Olli, the innovative self driving mini van, provides us with some heads-up on future mobility and also transport

Currently there is a lot of buzz around self-driving, autonomous vehicles:

• Ride sharing disruptors are investing into self driving technology or form partnerships: Uber buying Otto, Lyft partnering with GM, Gett receiving a 300 Mio. investment of VW
• Global car brands all talking about launching new self driving cars for their customer base: GM, Ford, BMW, Mercedes and one after the other going after software startups like Ford investing into Argo AI, GM buying Cruise to accelerate their journey towards new autonomous vehicles
• Concept cars like the Snap from Rinspeed, based on ZF's new electric vehicle platform, which is significantly lowering the market entry for new innovative mobility service providers
• Commercial vehicle manufacturers announcing self driving trucks and new transport innovations: Platooning, Drones and robots, Modular electric trucks
• Several public governmental funded pilots for new urban mobility concepts: UKI Gateway, PostBus Switzerland
• Even former car brands like Saab (going bankrupt in 2012) are becoming famous again by focusing on electric, autonomous vehicles through their rebirth as NEVS
• The customer experience starts to become more attention than just the product itself: Volvo offering a new app for a set of concierge services, Daimler launching a private car sharing app CROOVE. The acquisition of german meta car sharing platform Carjump can be seen as a similar move by PSA

Olli, the innovative self-driving mini bus concept that Local Motors recently launched, does show us some unique elements about the future of mobility and also transport.

With the needs of the end-users in mind, Local Motors and its partners are following an approach, focusing on the user-experience and not only the product and its self-driving capabilities, which underpins their understanding of the fact, that “Customer’s DON’T buy products they are looking for the best customer experience and the best outcome”. Focusing initially on inner city public transport, Olli comes with an unique virtual assistant powered by IBM Watson, that greets it passengers, can answer questions and can give advise about interesting locations. A truly unique user experience giving autonomous vehicles a personal touch, which is key to gain acceptance, as riding a bus without a driver feels still risky to the majority of people.

Mass adoption of autonomous driving will very likely happen in two stages. First it will appear in environments with low speed, like inner city public/taxi transport, fairgrounds, last mile delivery. Here the accidental risk is lower and it can be seen as the needed “test bed” to mature the underlying technologies for mainstream adoption. Remote or tele operation concepts will act as a bridge technology that help to accelerate the maturity and safety of autonomous driving technology.

Car and ride sharing offerings like Uber, Lyft, autonomous Taxi company Nutonomy and new mobility concepts like Olli, Navya, Easymile and Next Future Transport will all act as a catalyst in the discussion with the various regulators and will drive mass adoption of autonomous driving technology.

According to a study performed by Roland Berger, the European ride and car sharing market is expected to reach 7.2 – 10.8 billion EUR by 2020.

One interesting adjacent area to consider as a further “test bed” for autonomous driving technologies is “last mile delivery”. Mercedes Vans and Starship Technologies are showing us the direction.

To make the above stated concepts happen there are a set of key technical capabilities that are essential to start transforming future mobility and also transport:

• Advanced Driver Assistant Systems/Autonomous Driving (ADAS/AD)
• Maps & Environmental infos
• E-Mobility
• Fleet operation and management
• Intelligent, AI powered services platform as ecosystem enabler for value add services

ADAS/AD Technology

The recent announcement of Autoliv and Volvo (which lead to the startup Zenuity) caught my attention because there is something different in this partnership, as it is not only focused on bringing self-driving technologies to Volvo cars, but is also about offering a ADAS/AD solution through a joint venture, as a kind of standard solution to anybody planning to built autonomous vehicles. BMW/Intel and Mobileye did announce something similar but still being a closed system.

Different to the above closed systems, Baidu is offering their Apollo platform as an open platform for the development of automonous driving capabilities. Together with Udacity you will soon get a world class developer enablement program.

The development of ADAS/AD capabilities is one of the most challenging AI problems to solve and with our IBM AREMA framework we provide a full development lifecycle solution for this.

Maps & Environmental infos

HERE is ideally positioned in this space, as it provides the needed maps that enable autonomous driving, but through its close ties with Daimler, BMW and Audi it is starting to become the sensor fusion hub. Through the feed back of environmental information captured by the sensors in the connected cars, HERE provides another needed foundation for a safe autonomous driving experience.

Providing safe and reliable AD/ADAS capabilities does also require contextual, real-time information (e.g. construction sites, accidents and road conditions ahead). With IBM's Vehicle Insight Platform we provide the foundational capabilities to perform real-time sensor data fusion and analytics to provide contextual information to autonomous vehicles for a safe journey.

E-Mobility

Certainly not only applicable for autonomous driving, electrical drives and power systems are part of the mobility and transport evolution. Traditional car suppliers are all making their homework and are offering preassembled electric driving platforms, as demonstrated by the latest announcements of ZF and Siemens/Valeo. 

Remote fleet operation

A pre requisite for the new mobility and transport concepts outlined above are remote fleet operation capabilities as offered by BestMile and Phantom Auto. Without them, Olli and the likes cannot be operated by a city or a car/ride sharing provider in a safe and economical way.

Intelligent, AI powered services platform as ecosystem enabler for value add services

At IBM we believe that success in future mobility and transport is depending on addressing and meeting customer needs. Putting the customer needs first and to be able to provide the desired user experience requires an open and standards based, AI powered cloud platform that acts as an innovation catalyst and can be used by all kind of developers to create intelligent, value added services. Interested to learn more, see how PSA and IBM have teamed up to offer a mobile innovation platform.

On top of these technical capabilities are 6 essential business capabilities that need to be mastered by anybody who is interested to built and run a successful mobility services business leveraging self driving vehicles.

Interestingly, as outlined in Mark and Evan's article, the market will be captured by the entity that possesses the diverse capabilities needed to operate across the entire service-delivery value chain and not necessarily the ones that put most of their focus on the ADAS/AD technology. Frank Chen from the research company a16z did also look at the changes triggered by electric, self-driving vehicles and the impact this will have on the traditional automotive value chain.

Wunder Mobility is an interesting startup that provides some of the needed SW capabilities to best support the 6 essential business capabilities.

Looking further into the future, Uber has published a white paper around Flying Cars. Thus mobility will look very different in a couple years from now and current mobility leaders need to reinvent themselves to stay leaders.