The transportation industry is currently in a state of change, with autonomous cars on the horizon and the Hyperloop under testing.

Tommaso Gecchelin, however, has his own ideas about the future of urban transportation. While he sees a future of autonomous cars, his vision is that vehicles will be modular and able to connect to each other. He calls this concept "Next," and sees it offering on-demand rides and shared public transportation.

What makes Next interesting is that it essentially combines personal transportation with public transportation. Users can summon a pod to their door, after which the pod will join up with other pods all going the same direction on the highway.

The idea for Next came when Gecchelin, an Italian engineer and industrial designer, was working with a design studio on the "bus of the future." While interviewing bus passengers, Gecchelin spoke to a woman who said that in the future public transportation should be more than simply a way to get from point A to point B. This inspired Gecchelin.

To explain what Next can do, Gecchelin likens it to the iPhone and the App Store. With the right hardware, third parties could use Next as a way to create new services and business ideas. For example, a company could retrieve your luggage after a flight, and deliver it right to the pod that will be taking the user home. Ideas like this, however, were a little too futuristic for the design company that Gecchelin was working for, so he founded Next.

Of course, Next really is just a concept, although Gecchelin says that the company is in talks with a major German company, and that a number of German cities are in line to be potential civic partners. In fact, Gecchelin says that Next will be ready by 2020. Whether that turns out to be a realistic remains to be seen, with Next requiring massive changes in infrastructure to work. It will also require people to actually want to use it, and it's not yet known how much passengers might be asked to pay.

Via: Wired