Photo by Marvin Meyer, Pablò, and frank mckenna on Unsplash
Welcome to November and the ramp-up to the holidays! In just a few weeks, we’ll be getting together with our families for traditions old and young, making brand new memories. We hope that you are close enough to be with the ones you love this holiday season.
As we consider what this year’s holiday season will bring, we’re thinking back to holiday trips of old. We’re comparing them with today’s travel and using that to extrapolate what the future may hold for holiday travel. Here’s our look at the Past, Present, and our guesses as to the Future of Holiday Travel!
The Past, 1910 - 1965: Once upon a time, over the river and through the woods, was something done on a buggy or a sled pulled by horses. Moving to the first Model T’s may have made the streets cleaner, but it made them just as loud. Horses, unlike car engines, can see when you steer them into the path of oncoming traffic and will change direction. With the creation of the Interstate system, we learned to cross many states at a time to see the family we have been missing. The invention of music systems improved our ability to get along by no longer having to sing to keep the driver awake, as long as you were in the range of a radio station playing the things you wanted to hear. And if the family left too late, there would be gridlock traffic to make the trip even longer.
The Present Era, 1965 - 2025: Although it was invented in 1948, it wasn’t until 1965 that manufacturers offered cruise Control in cars. A driver could now rest their legs during long road trips instead of constantly staying on top of the acceleration. We started to make cars roomier-- the VW bus, vans, SUVs, and so on gave us room to move as we traveled. In addition to Cruise Control, 1965 saw the introduction of the 8-track player. Since then, we’ve developed cassettes, CD players, MP3s with their own memory, and satellite radio systems so that there’s a world of entertainment (books, podcasts, live events) to choose from. But we are less connected to each other. We don’t sing together as much unless we find a moment in pop culture big enough to sucker our kids into voluntarily singing with us (Rest In Peace, GLEE, you were brilliant). We have our own affordable devices to obsess over during the trip. We don’t have to worry as much about falling asleep at the wheel, though, because our cars have collision alarms and even alarms to tell us we’re straying out of the lane divisions. While gridlock traffic is still an issue just around the holidays, we see less of it these days with applications like Waze and GoogleMaps sorting out alternative routes for us. In the more recent years, there have been pandemic considerations.
The Future, 2025 and on: In the not-so-distant future, we believe that we don’t drive as much as we supervise our car driving itself. People will likely use long trips to catch up on sleep and begin traveling at lighter speeds overnight, meaning gridlock traffic is nothing to fear. Cars may start to accommodate this with sleeping cabins for backseat passengers to rest while they ride. Car manufacturers will set up entertainment systems capable of targeting each passenger and what they want to hear specifically. While a shared experience is still possible, cars will allow us to block out the noise and light from others and recline in luxury. We won’t be pulled over by police officers when we speed. Instead, we’ll get our speeding ticket via e-mail with evidence of our car speeding and have to argue our way out of it in court with video, photo, and pursuit car evidence to battle against.
Before heading out on the road, make sure that your car is in tip-top shape. Please schedule an appointment at Super Service of Aliso Viejo to maintain your vehicle well-maintained for maintenance on your modern vehicle. And remember to add us on Facebook for news and updates! We look forward to seeing you soon.