Yes, I’d like to book a room on wheels, please.

Imagine it is 2035.

I live in Petite-Vallée, on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, about 850 kilometres from downtown Montréal. The distance has not changed. It still takes roughly ten hours to cover it by road, before stops and depending on conditions.¹

I have a medical appointment in Montréal on Wednesday morning.

On Tuesday, I finish my workday as usual. Around ten that evening, an autonomous vehicle picks me up at home.

I have booked a room on wheels.

I get in, go to bed and sleep. Overnight, the vehicle covers the 850 kilometres. The next morning, I wake up in Montréal.

I go to my appointment, spend the day in the city and get back in that evening. By Thursday morning, I am home in Petite-Vallée.

The 850 kilometres are still there.

What has changed is what they cost me.

The real cost of living far away

Back to 2026.

If I had to make that trip today, an appointment lasting a few hours could easily take up three days: leave on Tuesday, be in Montréal on Wednesday, return on Thursday. Add two nights in a hotel.

I could protect my workdays by travelling on the weekends before and after, but I would be trading two weekdays on the road for two shortened weekends and nearly a week of accommodation.

Other ways of getting there exist, but they do not make the problem disappear. Flights can get me from Gaspé to the Montréal area, but I have to work around operating days, schedules and stopovers.² Passenger rail service to Gaspé is still suspended.³ The bus serves Grande-Vallée, just down the road from Petite-Vallée, every day, but the trip to Montréal takes more than twelve hours, including transfers.⁴

Montréal is not out of reach.

The problem is everything a trip demands beyond the activity that made it necessary.

A medical appointment becomes a small expedition. A work meeting means rearranging my schedule. A show or a family event means asking whether the trip is really worth it. Even an international vacation can begin with a day spent simply reaching the major airport where the flight departs.

These constraints eventually weigh on a much larger decision: where to live.

Living outside a major centre involves a trade-off. You may gain space, peace and quiet, a different connection to the place you live, or a quality of life you prefer. In exchange, many of the options concentrated in large cities become harder to reach.

Autonomous vehicles could change that trade-off by changing what we can do with the time it takes to cover the distance.

We are still thinking too much about cars

We tend to picture an autonomous vehicle as a car that can drive itself.

That may be a transitional way of seeing it.

If no one needs to drive, why keep organizing the entire interior around driving? Why should the seats always face forward? Why keep a steering wheel, pedals, a driver’s seat, or even a clear distinction between front and back?

This transformation has already begun.

In Las Vegas, the Zoox robotaxi offers a fairly concrete glimpse. It has no steering wheel or pedals and can travel in either direction without turning around. Its four passengers sit facing one another, in a layout Zoox compares more to a small lounge than a conventional car interior. The service has been open to the public in Las Vegas since September 2025.⁵

The change looks simple enough. Yet the experience is different: the vehicle is designed around the people making the trip rather than the person doing the driving.

Volvo took the idea much further in 2018 with its 360c concept. It imagined a fully autonomous electric vehicle in four configurations: a bedroom, a mobile office, a living room and an entertainment space. Volvo explicitly presented the sleeping version as a possible alternative to some air travel, with the advantage of a private, door-to-door trip.⁶

It was very much a concept, but it asked the right question:

What does a vehicle become when it no longer has to be designed for a driver?

Making travel time usable again

For a long overnight trip, I probably would not want an autonomous car.

I would want a room.

Not necessarily an RV with a kitchen, a shower and enough living space for several days. A relatively compact, comfortable and safe cabin would do: a bed, somewhere for my things and what I need to get through the night.

For a daytime trip, I might prefer an office: a table, a good chair, a screen and a connection reliable enough to work or join meetings.

Travelling with others? Why not a small lounge?

The same vehicle does not even have to serve all these purposes. A service could offer different kinds of cabins for different trips, much as we choose a hotel room, a rental car or a class of train service today.

That changes the calculation.

For two centuries, much of the progress in transportation has been about going faster: railways, highways, airplanes, high-speed trains. But there is another way to lower the cost of a trip: make the time spent travelling available for something else.

If I sleep for nine hours, it matters much less whether my journey takes eight, nine or even ten.

If I can put in a fairly normal workday on the road, those hours do not necessarily come out of the rest of my week.

An autonomous vehicle does not have to beat a plane on speed to become an attractive option.

It can compete on other terms.

The software train

There is another possibility, more interesting still.

We often continue to imagine each autonomous vehicle as an independent car: mine drives itself while the others do the same around it.

But connected autonomous vehicles could share their positions, destinations, speeds and battery levels. They could coordinate their movements with a precision that would be difficult for independent human drivers to achieve.

Platooning—the coordinated movement of connected vehicles in a convoy—is already an established field of research. Vehicles exchange information so they can travel together with smaller gaps between them. Research addresses how to form and break up platoons as well as how to control them.⁷

Now imagine my trip from Petite-Vallée to Montréal.

My vehicle leaves home on its own. As it heads west, it comes across other vehicles on compatible routes. Some join up. Others join at Mont-Joli or Rivière-du-Loup.

The system can adjust their speeds, spacing and paths. At Québec City, some vehicles leave the group. Others continue toward Montréal.

No timetable was drawn up months in advance.

The convoy formed because, at that moment, several vehicles stood to benefit from travelling together. It then changed shape or broke up as their needs diverged.

We could almost call it a software train.

This scenario extends the research on platooning. It does not describe a service available on our roads today.

The parallel can go further. Vehicles that know one another’s intentions could adjust their speeds collectively to keep traffic flowing, instead of accelerating toward the next slowdown. Charging itself could evolve: dynamic wireless charging, which delivers energy to a moving vehicle through equipment embedded in the road, is already being researched and tested on roads. Deployment at scale remains to be demonstrated.⁸

We do not need to predict which of these technologies will prevail. The essential point lies elsewhere: when vehicles become autonomous, electric and coordinated by software, they can begin to operate as parts of a system rather than a collection of independent objects.

Giving roads some of the properties of rail

This does not mean autonomous vehicles will replace railways.

On a busy corridor, a well-filled train retains fundamental advantages in capacity and efficiency. Carrying hundreds of people individually in as many small cabins is not a better answer to every transportation problem.

But much of North America does not consist of densely populated corridors.

It is hard to imagine a rail network one day offering frequent departures between every small community and the major cities. The distances are long, the population is scattered and the infrastructure required is substantial.

The roads already exist.

The opportunity may lie in giving roads some of the properties of rail: coordinated movement, convoys, steady speeds, collective optimization and, eventually, shared energy infrastructure.

With one important difference: the last mile is already part of the system.

I could leave directly from my home in Petite-Vallée. No trip to a station. No fixed departure time. No connections. No luggage to transfer.

For part of the journey, my room on wheels could behave like a carriage in a temporary train made up of dozens of vehicles.

As it approached Montréal, it would leave the convoy and take me straight to my destination.

In a sense, a train that forms along the way and picks me up at my front door.

This combination is most interesting precisely where frequent rail service would be hardest to justify.

In Montréal, replacing a twenty-minute taxi ride with twenty minutes in a robotaxi is an improvement.

In Petite-Vallée, turning nine hours of driving into a night’s sleep could change a decision about where to live.

Being able to go to sleep

One condition is unavoidable.

For me to go to bed in Petite-Vallée and sleep while a machine takes me to Montréal, the level of safety will have to be extremely high, including for someone lying down.

Crossing Quebec in February is no demonstration under the California or Nevada sun. Snow, ice, blowing snow, animals, roadwork, crashes and unexpected events will all be part of the problem to solve.

Then come cybersecurity, liability, insurance, infrastructure availability and how the system behaves when something fails.

Sleeping at 100 km/h requires a very different level of trust from trying a robotaxi for fifteen minutes.

I do not know whether we will be there in 2035. It may take longer. Some of the possibilities discussed here will probably never take exactly this form.

The point of the exercise is not to predict the vehicle of 2035.

It is to notice what becomes conceivable when several developments—autonomy, electric propulsion, connectivity and artificial intelligence—begin to combine.

Living farther away without giving up as much

Large cities concentrate options: jobs, specialized care, universities, culture, major airports, professional networks and personal connections.

That is an important part of their value.

But what happens if you can live 850 kilometres from a major city without sacrificing several days every time you need to go there?

I could live in Petite-Vallée because that is where I want to be, and go to Montréal when an appointment, an event or an opportunity makes the trip worthwhile.

The distance does not disappear.

The range of options available despite that distance grows.

Technologies that change our lives do not always make the previously impossible possible. Sometimes they simply remove enough friction for an option that already existed on paper to become practical.

You can already live on the Gaspé Peninsula and go to Montréal to see a specialist, attend a concert, catch a flight or join a meeting.

The question is how much that possibility costs in time, money and planning.

If autonomy can turn a night on the road into a night’s sleep, or a day of travelling into a day of work, Petite-Vallée will be no closer to Montréal on the map.

But 850 kilometres could weigh much less heavily in the decision to make it home.

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