Can autonomous cars herald a brighter tomorrow? (or, a chat over dinner…)
Imagine just walking out into the road regardless of the traffic. It wouldn’t matter where you crossed either — traffic lights had long since been resigned to the dustbin of history. Traffic signs were no longer necessary, so the clutter of what is known as ‘street furniture’ was a distant memory as well. Some people wondered what those fading lines on the asphalt were once for. Car parks are few and far between and certainly don’t take up valuable real estate.
Welcome to a world where the only cars are autonomous. It is a world I found myself being transported to (pardon the pun) when in conversation with Jonathan Reichental* at a dinner last month. Jonathan is a firm believer that the future of vehicles is ‘ACES’ — Autonomous Connected Electric Shared. Earlier that day he had presented this vision to a packed TM Forum conference hall in Yinchuan in China and casually mentioned that our future didn’t have a place for traffic signs. After all, autonomous vehicles don’t need to read the sign — they will know where to go anyway. Finding myself intrigued by that and knowing that he couldn’t run away from the dinner table, it was with this as a starting point we began to riff on what this world of the autonomous vehicle looked like. I’m trying my best to recollect the points here as I think it is a real challenge for our times.
You may not agree with the suggestions we made at that table but there is a sound basis for all of it — and more. With vehicles able to understand where other road users are through ever improving sensor technology, the need to bring traffic to a halt to allow traffic in another direction to move, or to allow pedestrians to cross, is removed. You should be able to walk out into the road and the traffic will avoid you. Now that it avoids you and each other, the need for traffic lights is removed. It will just be a continuous flow. We will not need to paint yellow or red lines on our roads as the vehicles will just know where they can and cannot stop. Street clutter can give way to more imaginative places to be — less need for guard rail would be a nice start! Shared vehicles mean there is little need for car parking — the boast of ownership is increasingly lost on young people today anyway as the sharing economy takes hold.
Motor insurance becomes a thing of the past as well; at least in its current form. In a system where you pretty much know straight away who was at fault and where everyone contributes into a fund through their hire charge, the need to personally insure a vehicle is reduced if not eliminated. Already we are seeing insurance companies thinking about how they insure autonomous vehicles (e.g the ABI discuss it here and Adrian Flux have launched a policy that considers autonomous features )
But there are dangers too. If there is an inevitable accident (no system is foolproof), who takes the decision on how the collision occurs? i.e. who comes off worst? We are faced with the horrible idea that the algorithm decides which life is more valuable. The ‘trolley problem’ necessarily becomes an everyday occurrence. Our lawmakers will have to wrestle with that one and it won’t be an easy debate. Already it seems Mercedes believes it is the pedestrian who will be ‘sacrificed’.
If vehicles need to know where other ‘things’ are then there is an issue of ensuring everything is connected. Speaking about vulnerable road users like cyclists and horse riders, we came to the conclusion that they’ll simply have to be connected in some way. So, equestrians, is your saddle IoT enabled?! An initial thought we considered was use of smart phones but our conversation began to question the need for a smart phone in a future where everything is enabled and intuitive. Perhaps that’s for a different post!
Another problem is the question of who ultimately owns the vehicles. After all, someone or some organisation will need to operate, service and repair them. Perhaps we will see new business models come forward? Perhaps in keeping with their shared ethos, cooperatives will be the way? Maybe even a role for the state? Maybe this is something car producers will take on themselves? (although given the Mercedes announcement highlighted above, will the necessary trust be there?) It will be keenly debated I am sure, as this may well be the key to how they are received and used.
There are, of course, technical issues that will have to be addressed but I would be less concerned about them. Issues of interoperability, for instance, will see standards developed that eventually become widespread and accepted. The main technical issues may well precipitated by cross-cultural ones and be largely associated with transition issues as generations get more used to treating vehicles in a different way. There will be some inevitable jostling for tech supremacy from competing interests, but much like many other technology differences there will be an accepted standard in the end.
How autonomous vehicles impact on our cities is something we need to start thinking about now at operational, planning and governance levels. I know of no UK spatial planning document that has considered these impacts already (willing to be corrected here). As Jonathan and I discussed, it will go way beyond just the basic infrastructure. It will be a re-imagining of cities as a whole. We should embrace it and think of how we can create a better future. Autonomous vehicles should herald a brighter future and not be a way of entrenching the problems of the present. We have spent so long (too long) trying to manage our cities with vehicle technology that is only as good as the varied humans controlling it — building around the needs of the car. Autonomous vehicles potentially offer a chance to keep what is good about cars but build around the needs of people instead.
Maybe it is time this conversation was being had around more than just dinner tables?
*Jonathan Reichental is CIO of Palo Alto and has written about some of this much better than I have such as here for instance. If you get a chance to hear him present then do so. If you get a chance to bend his ear at the dinner table then definitely do so - he’s far too polite to walk away! He can be followed on Twitter at @Reichental and here on Medium at Jonathan Reichental
