The future of traveling is not by car or plane, bus or horse buggy, or whatever. If you love the smell and feel of a hotel room, you’re probably going to love this: a Toronto-based design firm will turn your car into a driving hotel suite. Or the other way around.
Long-distance, frequent travelers often spend an inordinate amount of time changing flights, dealing with dead times, checking in and out of hotel rooms, and making plans for all this. With the Autonomous Travel Suite from Aprilli, none of that will be necessary anymore, because your hotel room will take them wherever they need to be.
The idea
The Autonomous Travel Suite is an idea that starts from the premise that technology for fully-autonomous cars will soon enable driverless traveling experiences. With man suddenly freed from having to mind the road to drive the car, what could he possibly do, especially on long-distance journeys?
Why not cut down on wasted time by bringing everything a traveler needs for the journey in one sleek, albeit rather boxy package? Aprilli debuted the idea in 2018, when it won the Radical Innovation Award, but it’s still worth revisiting one year later, when the auto industry is still working (hard) on making fully-autonomous cars happen.
Photo: Aprilli
The Suite is a hotel room slash car that you can summon via an app. Also in this app, you can mark down the number of days for the journey and whether you’ll be needing a little more than just a place to sleep / work and a small bathroom.
“In a compact hotel room environment, the suite is equipped with the basic sleeping, working, and washroom facilities, allowing the guests to use their travel time more efficiently and productively,” Aprilli says. “Using Autonomous Driving technology, the travel suite takes you to multiple destinations, serving as your personal vehicle and mobile hotel room.”
“When it comes to long-distance travels, the actual limitations are not about ‘How long can a car drive you around?’ or ‘How long can the battery last?’,” the designers say. “The real issues are about ‘How long can people stay inside a limited space?’ or ‘What can people actually do during the long travel time?’”
Transpitality
From these questions sprung the concept of transpitality, which integrates hospitality and transportation. The idea is to offer the traveler both the means to complete a journey and the accommodation (plus amenities) for the duration of it.
Photo: Aprilli
To that end, the Suite could pair with stationary parent units (Autonomous Hotel Facilities), offering the traveler bigger accommodations and extra amenities like spa, pool, gym, meeting rooms and fine dining, housekeeping and charging. The Suite would simply pull up to the parent unit and become attached to it for as long as the traveler needed to be off the road.
Just a cog in the machine
That’s what this Autonomous Travel Suite is meant to be: a cog in a much larger machine that would meet every traveler’s needs in terms of long-distance journey requirements.
The Suite would also work with drones that could deliver necessary stuff for the road or even battery packs, without the need for the traveler to pause the journey. Or it would work in sync with service vehicles, which would have the same functionality as the drones.
Photo: Aprilli
Every step of the journey will be planned on the online platform, coordinating docking times and resupplies, and bookings at stationary units with only the amenities the traveler needs. The goal is to turn “every journey into a destination” and progressively replace all other means of transport for long-distance traveling.
Not really a car, though
With all that, the Travel Suite is not a car and Aprilli is keen on stressing that difference. It looks like one and may even end up operating like an AV, but it’s actually a basic hotel room on wheels. That happens to drive all by itself.
Photo: Aprilli
“Autonomous Travel Suite is not a car, it is a mobile room,” the designers say. “Autonomous Travel Suite differs from normal autonomous commute cars in that it is a specifically designed and serviced mobile space operated and managed by hospitality professionals.”
In fact, Aprilli is convinced the entire network of autonomous hotel units could be developed and added to the existing hospitality infrastructure, including hotel chains, gas stations and rental car companies.
If agents in the hospitality business mobilize and work together on a plan, and technology advances to attain Level 5 Autonomy, Aprilli will step up to help you “Enjoy the freedom of your journey” by having a hotel suite drive you while you sleep, work or just chill.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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