For Automated Driving, Keeping Kindergartners Safe Is Only The First Step...

(Read the Toyota article first)

I'm always encouraged when someone with a reputation greater than mine echoes the thoughts that roll around in my head. Clearly, we're closer every day to a world with fully autonomous vehicles running around on their own through our cities and towns. You can watch the march of progress in the news headlines on a daily basis. The autonomous vehicle trend, you'll note though, was not initiated by the stalwarts of the automotive industry we've all known and loved for decades. The brands that most of us, our parents and grandparents have come to rely on are only now reluctantly following (or being dragged kicking and screaming) on the heels of companies that are newer than some of the bumper stickers I still have on my own cars. The real push for this advancement is coming from the likes of Uber (2009), Lyft (2012) and Argo-AI (2016), to name only a few. These brands represent a new up-start generation of companies that have no intention of building, " Your Father's Oldsmobile".

What is important to recognize here is the parallel trend that the largest of these new companies represent. It is not just that cars will become level-5 autonomous (they are/will). It is that they'll also become more of a shared commodity than they have been historically because of this autonomy. Ride-sharing and car-hailing business stand to reap the largest rewards when it comes to automating driving. The logic applied here is the same logic that explains the powerful economics of "fleet consolidation" that has gone on in other modes of transportation in decades past. Shipping and railroad magnates came about through such consolidation as did their analogs in aviation and on/off-highway vehicle markets. Uber, for example, could become the single largest owner of land vehicles in the world. That is a powerful consolidation of ownership and control.

Mr. Humphries points out in his interview (see the link above) that the function of cars will change with the large-scale adoption of the car-hailing model. What is hinted at, though not said explicitly, is also that cars and their respective components will have to be engineered with new goals in mind due to this "on-demand" transportation model. You can't turn a Maxima, Camry, or an Accord into an autonomous taxi just by removing the steering wheel and making the seats swivel around backward. These cars are consumer products and were never intended to last a million miles. Efficiency, reliability, and uptime become the dominant design factors with this change in usage and ownership. This thought gets more interesting when one imagines flip-flopping the statistic that is used most regarding the rate of personal car usage. Today, an individual's car is said to spend around 95% of its time idle, doing nothing, sitting in parking lots, garages and driveways. Now, think what that same car's reliability will look like over a similar time span of ownership if it was actually used 95% of the time instead? Figure 35 miles per hour for 23 hours per day. That could be 290,000 stop-and-go city miles per year easily or 2.9 million miles over a typical ten-year lifespan.

When you stop and ponder the items that wear out on cars toward the end of their life, what are the top things that come to mind? Bearings in the engine and wheels fail. Transmissions/gears give out. Clutches slip. CV joints wear. Blocks crack. Piston rings blow. And, everything rusts. (Well, rust is a bad thing where I've lived, but they tell me this doesn't happen to cars in the south and out west.) My years of frugality in personal car purchases and stubborn desire to fix (or attempt to fix as my luck has been lately) failures myself have taught me to appreciate these end of life issues. Part of the reason we started Brokkr Technologies is to provide solutions to manufacturers through our advanced metal surface coatings. Our wear resistant hard coatings for steels, as just one example of what our range of chemistries is capable of, provide a path to million-mile passenger vehicles.

Every aspect of the design of automobiles will have to be reevaluated based on these paradigm shifts in their usage and ownership. Getting rid of the steering wheel is (perhaps) just one step. And rearranging seats and cup holders and adding new entertainment systems will certainly be part of what is displayed for us to ogle at. But, for example, do you really need a six/seven/ eight-speed transmission for this new mode of transportation? What benefit does that give to the owner of the business that uses the car as a revenue-generating capital investment like a drill press? Or, what about those "20-inch ebony black-painted machined aluminum wheels with painted pockets"? What is the ROI for those?

Rear spoilers?

Chrome door handles?

Carbon fiber interior package?

Illuminated front emblem?

469 HP, 4.0L V8?

Sport-tuned exhaust?

Sure, there will be levels of creature comforts that remain. Uber & Lyft recognize that differentiation in their various levels of service is needed. But, these individualizing features and options that serve only to inflate our egos (which I fall prey to admittedly) will be supplanted by the things that bring value to the new owners of these fleets of autonomous cars. Brake pads that don't need replacement every 70k miles. Struts that don't rust out and fail. Million-mile engine oils? (The world isn't quite ready to go all electric just yet.) Head gaskets that don't blow at 150k miles? (Yeah...I'm slightly bitter at the moment about the head gasket thing.) Fuel economy will be king over comfort. You will become intimately familiar with the term "mean time between failures" as it applies to the cars picking you up. And, if you still want to save the world by using an electric vehicle (which I'm not against), you're going to have to pay for that luxury. That car will have to sit idle, not generating revenue while it charges or, possibly, have a literal ton of batteries swapped out by a technician/robot before it can get rolling again. Time spent sitting motionless means lost dollars, which is bad for business. (Sorry Mr. Lorax)

You get the idea, though. There will be far fewer "SHO" packages, Super Sports and AMG branded rides in a world where emotionally driven individuals are no longer making these trim level buying decisions. I would not predict a long life for Lincoln Navigators, Cadillac Escalades or the 5 trim levels of the Honda Pilot. There is less room in the vehicle market for such non-nuanced differentiation when people are paying for just the transportation and not the "joys" of owning the transporter itself. This doesn't mean there won't be luxury vehicles out picking people up and dropping them off. As someone that has more years in the rearview mirror than perhaps ahead of him, I admit to finding heated leather seats to be pretty darn sweet. I'm willing to pay a bit more for the comfort. It just means the world is probably going to look more like a monochromatic Manhattan street than the cornucopia of options, gizmos, and gadgets that you find in today's automotive showroom.

The article's title might sound a bit harsh at first. I get that. It's not meant to sound insensitive. But, the idea stems from a similar adage we used at a company I previously worked for. We always kept the "bus full of kindergartners" foremost in our mind when designing. This was seen as the worst case scenario if something went wrong and our product caused a crash. Nothing was more important to us than keeping those kids safe. It's the same for the autonomous vehicle market.The race to this car-hailing financial nirvana isn't going to be won by the company that has a perfect record of not running over kindergartners. That is the price of entry INTO the market. Existing automotive platforms certainly make for convenient test beds for the autonomy part of the puzzle. However, they fall short of being the final long-term solution to individual autonomous transportation. The race will be won by the companies that recognize the full scope of the vehicle engineering challenges ahead of them and then act boldly on that knowledge.

I'm glad Mr. Humphries has espoused a similar vision.

-Andy Hessler 20FEB2018