Info Tech AUSTIN, TX –Like CES, South by Southwest 2016 was awash in panels and talks about connected and autonomous cars. Legislators, consultants, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs and politicians all weighed in on the potential impact of autonomous autos – how it will affect liability, security, ownership, cities, space planning, and the actual mobility experience. When they really become mainstream – in reality, years away – autonomous automobiles will be nothing less than a revolution.
How we got here
The automobile was one of the fundamental innovations of the twentieth century, and it revolutionized the development of cities. A vast infrastructure and ecosystem was built around it, to help fuel it, store it, and maintain it. Roads and highways changed the design of cities, and led to development of suburbs and exurbs, where people could live far away from their places of work and recreation. It also had negative consequences, leading to decay in some urban cores in America, as newer homes, jobs and other infrastructure moved to the suburbs. In some cities, highways divided neighborhoods, creating economic divides as development flourished on one side over the other.
These days the promise of the autonomous automobile has spurred new thinking in urban planning, mobility, and infrastructure development. Are we thinking about the potential impact of this technology on our future infrastructure needs? Given the long term planning time frames and high cost of infrastructure today, are we planning for the future based on the technology of yesterday or tomorrow?
Think about it: No one has a crystal ball, but obviously today’s roads are being built for and around human drivers. What would road design be if all cars and the infrastructure were connected? Theoretically, autonomous cars could go down the road within inches of each other, and they could all communicate with each other and traffic signals. And then there’s the question of sharing: What if cars were not owned, but available on demand? What does that do to parking space requirements? How might that dynamic change the relationship between city cores and suburbia? For people that like to drive and control the machine, what happens to the driving experience?
The promise of real safety
One common theme across the discussions about autonomous cars is that it has the potential to greatly increase safety. The statistics show that 95% of traffic accidents are caused by human error, and around 38,000 people die in accidents each year in the United States. One is far more likely to die in an automobile accident than in a plane crash.
Most of the fear around autonomous cars is how they’ll react to unforeseen situations. The most likely scenario is unforeseen situations caused by human drivers sharing the road with autonomous cars, and that presents interesting challenges. If traffic deaths – and injuries, property damage, and the inevitable lawsuits – can be minimized, that alone could make the business case for autonomous vehicles.
Along that line, Volvo has announced a goal to reduce accident deaths to zero in their automobiles by 2020 through better safety design and active and passive technology. Further, if its autonomous driving systems fail, it will assume responsibility. It’s an interesting and bold move, as lawsuits related to safety issues can bring a company to the verge of bankruptcy. In the 1980s, the unintended acceleration lawsuits almost drove Audi out the U.S. market, and it took years for the brand to recover. More recently, Toyota and GM have had highly publicized multibillion-dollar settlements around safety related equipment failures.
Infrastructure and sharing
While safety is a big motivator in the path to autonomous vehicles, there is much more to be gained. Cities built around the automobile, especially newer ones, have found it hard to add public transportation infrastructure. For example, in 2014 the city of Austin floated a billion dollar bond program for an extension of the city’s MetroRail system that was defeated in a public vote. Part of the issue involved what parts of the city the rail would serve, and many people from the parts of the city unable to take advantage of light rail did not see the need to vote to raise their taxes to finance it. In contrast, the appeal of the autonomous auto is that it would require relatively moderate changes in existing infrastructure and potentially use existing roads more efficiently. That efficiency also implies the potential for less cars on the road, less wasted energy and carbon emissions, and overall a cleaner planet.
However, less cars on the road are not good news to auto manufacturers. Today’s automobile business is geared around an ownership model, and the financial arms of every carmaker have built incentives to get people to trade in for a new car every 3-5 years. Naturally not everyone does so, and people are keeping their cars much longer than ever before, in part because of increased reliability and less model design changeover than in the past. But the rapid ascent of the Uber and Lyft car-on-demand model, and urban based car sharing services like Zipcar and Daimler’s Car2Go have brought in new concepts of mobility. The automakers are starting to think of themselves as mobility companies and are making investments in these areas, as witnessed by GM’s $500 million investment in Lyft announced at CES in January.
Connected cars
What about the driving experience? Does it go away? BMW has for years sported the tagline “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” In a car that drives itself, what does that mean? BMW, like other carmakers, have seen that users want their smartphone connectivity, entertainment, and communication capabilities better integrated in current automobiles. BMW was a pioneer in advanced infotainment systems with the original iDrive, and the latest version features hand gestures as another control mechanism. Ford’s new SYNC 3 features a new software platform for applications and promises over-the-air updates.
In fact, virtually all the automakers are rolling out connected car systems in new models, and also making them software updatable, much like our smartphones. The car experience is moving beyond just control of the machine itself, into a more immersive mobile entertainment and communication cocoon. Semi-autonomous and ultimately fully autonomous driving systems will further exacerbate this trend. It is also a serious challenge for automakers to keep their differentiation over time, as the Google and Apple ecosystems have invaded the car with Android Auto and CarPlay, which the automakers have had to integrate due to customer demand.
Regulations and smart cities
There are still many hurdles to the nirvana of autonomous cars. In the U.S. the federal government sets the safety standards for cars, and mandates such things as seat belts, airbags, minimum crash safety standards, and much more. But states control licensing drivers, and that can present issues with respect to autonomous driving. States are trying to work through the aspects of licensing software as a driver, and the issue of liability will always come up when something goes wrong.
What is clear is that if states enact a patchwork of different laws with respect to autonomous cars, then it will significantly slow down the adoption of the technology. Recently, the California DMV drafted a law that allows autonomous cars to operate on public roads, but it requires a licensed driver in the vehicle and a steering wheel and brake pedals. Google’s self-driving vehicles don’t have these, and they say that such laws will severely limit adoption. People without driver license or physical impairments to operate cars won’t be able to take advantage of autonomous cars. Google announced it will be testing autonomous cars in Austin, and presumably our business friendly Texas laws will be more accommodating.
In another panel, Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Anthony Foxx led a discussion with six mayors of the seven finalists for the DOT’s Smart City Challenge. The DOT has partnered with Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures to pledge up to $50 million in funding to define Smart City and become the country’s first city to fully integrate self-driving cars, connected vehicles, and smart sensors into its transportation network. The finalists are Austin, Columbus (OH), Denver, Kansas City (MO), Pittsburgh, Portland (OR), and San Francisco. The cities that were eligible had to meet size and population limits (midsize cities), which ruled out larger cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Several mayors all spoke about the potential of new mobility technology to help bridge the socio-economic divides in their respective cities. Some talked about the potential for autonomous vehicles to deliver services to underprivileged neighborhoods, such as mobile hotspots for high-speed internet access. Others noted the potential for autonomous vehicles to enable affordable transportation alternatives to retain creative and lower income people being priced out of central urban living areas. All talked about the need to reduce traffic and congestion, the lost productivity of sitting in traffic, and how cities need to rethink space planning and utilization around the new technology.
Telematics and services
Like any connected device, cars generate lots of data. They have been doing so for a long time, and much of that data has been available through the OBD-II port built into cars since 1996. The port has long been used for vehicle diagnostics and repair purposes, and it can be thought of as the USB port standard for automobiles.
What has become interesting is that new IoT devices can connect to that port and connect vehicle data to the Internet. This means there are opportunities for connected car applications without the latest connected car technology — and not necessarily desirable ones. Some current applications include dongles from Progressive and Liberty Mutual Insurance companies, where if you opt in you can share car data that monitors driving habits – how fast you accelerate, how hard you brake, how many miles driven, etc. The incentive for this Big Brother-esque app is lower rates for good driving habits.
More interesting is IoT car platform Automatic, which sells a $99 OBD port dongle (pictured, right) that connects your car’s data to mobile applications – everything from trip tracking and automated expense reporting to integration with Nest, Alexa, and IFTTT app connections. The data in cars, just like smartphones, is and will be valuable. As automakers roll out more connected new vehicles, the car will become another app platform and market to deliver services and content.
In the context of smart cities, connected cars can tap into better information as they navigate around a city – such as real-time traffic information, parking availability and pricing, street closings, charging station locations, and more. Devices like Automatic may bridge the gap to make dumb cars smarter, but ultimately the direction is that all cars will be connected platforms in the future. That said, it’s not clear that the automaker’s systems, Apple, or Google will become the in-car standard. History says that with any big technology platform shift, new winners often emerge.
Connected cars will offer other services as well. Capital One talked about Apple Pay-like capability built into the car. Instead of pulling out your smartphone or wallet at the drive through, pay with your car. At CES, Kia was demonstrating a future car interior with a built in fingerprint reader, to authorize payments like you can on Apple or Samsung Pay. Transactions could go much quicker at fuel and charging stations as well as drive through services. Then there are possible deliveries to your car: Instead of having your online order delivered to your home, you could authorize a delivery service to open your trunk to deliver your package. With connected cars, no keys are needed, and you’re in control of authorization. From the point of view of efficiency, you might imagine delivery trucks making multiple deliveries in a single parking garage, versus significantly more miles logged delivering packages to individual homes.
The road ahead
Getting to connected and autonomous car and smarter city utopia will not be easy. We will still be driving our own cars for years, and may have to share the road with autonomous ones. There will be significant challenges with the aging American infrastructure, and congestion will get worse before it gets better. But we should remember that we can’t always predict the future, and that technology has a way of driving progress in ways we don’t anticipate.
Along that line, let’s humorously recall that at the turn of the century the horse manure problem was a significant issue on major urban cities like New York and London. Horse manure was that era’s pollution problem from ever increasing horse and buggy traffic. The London Times predicted in 1894 that by 1950 London would be nine feet deep in horse manure. It’s always dangerous to extrapolate what we know today too far out into the future.