Four Ways Traditional Vehicles Could Transform in the Future

As transportation industries look to reduce carbon emissions and keep up with changing regulations, the vehicles and vessels that carry people and products will evolve in the coming decades. Here are four trends experts in their fields see coming.

Elevators That Turn Left

Despite their name, there’s no rule that says elevators can only go up and down. Lee Gray, a professor of architectural history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, says elevators that also move horizontally have been part of the vertical transportation dream for more than 100 years. It hasn’t become a reality, he says, largely because of the immense costs associated with it.

But companies are moving in this direction. The German company TK Elevator, for example, has designed an elevator that moves vertically and horizontally called Multi—though it hasn’t yet been put into public operation. Dr. Gray believes multidirectional elevators will be a part of the future, deployed in a variety of ways.

If more people live in urban high-rises, multidirectional elevators could be incorporated into tall buildings and integrated with large transportation systems, such as subways, built beneath them, says Dr. Gray. They could also be used in cities like Las Vegas, where a lot of people in, say, a hotel are trying to get to a convention center across the street.

Climate change could inspire the use of multidirectional elevators to help people avoid the heat, much like cities such as Minneapolis currently have heated skyways to help people avoid the cold, Dr. Gray says. “Maybe I really don’t want to go outside,” he says. “Maybe I’ll be happy to be zooming along in my little air-conditioned elevator car.”

Truly Remote Car Charging

Charging an electric car is a lot like charging a cellphone in the 2000s: If you use it at all, you’ve got to charge it a lot. Solutions in the works include dedicated lanes that wirelessly charge cars as they drive down the road, with a pilot program launching next year in Detroit.

Dedicated lanes aren’t the best long-term solution, says Dennis Hong, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and founding director of the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles. “We want to try to avoid rigid infrastructure, things that you can’t really modify that easily,” he says.

Dr. Hong says an alternative could be car charging delivered via radio waves. The technology exists, he says, but is being used only in laboratory settings, not commercially.

Such a method would need to overcome some significant safety challenges, notes Michael Kintner-Meyer, a research engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state. Sending that amount of energy through radio waves would be similar to pointing a radar at a car, he says, except “any living creature passing through it will be basically fried.”

Tugboat Drones

Even tugboats are being challenged to go emissions-free. These traditional helper-vessels could also go people-free, some in the industry believe.

Having crews on board comes with inefficiencies: People need bathrooms, beds, clean laundry, and they have a lot of downtime. Companies are developing technology for electric tugboats to sail without crew onboard—running autonomously when appropriate and controlled remotely by a human as needed.

Between going electric and not needing a crew, the look of a tug is going to change. Since it will no longer need a place for the crew to sleep and a high perch for the captain, the tugs of the future could be smaller and flatter. “What I envision looking at the harbor one day is you’re going to see more vessels with a very low profile,” said Jerry Silla, director of fleet engineering at Foss Maritime, a Seattle-based tug operator. “You won’t see these big superstructures, you’re not going to see vessels that are manned by crew.”

One of the biggest challenges for a crew-free tugboat? Figuring out how to transfer the tow rope from the tug to the vessel it is assisting, says Oskar Levander, senior vice president of business concepts at Norway’s Kongsberg Maritime. Today, crew members on the ship and the tug exchange a rope. But what to do when no one’s on the tug? Mr. Levander says potential solutions include big mechanical arms that come off the side of the tug, magnets, and even drone-delivered rope.

The Little, Local Airport

The U.S. has roughly 5,000 public airports, heliports, and seaplane bases, and upward of 14,000 for private use. But most travelers fly between only a few of the big ones. That is going to change, predicts Gregory Davis, CEO of Eviation, which is developing an electric plane.

Mr. Davis contends that electric planes will be cheaper to operate than those powered by jet fuel. They’re also going to be smaller. His company’s Alice prototype—which made its first flight in September—holds nine passengers and two crew members. The emergence of electric planes will eventually open up the nation’s regional and local airports to more commercial flights, he predicts, allowing travelers to avoid larger airports.

“We have a major potential to expand point-to-point air travel, which is also the most cost-effective and cleanest way of getting specifically from where you [are] to where you want to go,” he said. “You’re going to have much more choice and much easier access to air travel in 2050.”

Eviation plans to begin delivering aircraft in 2027. But before electric airplanes begin carrying commercial passengers between regional airports, there’s work to be done beyond the design of the planes, Mr. Davis says—from dealing with regulatory hurdles to building out a charging network at airports.

I wish to protest the current ugliness. I see it as a continuing trend, “the uglification of everything.” It is coming out of our culture with picked-up speed, and from many media silos, and I don’t like it.

You remember the 1999 movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” from the Patricia Highsmith novel. It was fabulous—mysteries, murders, a sociopath scheming his way among high-class expats on the Italian Riviera. The laid-back glamour of Jude Law, the Grace Kelly-ness of Gwyneth Paltrow, who looks like a Vogue magazine cover decided to take a stroll through the streets of 1950s Venice, the truly brilliant acting of Matt Damon, who is so well-liked by audiences I’m not sure we notice anymore what a great actor he is. The director, Anthony Minghella, deliberately showed you pretty shiny things while taking you on a journey to a heart of darkness.

There’s a new version, a streaming series from Netflix, called “Ripley.” I turned to it eagerly and watched with puzzlement. It is unrelievedly ugly. Grimy, gloomy, grim. Tom Ripley is now charmless, a pale and watchful slug slithering through ancient rooms. He isn’t bright, eager, endearing, only predatory. No one would want to know him! Which makes the story make no sense. Again, Ripley is a sociopath, but few could tell because he seemed so sweet and easy. In the original movie, Philip Seymour Hoffman has an unforgettable turn as a jazz-loving, prep-schooled, in-crowd snob. In this version that character is mirthless, genderless, hidden. No one would want to know him either. Marge, the Paltrow role in the movie, is ponderous and plain, like a lost 1970s hippie, which undercuts a small part of the tragedy: Why is the lovely woman so in love with a careless idler who loves no one?

The ugliness seemed a deliberate artistic decision, as did the air of constant menace, as if we all know life is never nice.

I go to the No. 1 program on Netflix this week, “Baby Reindeer.” People speak highly of it. It’s about a stalker and is based on a true story, but she’s stalking a comic so this might be fun. Oh dear, no. It is again unrelievedly bleak. Life is low, plain and homely. No one is ever nice or kind; all human conversation is opaque and halting; work colleagues are cruel and loud. Everyone is emotionally incapable and dumb. No one laughs except for the morbidly obese stalker, who cackles madly. The only attractive person is the transgender girlfriend, who has a pretty smile and smiles a lot, but cries a lot too and is vengeful.

Good drama always makes you think. I thought: Do I want to continue living?

I go to the Daily Mail website, once my guilty pleasure. High jinks of the rich and famous, randy royals, fast cars and movie stars, models and rock stars caught in the drug bust. It was great! But it seems to have taken a turn and is more about crime, grime, human sadness and degradation—child abuse, mothers drowning their babies, “Man murders family, self.” It is less a portal into life’s mindless, undeserved beauty, than a testimony to its horrors.

I go to the new “Cabaret.” Who doesn’t love “Cabaret”? It is dark, witty, painful, glamorous. The music and lyrics have stood the test of time. The story’s backdrop: The soft decadence of Weimar is being replaced by the hard decadence of Nazism.

It is Kander and Ebb’s masterpiece, revived again and again. And this revival is hideous. It is ugly, bizarre, inartistic, fundamentally stupid. Also obscene but in a purposeless way, without meaning.

I had the distinct feeling the producers take their audience to be distracted dopamine addicts with fractured attention spans and no ability to follow a story. They also seemed to have no faith in the story itself, so they went with endless pyrotechnics. This is “Cabaret” for the empty-headed. Everyone screams. The songs are slowed, because you might need a moment to take it in. Almost everyone on stage is weirdly hunched, like a gargoyle, everyone overacts, and all of it is without art.

On the way in, staffers put stickers on the cameras of your phone, “to protect our intellectual property,” as one said.

It isn’t an easy job to make the widely admired Eddie Redmayne unappealing, but by God they did it. As he’s a producer I guess he did it, too. He takes the stage as the Emcee in a purple leather skirt with a small green cone on his head and appears further on as a clown with a machine gun and a weird goth devil. It is all so childish, so plonkingly empty.

Here is something sad about modern artists: They are held back by a lack of limits.

Bob Fosse, the director of the classic 1972 movie version, got to push against society’s limits and Broadway’s and Hollywood’s prohibitions. He pushed hard against what was pushing him, which caused friction; in the heat of that came art. Directors and writers now have nothing to push against because there are no rules or cultural prohibitions, so there’s no friction, everything is left cold, and the art turns in on itself and becomes merely weird.

Fosse famously loved women. No one loves women in this show. When we meet Sally Bowles, in the kind of dress a little girl might put on a doll, with heavy leather boots and harsh, garish makeup, the character doesn’t flirt, doesn’t seduce or charm. She barks and screams, angrily.

Really it is harrowing. At one point Mr. Redmayne dances with a toilet plunger, and a loaf of Italian bread is inserted and removed from his anal cavity. I mentioned this to my friend, who asked if I saw the dancer in the corner masturbating with a copy of what appeared to be “Mein Kampf.”

That’s what I call intellectual property!

In previous iterations the Kit Kat Club was a hypocrisy-free zone, a place of no boundaries, until the bad guys came and it wasn’t. I’m sure the director and producers met in the planning stage and used words like “breakthrough” and “a ‘Cabaret’ for today,” and “we don’t hide the coming cruelty.” But they do hide it by making everything, beginning to end, lifeless and grotesque. No innocence is traduced because no innocence exists.

How could a show be so frantic and outlandish and still be so tedious? It’s almost an achievement.

And for all that there is something smug about it, as if they’re looking down from some great, unearned height.

I left thinking, as I often do now on seeing something made ugly: This is what purgatory is going to be like. And then, no, this is what hell is going to be like—the cackling stalker, the pale sociopath, Eddie Redmayne dancing with a plunger.

Why does it all bother me?

Because even though it isn’t new, uglification is rising and spreading as an artistic attitude, and it can’t be good for us. Because it speaks of self-hatred, and a society that hates itself, and hates life, won’t last. Because it gives those who are young nothing to love and feel soft about. Because we need beauty to keep our morale up.

Because life isn’t merde, in spite of what our entertainment geniuses say.

Four Ways Traditional Vehicles Could Transform in the Future—Even Elevators

Researchers, professors and executives forecast changes and innovations coming for some traditional conveyances

Elevators That Turn Left

Truly Remote Car Charging

Tugboat Drones

The Little, Local Airport

Artistic culture has taken a repulsive turn. It speaks of a society that hates itself, and hates life.