The subtitle of this books explains what Autonomy is all about: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—and How it Will Reshape Our World. The author of the book is Lawrence Burns with Christopher Shulgan as the co-author. Published in 2018, the book tells the story about how we’ve gotten to where we are now, which is close to the sale of real autonomous vehicles. Larry Burns was the head of technology at General Motors for many years and now is a consultant but very active in Google’s efforts in this area.
The first section of this book deals with the three DARPA Challenges that kick-started autonomous driving technology. The military wanted a vehicle that could navigate a chaotic city without putting human life at risk.
The second part of the book deals with the history of the auto industry, including recent trends that will likely reshape our transportation system. The first trend is the electrification of vehicles. Part of the importance of that is that electric cars can be much simpler than conventional cars, requiring roughly ten percent of the parts. The 90 percent decrease in parts would have a profound effect on the supply chain. The other significance of electric cars is, if the electricity comes from renewable sources, the automobile’s role as a greenhouse gas emitter largely goes away. The other trend is transportation as a service, exemplified by Uber and Lyft. I didn’t see TaaS as an abbreviation for this, so I might as well state it here, since it makes sense.
After the third DARPA Challenge was won by Carnegie-Mellon with sponsorship from GM, not much happened. GM had a commanding lead in the technology, but this was during the Great Recession and GM was going bankrupt. In addition, GM management never believed in autonomous cars. Perhaps because they present an existential threat to their business model.
In fact, no car companies picked up the technology from the DARPA teams. Instead, Google hired most of the key personnel and set up a project team called Chauffeur. The Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then set up challenges for the Chauffeur team and provided huge financial incentives. Financial incentives that would provide wealth and financial independence to each member of the team. They succeeded.
At this point, Google’s effort, now called Waymo, is about five years ahead of everyone else. In fact, they are the only ones that have a viable, fully-autonomous system. Tesla’s Autopilot system is oversold and, as a result, there have been deaths. The Tesla system is an aid meant only for freeways with the human needing to stand by at all times. People are using it in inappropriate circumstances.
When will we see the Waymo system commercially available? I don’t know but the technology is there. Manufacturers developing their own systems will need several more years as will Uber. Those who license the Waymo technology could be to market relatively soon, if the legal implications can be worked out.
Think about the effect this could have. The author thinks the convergence of these trends could be a $4 trillion disruption. The cost of our transportation system could be reduced from $0.85 per mile to $0.20 per mile. If time spent driving is costed into this, the current cost is $1.50 per mile and Americans drive three trillion miles a year. There is $4 trillion per year savings available.
Other benefits include reducing traffic deaths by 90 percent, eliminating dependence on petroleum, taking the automobile out of the environmental discussion and greatly reducing congestion.
To realize these savings, four trends will need to merge. The first, mentioned above, is electric cars replacing cars powered by internal combustion engines. The second trend, also mentioned above, is the Transportation as a Service (TaaS) model becoming widely adopted. This implies a couple of things. First that people, by and large, give up owning their own cars. Second, that people are willing to use a shared resource to get around.
The third trend, and one made possible by TaaS, is the ability to “right-size” vehicles to the task. For example, with private car ownership, if we ever need to haul eight kids to soccer practice, we buy just such a vehicle. But 95 percent of the time, our monster SUV has one of two people in it. With the TaaS model, we’d call an eight-passenger vehicle when we needed it. But most of our time would be spent in a pod that was sized for one or two people.
The fourth trend, and the most difficult technologically, is fully autonomous vehicle controls. Driver aids that require the human to always be standing bye to intervene in an emergency just don’t work. Humans tend to get distracted or tune-out. They are ill-prepared to respond to an emergency. To work, autonomous systems must be fully able to handle the driving. This further simplifies the vehicle. Steering wheels and pedals are no longer needed. For the humans, the ride becomes passive.
Why hasn’t this happened yet? These things take time to implement. More importantly, there are a lot of stakeholders who benefit from our current, inefficient transportation system. The auto industry is huge. So is the petroleum industry. Plus, did you know that three percent of Americans drive for a living? That includes taxis, trucks and buses.
Still, the finances are compelling, as are some of the other advantages. The market here is bigger than smart phones. It seems inevitable that this is our future, but I’ll still believe it when I see it. To get yourself in a position to see where we are likely headed, I recommend this book to you.
Meanwhile, next week I will follow up with what this new transportation model might actually look like.
No comments yet.