Smart Cities Week - Silicon Valley Take Home # 1 - Connected & Autonomous Vehicles, ("C&AVs")

All eyes were on connected and autonomous vehicles at SCW SV and I was pleased to be involved in some really interesting and insightful discussions about the future of this break away sector of smart city.

TAKE HOME MESSAGES

1. Transportation is about getting people or materials from point A to B in the safest, lowest cost, most environmentally friendly manner. It's not about cars.

2. The focus of E-mobility is all about increasing PMV, ("people miles travelled"), whilst reducing VMT, ("vehicle miles travelled"). In the USA the average car has 5 seats and yet the average occupancy is 1.1 people per vehicle. If we could approach 5 people per car then 80% of vehicles could be eliminated form the road. This involves developing strategies and incentives for sharing.

The challenges are:

> People don't like sharing in cars, (although they will share in planes). This is an issue for psychologists, not engineers or technologists. Normally making things compulsory or providing significant financial incentives will change public sentiment. Anyone who has every caught the Tube in London will agree. It is not a pleasant experience.

> For some people cars are more than a means of getting from A to B. They are about status, recreation, and sometimes investment.

> In car sharing 3 is better than 2, (the idea of "the witness").

> Cars need to be redesigned. They are currently driver focussed and in future this critical design feature/(constraint) will be redundant.

3. Cybersecurity is critical. People need to know that their vehicle will not be hacked or receive hacked inputs. In simple terms the question I ask is, "Would I put my kids on an autonomous school bus?" When the answer is "YES!", as is now the case with on-line banking, there will be an avalanche of movement in this direction. 

4. There is a huge legal void around C&AVs that needs industry leadership and engagement with the legislature in every region if is to be implemented. Further, people need to decide how much risk we will collectively accept. We know intuitively that driving a car may result in death yet we consider it an acceptable risk, and do not propose the banning or cars. We need to make the same decision about C&AVs.

5. There are practical constraints as autonomous vehicles are designed above all for safety, and traditional civil infrastructure, (roads), does not support full deployment of C&AVs. For example, a few pedestrians who choose to stand in the middle of a street can shut down an entire city, as cars won't move with pedestrians in the way. the entire urban landscape needs to change to enable large scale adoption of the autonomous vehicle.

6. Will public transport disappear in the future or will everyone move away from private transport to public? Its completely uncertain at this point. What we do know is that in the second transportation revolution, (after the horse), the industrial revolution in the 19th delivered the rail network. This started out as being private and after a few major incidents the industry was compulsorily acquired by governments in order to manage risk and set standards for safety.

SUMMARY

What we know now is about 20% of what we need to know, but the key requirements for the future of mobility are to be:

> Autonomous

> Connected 

> Electric

> Shared

in order to:

> Increase People Miles Travelled

> Reduce Vehicle Miles Travelled

> Increase Safety 

> Reduce Congestion

> Reduce the Consumption of Embedded Materials and Energy

> Reduce Emissions

> Reduce Cost

MY TIP

The future of C&AV is the autonomous drone.

Why?

> It eliminates the pedestrian dilemma which is critical path to large scale deployment.

> It optimises spatial mobility, (3 Dimensions, not just 2), which caters for an increase in the urban concentration from 54% to 66% by 2050, (We have to build up, not out)

> The technology exists now, (Dubai is trialling it currently including docking stations on apartment buildings), and

Just to give me some reassurance, as I was driving back up the freeway yesterday from Santa Clara to San Francisco, straight past the NASA Research Facility Uber & NASA announced that they have signed a JV to fast track development and commercialisation of this technology.

Watch this space.