There once was a day when a concept like the Renault EZ-GO would be deemed as too outlandish and nothing more than a figment of someone’s wild imagination. Those days are obviously gone. It’s still a crazy-by-comparison concept, but it’s become par for the course in an industry that’s now embracing its autonomous future. So here’s the EZ-GO Concept. It’s a driverless, electric concept that’s built for on-demand autonomous ride-sharing. Yep, welcome to 2018.

If we told you that Renault would develop a concept car in 2018 that had a top speed of 30 mph, you’d probably think we were sipping some of the good stuff. But this is where we are now in the business. The Renault EZ-GO has the speed of a rickshaw, but it’s packed to the brim with enough high-tech features that it would make Inspector Gadget proud. It has self-driving sensors, including radar, LiDAR, ultrasound, and cameras, all of which are located in an antenna on the rear spoiler. It’s also capable of the two most advanced stages of autonomous — Level 4 and Level 5 — enabling it to shuttle around commuters on urban cities without the need of a driver on-board.

In terms of design, the Renault EZ-GO is actually bigger than most cars. Think of it more as the trolley of the future. It has a trapeze-shaped design with massive windows that serve as huge doors and a glass panorama roof. The largely transparent look of the EZ-GO Concept came as a result of consumer preference, a lot of whom admitted that they felt more comfortable in a transparent vehicle. So that’s what Renault did. "When you are in our car, on the bench seat and beside a big window, it's like you are on a park bench that's somehow moving," Renault's manager of concept cars, Stéphane Janin, told Engadget.

Functionally, the EZ-GO Concept can do a myriad of things when it’s on the road. It has an active suspension that can handle city roads. It can raise and lower itself depending on the needs of certain passengers. It even has four-wheel steering that allows it to be more flexible and versatile when it’s driving by itself with passengers in tow. Oh, and WiFi? Yeah, it has that too.

The concept paints a bright picture of what Renault is capable of in the future. Even better, we won’t have to wait too long to find out if it’s actually capable of becoming a real thing. Renault said that its first EZ-GO-style vehicle will arrive in 2022. It may not look like this one, but if its functions are in sync with what the concept’s capable of, that future could arrive sooner than we expected.

References

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