One sunny morning in the spring of 2019, you may be awakened by an e-mail from your automobile. "Good morning," reads the alert, chiming insistently on your bedside laptop. "Remember, car-pool duty today!" You acknowledge the mail, smile and turn over. Be ing the designated driver buys you an extra 10 minutes of snooze time. When you finally step out the front door, your car-pool buddies are already at your driveway, and it seems the earlier start they received has made them no less keen on the arrangement .

You pop the doors with your key fob-some things haven't changed in the past 20 years-and they pile in the back after dropping jackets, bags and cell phones nonchalantly in the trunk. It takes only a few seconds to discover why they're so eager. By the tim e you cross to the driver's side, your buddies have downloaded a digital file of music mixes for the journey, put their favorite breakfast TV show on the passenger view screens as wallpaper, cranked up the AC and started surfing the news sites. No wonder this pooling thing became so popular, you think.

The engine, a hybrid electric model, starts up so noiselessly you can barely feel a vibration. In fact, the only indication it has started is a smiley face in the corner of your Heads-Up Display (hud), a kind of virtual dashboard projected onto the bottom of your windshield that you keep in your peripheral vision. All other systems boot up automatically, with the exception of the AutoPC, which is active all the time. It received updated copies of that report you were sweating over last night, should you n eed to have it read to you for your peace of mind during the journey. (And if your boss wants to hear it too, your cell phone in the trunk will patch his call through to the front speakers.)