At the 1939 World’s Fair, General Motors presented its vision for the future with its aptly named ‘Futurama’ exhibit.
The exhibit was the work of American industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, who described it is “a large-scale model representing almost every type of terrain in America and illustrating how a motorway system may be laid down over the entire country—across mountains, over rivers and lakes, through cities and past towns—never deviating from a direct course and always adhering to the four basic principles of highway design: safety, comfort, speed, and economy.”
The Futurama exhibit ended up being a very accurate vision for the future. It introduced the idea of network expressways to many Americans, showing them how multi-lane roads with cars traveling at high speeds could help streamline travel in and out of cities.
At the time of the 1939 World’s Fair, the rising popularity of the motorcar had GM and other automakers excited about the endless possibilities of the future. The auto industry finds itself in a similar place today, with investors, executives and other industry players eager to leverage new technologies like autonomy and electrification to grow their business.
GM is at the forefront of this industry revolution with its Vision Zero mandate. Under Vision Zero, GM is striving to help create a world with zero vehicle emissions, zero traffic congestion and zero accident deaths. It hopes to do this by running its various facilities on 100% renewable energy, introducing more EVs and continuing to develop advanced autonomous driving technology.
Amid all this change, GM decided to reflect on its Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair and provide a vision for what it thinks 2039 will be like. The automaker recently put together a pie-in-the-sky ‘Vision For 2039’ video, which shows the various technologies that GM is currently working on to help make Vision Zero a reality. The video shows a world with more EVs and AVs and abundant wireless vehicle charging. The video also predicts AVs will monitor people’s vital signs as they drive and warn them of potential health problems they might have, enable live video chats and more.
Check out the video embedded below.
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Comments
Lol…production models may vary.
Here we go again with the triple zero fantasy. Why can’t she say reduced emissions, reduced crashes and reduced congestion? Zero is not remotely possible as long as human beings, computers, weather conditions and loads of other every day factors are involved. 2039 isn’t going to magically fix all of these things!
What an exciting video! My dad went to that Worlds’ Fair in 1939, and my sister went to the 1964 World’s Fair at the same site (Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, New York), which still has the Unisphere and the scale miniature of New York City. Most of the vehicles and features in this new GM video actually exists, as shown here on previous GM Authority articles. But we really need the “Vehicle to Vehicle” (V2V) network up and running on all vehicles before we can see this new 2039 future, just 19 years away. Great work GM!
These are wild a$$ dreams that only a small percentage of it will come true.
Like flying cars other than the Corvette the other day never came about. Nor would you want the people who you are driving with today flying in the future.
Be careful of what you dream. Autonomy is just the first step to control where you go, how you go and when you get there. This puts your travel in the hands of others for the so called common good?
Late to work you can’t take the short cut or speed. The 5 PM time is busy so your travel will be delayed till 6 PM. Want to go to the store on the west side. You are not permitted as they have too many cars on the road for the air quality or so they claim.
I guess we all need to dream but use care in what you dream.
To be fair, we did address the driver issue with autonomous. Three-axis autonomous is arguably safer than two axis because there’s far less odds of two properly-communicating vehicles having a failure that would cause a wreck (such as a car losing a tire at 100 MPH, and then crashing into another autonomous car).
Drones have shown we can lift people, but the battery tech isn’t there yet to do it long distances with enough lightness. People also will have to adjust to noise environments (soundproofing buildings is going to have to happen rapidly with hundreds of human drone transports in the sky above).
That said, being able to have grandma drag grandpa, to an autonomous drone, and hitting a button to take his heart-attacked body to the ER in five minutes instead of fifty… will drive people to embrace them.
does vision zero include zero sedans? on that front, gm is delivering.
I would like GM to better this 2039 vision by some years. I expect they can.
Did you notice there’s a Cadillac crossover (0.50 – 0.57) that’s different from every Cadillac on sale today? Could it be the production version of the electric crossover or is it just a CT6?
And that by the end of the video there’s an emergency truck with some design similarities with the GMC Hummer?
Or maybe I’m just seeing things…
I got pretty slammed by some for noting the at CT6 was probably going to be wagon/SuV-ivized.
A lot of people think that GM will wait for VSS-R and hold it back. I don’t. I think they’ll use the Chinese plant making the CT6 and just retool it lightly to do the SUV version, and ship that back here. Then you don’t have to deal with the drama/anger of the CT6 shutting down in Detroit, because the SUV will be an all-new vehicle captively imported from GM China.
And I strongly suspect it will have a true Blackwing V8.
Triple zero BS. Please get her out of there.