Toyota's Pod, the e-Pallete could be your future Uber or much more

It's a rolling restaurant. It's an Amazon delivery van. It's a mobile store or showroom or hotel room or taxi. It is the car as a blank canvas.

Toyota calls this pod the e-Palette. It was the centerpiece of the company's press conference at CES 2018. The automaker plans to let these autonomous vehicles loose at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. For now, this future van stands as a model of where Toyota sees the platform-driven transportation of tomorrow.

The e-Palette is fully electric and self-driving. Company president Akio Toyoda called it a "plug and play" open standard that giant companies or small businesses could use for just about anything. Clearly this minibus could be a driverless ride-sharing vehicle you hail from your phone, and indeed, Uber is one of Toyota's early partners on this program.

Amazon is another, for obvious reasons. The demonstration video for e-Palette shows these pods carrying cargo to and from distribution centers, where, say, a smaller pod would pick up your Amazon delivery and drive it to your home.

Anything that fits into an e-Palette could become mobile. Toyoda asked the crowd to imagine a future Burning Man festival serviced by these self-driving Toyota pods turned into food trucks or shops. Or, one of the autonomous vehicles could come to your house to pick up things you want to send to your storage unit.

It's a pretty pie-in-the-sky picture. But the autonomy revolution absolutely will alter the nature of what a vehicle can be. If you don't need a driver's seat and a dashboard, then the traditional design of a car's interior is out the window. It could have seats facing each other like you'd find on a train. It could have them along the sides like a subway car. It could scrap seating altogether to become a rolling store or showroom or any other use you can think of. And the car and tech companies both are going to race to control the platform this future rides upon.