Via the excellent Browser, here’s the opening of “Choosing a Driving Plan: 2035, United States,” a post at A History of the Future which examines automobiles in a post-driver, post-ownership landscape:

“The ‘driverless’ car revolutionised every aspect of transportation — particularly the business model. This brochure demonstrates how people struggled to come to grips with the new world:

Life used to be simple. If you wanted to travel, all you had to do was buy a car and put gas in it every so often. Sure, keeping a car was expensive, and it bled value every minute you weren’t using it, and you had to pay for parking and repairs and insurance, and you wasted thousands of hours of your life in the mindless drudgery of driving, but at least you knew you had absolutely no choice in the matter.

Well, it’s 2035 now, and while we’re blessedly free from the monotony and expense of driving, we’re also faced with a bewildering range of options for getting from A to B. The plummeting cost of cars (we can surely drop the term ‘driverless’ by now), along with their tight network integration, has seen a thousand flowers bloom in the burgeoning ‘cars as a service’ sector.

With so many choices available it’s easy to get confused, but don’t worry: we’re here to help you find your perfect car plan!

(Before we begin, those Pay As You Go plans that seem so cheap with their free miles and entertainment? Unless you’re a penniless hermit who only makes ten trips a year, or you hate the idea of being able to travel wherever you want, whenever you want, forget it.)

Now we’ve gotten that out of the way, here a few general tips on finding a good plan.

First off, don’t go for flat-rate pricing for ‘car minutes’ or ‘car miles.'”