While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.
It's natural to look both backward and forward at the turn of the year, so let's take a moment to do both at the same time. BBC's Tomorrow's World was something like Popular Science in that it covered cutting-edge and contemporary advancements in science and technology while also offering bold and optimistic predictions about the future that came just short of science fiction. Automobiles naturally crossed the Tomorrow's World desk on a regular basis, and among the many segments from the program online are several dealing with advancements in automotive technology. So how did their predictions pan out?
We'll start with an early segment from the show dealing with electric vehicles (EV)s, featuring a pair of electrified Minis, a battery-powered Peel Trident and a Scottish Aviation Scamp. The mid-Sixties was still a primitive time for EVs, so it's curious to see these many examples at relatively advanced states of development. Verdict: prescient.
It wouldn't be a show dealing with the future of transportation without a flying car from time to time, and in this 1970 segment, we see the Wagner Aerocar, a helicopter able to drive around on the surface as a five-passenger sedan. However well developed it appeared here, it apparently never progressed past the prototype stage, as have all the flying car concepts that have since followed. Verdict: though it flew, it never got off the ground.
Navigation systems proved easy bait for the BBC's producers, as we see from a couple of segments - one from 1971, another from 1986 (the latter actually from Top Gear). Both depended on recorded directions, either via cassette or CD, rather than satellite feeds, which had their own issues. As the 1971 segment noted, the system didn't really work well when encountering construction or road reconfiguration (and probably wouldn't deal well with a driver who took a wrong turn). However, the ending of that segment, all jokes aside, comes true on an all-too-frequent basis these days. Verdict: wrong turn, but they still saw where they were headed.
Keep reading to watch more videos and discover how projections about autonomous cars, self-parking vehicles and EVs have panned out.
