicle on demand, the ‘Future-Type’ concept car by Jaguar has one particularly unusual feature: a removable steering wheel with voice -activated artificial intelligence. It’s this steering wheel, rather than a smartphone, that you use to call a car – because that’s the only part of the car you need to own. It performs the usual Alexa-type functions like playing music, booking a reservation or integrating into smart home systems. When the car arrives, you take the steering wheel with you, plug it in and the car whisks you away.

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Self Driving Mobile Living Rooms 10 Car Concepts For The Next 50 Years

If we could just get beyond pesky hiccups like catastrophic climate change and wanting to obliterate each other with nuclear weapons, we humans could learn from our mistakes and create a future that’s actually cooler and more sustainable than anything we dreamed up during the 20th century. Making the most of microalgae, one of the most ancient and prolific organisms on earth, we could produce abundant clean energy and healthy foods while also reducing the amount of CO2 in the air and producing more oxygen. These designs show just how this symbiotic process could manifest in our lives.

Living Chandelier Filled with Algae

Embedded with LED bulbs and sustained by daylight, ‘Exhale’ by Julian Melchiorri is a living chandelier with beautiful glass components filled with various shades of green algae. The glass ‘leaves’ take in CO2 from the room and release oxygen, too, making it a striking air purifier. Melchiorri is a designer and engineer, but he’s also a leading biochemical technology researcher, and he’s been working on his ‘artificial leaf’ concept for years.

‘Algae Green Loop’ Proposal for Chicago’s Marina City Towers

Architecture office Influx Studio imagines a dramatic makeover for the Marina City Towers in Chicago, retrofitting them to absorb CO2 through loops of bioreactors to help mitigate climate change. The closed-loop system sequesters carbon from the air, absorbs it through vegetal photosynthesis and produces its own energy through the same wind turbines that suck in CO2 and through the algae bioreactors that process it.

Photosynthetic Algae Furnishings

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‘Living Things’ is a series of bio-powered furnishings exploring ‘symbiotic living,’ his which micro-algae help light up our homes. Presented in a series of vignettes, the project contains furniture and lamps that are both beautiful and beneficial. “The morphologies of hand-blown glass vessels function both as lighting and heating elements for the human occupants, and high functioning photobioreactors which provide heat, light, agitation, air supply nutrient and waste control to the living algae inside.”

World’s First Algae-Powered Building

Lots of concepts tout the ability to power an entire building on algae, but have you ever actually seen one built? BIQ House in Hamburg, Germany by Austrian firm Splitterwerk features the world’s first iso-adaptive facade in the form of algae-filled glass panels shading the southeast and southwest faces of the building. The algae is sourced from a nearby tributary of the Elbe River and constantly changes color as it grows. The panes produce biomass as the algae multiplies, and reduce the amount of energy needed for cooling inside the building.

Living Portraits Made with Microscopic Algae

Living algae cultured in petri dishes clump together to form images in a living twist on traditional photography techniques. Artist and researcher Lia Giraud places a mix of chemical nutrients in the dish and exposes them to an image, and the cells react to the light and form solids of various densities, resulting in the different shades of green that produce the image.

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Its Alive 14 Algae Powered Inventions For Food Light Energy Oxygen

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?