Silicon Valley’s Biggest Challenge Yet
The Car itself as Enabler of Assisted and Automated Drive. If carmakers don’t bring a more suitable ‘rolling platform’… Silicon Valley should. The power of losing weight and girth.
How? By presenting a more suitable platform for all the detection and scanning hardware, the software, incl. processing algorithms that ADAS developers do pilots with. Think about it, in the world’s largest consumer market, the industry is struggling to deliver on promises made and meet the major challenges that lie in front of us. Are assisted and automated drive systems brought upon us prematurely? Can the driver be taken out of the loop? Do ride-hail providers (TNCs) use the wrong sort of robo taxis, unnecessarily compromising safety and economics? Whatever systems are used, it comes down to the car how well they work, right? That’s the thing that will need to be displaced physically in order to carry people from A to B. Enough with the endless rehashes about vehicle autonomy that plague internet media, and how well systems work, or not. They’re not — reason why there’s so much fuss about them, particularly with administrators, safety experts and regulators. Below a self-explanatory outline in pictures.
Boundaries between full-automated drive and deploying robo-taxis got blurred; it explains the ‘disconnect’ in what to expect… Of particular significance since there’s talk about removing the steering wheel.
What’s so intriguing about self-driving vehicles is that they open up a whole terra incognita between personal-owned cars and taxis. If cars will become autonomous, there is no need to actually own them. They can pick you up and drop you off wherever and whenever you need them to — which makes them utilitarian rather than objects of TLC. And exactly this leaves the door wide open for TNCs (Transport Network Companies) to exploit driverless cars — it is called MaaS: Mobility as a Service. However, surveys have shown that there is still a long way for the public to overcome their apprehension. TNCs like Waymo and Cruise are eager to work on that, but their robo-taxis haven’t advanced beyond Level 4 yet… at best, see graphic below.
Safety comes first
Reformat the car as an extension of the driver, as a 360° vision motorcycle helmet on wheels, then add assisted / automated drive systems. Notice the view-angles of the lidar and the driver below. The driver sits on the right side, where it matters most to be able to evade, avoid vulnerable road users like cyclists and pedestrians. “As soon as something unexpected happens, such as a child running across the road, we need to be able to use our full cognitive abilities to assess the situation and take appropriate action.” Source: “Want to relax in your self-driving car? Think again — study” Added benefit: driver and person seated next avoid injury in front-collisions.
There’s more to gain. Space Efficiency, Unclog Traffic. Better use of road space. After all, the average car trip consists of 1.2 person.
Below left: 99 percent of the cars are wider than their usual single occupant is tall. Right: how NYC allocates space. How does San Francisco compare?
There’s more to gain. Cost Savings… Plus Faster Response and Transit times.
Using smaller, sleeker AVs dramatically lowers the costs of having to deploy cars clumsier than the average ride-hail trip calls for. Betters the chances of intermodal usage in collaboration with Public Transport. Need more seats? Then deploy a people carrier or SUV. Obviously, this three-seater will appeal to more people — “1 in 900 suffices”. Below: boxy car design means that the on-board AV technology needs to see around corners, making it harder to piece together the image of what’s happening around the AV.
Below the robo taxis that TNCs Waymo and Cruise deploy in San Francisco. They are not only needlessly costly to exploit, needlessly big and heavy per paying passenger, those TNCs are unable to intervene when their robo taxis disrupt traffic, public transit and emergency response services, and when accidents take place (still 1.3 times higher than the national average). TNCs resolve problems by sending a human rescue driver to free the robo-taxi rather than having remote operators guide the vehicles how to proceed. Also notice the hardware sticking out of the robo-taxis to be able to ‘see’ around the corners — protuberances that are normally not allowed, in order not to cause more harm to other road users in case of an accident.
Below: GM’s and Cruise’ vision on the robo taxi, a big block of rolling real estate taking up even more public space. They come in handy for disabled customers though. The thing is: not every customer is one. In the time and with the budget it took to develop the Cruise Origin, GM could have come up with a more sensible, economical and far safer alternative. Question is: shouldn’t administrators become more involved in how robo taxis operate when ride-hailing becomes utility-like, almost Public Transportation like?
There’s more to gain… Energy Efficiency
EVs are basically oversized toy cars; the bigger and the heavier the car, the more batteries and kWh are needed, which frustrates the whole transition to affordable electro-mobility. Remember that the car is expected/supposed to become a household’s largest electricity-consuming appliance! Below to the right: the lower the vehicle mass and drag, the fewer of those costly batteries will be needed. Besides: “The energy required to power the computers would emit more than 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. To prevent such emissions from “spiralling out of control”, hardware efficiency needs to be improved.” Says Soumya Sudhakar of MIT.
If carmakers don’t bring a more suitable ‘rolling platform’… Silicon Valley should. The power of ‘doing more with less’.
The SUV is like an old telephone with touchpad and connectivity attached to it. The SUV’s sheer physique prevents it from becoming a safe and space-efficient self-driver. Silicon Valley’s biggest challenge yet? I’d like to think so. The transition from regular cellphone to smartphone has made APPLE the world’s richest company. The personal passenger car represents market value/total spendings at least 10–100 times bigger than what consumers spend on smartphones, the ratio ranging from cheap clunker + late-model iPhone up to a new car + 4-year old Samsung. In a nutshell, the car needs a reformat to benefit from new technology, to boost road safety and to evolve as a truly Green Car.
Thank you for reading, Ralph Panhuyzen
At some point former Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs must have said about the iPhone that was being developed: “it’s the format that expresses, that carries the change”. Remember that one of his famous sayings was: “design is not just what it looks like, design is how it works”. new-iSetta is to carry all sensor, scanning and imaging equipment required to have a clear view of what’s happening all around the AV and to eliminate blind spots but without protuberances that might spoil its low drag. Target is to slash the weight of the world’s most popular EV, the Tesla Model 3, in half — feasible because of its pod-like shape.
