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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Someday, we’ll supposedly be able to zoom from one city to the next in no time flat thanks to the Hyperloop, but that day is not today. Elon Musk’s high-speed transit system Hyperloop One has been successfully tested, and promises to cut the 400-mile trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco down to just 30 minutes, but it’ll take it a while to get off the ground. In the meantime, our options are still limited to air travel, personal vehicles, trains and buses. Buses are easily accessible and cheap, but they cost a whole lot of time and discomfort instead.

If you’ve ever taken an inter-city bus trip, you know how it goes. More often than not, you’re crammed in with dozens of other people, breathing stale air, hoping the person coughing next to you won’t get you sick. Even worse, inter-city bus travel is notoriously inefficient, requiring a lot of stops and ultimately taking a lot longer than it would if you were driving a car. Ever wish you could just block out your surroundings and sleep through it without drooling on somebody’s shoulder?

A new service called ‘Cabin’ aims to bridge the gap between bus travel and air travel with comfortable one-person sleeping pods, so you get your own private little area in which to stretch out and lay down during a long drive. The company bills itself as “the dreamiest way to travel between LA and SF,” acting as a hotel on wheels that transports you to your destination while you’re sleeping.

The company worked with hospitality architects to “completely reinvent the bus as we know it,” outfitting each pod with hotel-like amenities like free wi-fi, fresh bedding, complimentary water, tea, coffee, earplugs and even a melatonin supplement to help you fall asleep.

With a round-trip cost of $230 to get back and forth between San Francisco and LA, Cabin definitely isn’t the cheapest option; you can take a Bolt bus for just $50, and many airlines offer routes between the cities for as low as $69 each way. But we all know how much comfort airlines have sacrificed in recent years to keep their costs down, and an air trip with a pod this cozy would cost many times that amount. Plus, there’s no dealing with airports, hidden fees or traffic.

The future of inter-city travel will likely include self-driving vehicles and highway trains, but for now, this seems like a pretty cool option, especially for people who feel particularly stressed about flying. Cabin launched last year as SleepBus, and after a highly successful test run, raise $3.3 million to continue, with plans to expand to the East Coast.

Popping up from the rooftops of everything from rugged Jeeps to adorable BMW MINIs or extending from the sides of motorcycles and bicycles, these vehicle-based tents make shelter on the go as easy as it can be. Some cantilever dramatically over the ground so you feel like you’re hovering in midair, and others stretch surprisingly high into the sky, like your own personal portable ‘treehouse’ built right onto your car.

Overland Tacoma Habitat Levitating Tent

This pop-up tent by Nemo Equipment is custom-designed to fit the Toyota Tacoma pickup truck, using a hardtop as a base for a lightweight aluminum structural shell that opens and closes with the help of gas springs. When standing in the truck bed, users have an impressive 7 feet of headroom.

iKamper Skycamp & Hardtop One Rooftop Tents

The SkyCamp by iKamper is envisioned as a mobile treehouse experience that’s secured to the roof of a vehicle rather than a tree, complete with ladder access to the sleeping quarters. Nearly flat when not in use, the SkyCamp expands to impressive proportions, and add-ons can make the setup extend all the way to the ground for a lofted suite. The Hardtop One is a similar design, but expands vertically rather than diagonally.

Motorcycle Bivouac Exposed Camping

The ‘Bivouac’ by Exposed is designed to extend from a motorcycle to fit a single sleeper and their luggage, and pack up so tiny it can be mounted to the handlebars for transport. It may not be luxurious inside, but it’ll keep you and your motorcycle seat dry in the rain, and it’s perfect for the one-person explorer.

Prius Plus Hard Top Camper

There’s something hilarious about the proportions of this hard-shell ‘Prius Plus’ camper, which is made to clamp right onto a Toyota Prius hybrid as a camper converter. It’s been described as a ‘saggy diaper,’ ‘tumorous growth’ and a ‘giant marshmallow from outer space,’ and it’s not hard to see why. But Japan-based manufacturer Camp Inn did pull off quite a feat in creating a full-height entry to the back of a compact vehicle, leading to enough space for for or five people to sleep. It’s not clear how it latches on, it probably causes a significant plunge in your fuel economy and it costs twice as much as the Prius itself.

Bike Tire Tent

Cyclists can get in on the portable tent action, too, with ‘The Travel Tent’ by Chung-Jung Wu, Pei-Chun Chen & Li-Fu Chen. The design clips onto a bike wheel for easy portability while freeing up cargo space for other items, and extends into a pretty decently-sized one-person shelter.

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Who needs a garage when your autonomous vehicle could simply pull up into a port inside your home and seamlessly integrate itself with the interior? Hyundai wants to give us all another reason to spend hours inside our cars by effectively turning them into furniture when they’re not in use. Its ‘Mobility Vision’ concept, unveiled at this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, blurs the lines between architecture and automobiles more than ever.

The driverless car essentially plugs into the house when you’re done with a trip, and then the driver’s seat, which is mounted on a pivoting arm, can slide right into the living space for use as a chair. The idea is never having to stop what you’re doing and metaphorically shift gears between travel time and home time; stuff you leave in the car is easily accessible, babies can continue sleeping in their carseats, and there’s no fumbling for keys.

A single door, almost the height and width of the entire car, opens upward to delineate the space between the car’s interior and the living room. You can even run the car’s heat or air conditioning to adjust the temperature of your house, and use the car stereo to play music at home. Perhaps the most important detail: the car is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, so it’s quiet, and there’s no danger of breathing unhealthy fumes.

It’s just a concept, and not likely to become a reality anytime soon – but could it be a glimpse into what mobility will look like in the not-so-distant future? It seems entirely possible, but it’s not clear how many people want to just sit around in their cars for no reason when there’s probably a perfectly good couch just a few feet away.

If you’ve ever watched The Walking Dead and thought to yourself, “in a zombie apocalypse, I would just find the nearest armored diesel-powered vehicle and pack it full of survival gear,” here’s an array of potential choices to stoke your fantasies. Some are available to the deep-pocketed public and some are technically for military use only, some fully-equipped RVs and others basically just for roaring through utter chaos and making it out alive.

Hudson Armored Personnel Carrier – With a Turret

You’d be extremely lucky to come across one of these, post-apocalypse, if it happened to be abandoned or not in use. The Hudson Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) by INKAS was designed specifically for SWAT transport and it has a freaking turret. Other notable features include two escape hatches, gunports all around the perimeter and the platform of a ’79 Land Cruiser to make replacement parts and maintenance easy. It’s a lot more fun to imagine roaring around in this thing to escape zombie swarms than it is to envision the sort of real-world situations in which it’s actually used (and that goes for most of the rest of these, too.)

Applied Minds KiraVan

A lifelong adventurer built one of the world’s most insane vehicles in honor of his four-year-old daughter, envisioning an off-road expedition truck that could take her anywhere on earth without limitation while maintaining the highest levels of luxury. The result is the ‘KiraVan,’ which can travel up to 2,000 miles without resupply, climb 45-degree slopes and push through small bodies of water, not to mention its kevlar-reinforced tires, diesel-powered motorcycle ‘dinghy’ and a massive trailer housing the kid’s own ‘penthouse’ loft.

Mercedes-Benz Zetros 2733 6×6

Built as a luxury RV for rich hunters, the Mercedes-Benz Zetros 6×6 is not your grandfather’s vacation vehicle. It can go off-road, a virtual mobile fortress with ATV storage and extra-tough tires. Inside, there’s a bathroom with marble flooring and underfloor heating, a bedroom, a fully-equipped kitchen, a built-in SAT receiver powered by a diesel generator and a gun safe.

INKAS Huron APC

An earlier, larger version of the INKAS Hudson, the Huron APC looks like a Hummer on steroids and features “revolutionary lightweight armor” that makes it faster and easier to maneuver than similarly-sized armored vehicles. It can carry up to 16 passengers, and its engine bay is protected by the same armor that’s capable of shielding its crew from AK-47 fire. With a price tag of over half a million dollars, not even the richest civilians can buy it – it’s intended for police and military missions only.

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