Meet NEXT, the Future of Transportation That Has Us a Little Conflicted

One such company is NEXT Future Transportation, an enterprise started by Silicon Valley resident - but Venetian born - Tommaso Gecchelin. Tom is described as a designer/physicist/artist and, frankly, looking at his concept, you can see all of his three specialties at work.

We’ll start with the least obvious one, and that’s the artistry part. It’s hard to draw a line between art and design - mostly because design is, basically, a form of art - but for the sake of argument, let’s consider art everything with aesthetic values that doesn’t also have a practical side to it. In that case, the Next - as his project is called - has zero artistic inputs. His pods are as functional as they get, and they do nothing to make the streets look any better. Let’s face it: they’re just some elevators on tiny wheels.

Design-wise, however, it’s a completely different story. The cubic shape looks awful compared to even the ugliest of cars - OK, maybe the Pontiac Aztec would stand a chance - but it offers the possibility to maximize the use of space. Just like an elevator.

Most Next pods come with six seats, but other configurations are possible. Actually, countless configurations would be possible, including a bar-pod that serves coffee on the go. With Next, you don’t go to the coffee, the coffee comes to you. Maybe there is something to Tom’s idea after all...

In fact, everything happens on the move in this Next future. The pods connect with one another and passengers can move freely, getting into the one that’s headed their way. There’s also a service pod that comes when one of the vehicles runs out of juice to replace its battery. On the move, of course.

Obviously, the vehicles are fully-autonomous and have electric propulsion, but that goes without saying. You don’t hear anybody picturing a future with diesel engines, do you? And yet, car makers keep building them, and everybody keeps buying them.

And that brings us to the really utopian part of Tom’s project: he plans to have something ready to show for his project by 2020. That’s four years from now, which translates to about three decades for a company starting from scratch. But we wouldn’t want to be the ones standing in the way of a future where coffee is being delivered to you while on the move, so consider us on board.