Driverless: There’s Something Insanely Big Happening In Transport. Let’s get involved Startups!
With Tesla announcing this week the launch of “auto-pilot” the race for driverless transport is well and truly hotting up. Of course, Google has driven a million miles autonomously on Californian roads, however they’re not commercially available. Also, pretty much all car manufacturers are scrabbling to get driverless to market before they get cuckolded by the big tech companies. It’s almost clear now that the battle won’t simply an in-vehicle software one — there’s much, much more at stake and to win.
Tesla’s announcement represents the first stepping stone in the race to put driverless tech in consumer hands. The starting gun for a generational shift in transportation has now been fired.
Did you know that most UK cars are idle over 90% of the time? No, really, they are. If we were to design a brand new personal transportation system now, we wouldn’t accept that inefficiency.
It now seems possible, through technology, to change these things for the better. Think of all that time we’ll get back. No more hours wasted driving or frustratingly staring ahead in a traffic jam — months, possibly years, of our lives will be released back to us!
This, coupled with the petrol to electric gradual transition — particularly drawn into clear perspective with the recent VW emissions scandal on why we should do it sooner — will undoubtedly see (excuse me, please) the acceleration of trends towards smarter personal transport.
There are, of course, many things to overcome to get to a better future, not least of which are described in Nesta’s recent report on driverless cars and cyber security.
However, it’s good to see the UK government addressing the potential driverless challenges head-on (ahem, sorry!) with plans to be at the forefront but we could, of course, always be doing more to cement our transition to a driverless, more efficient and cleaner future.
There’s something very big happening in transport, and tech startups can play a role like never before in this insanely massive industry.
Like current massive trends and disruption in other industries (e.g. Fintech), there’s going to be truck loads of opportunities for startups to innovate within the macro trends taking place.
My friends over at Lendyapp are jumping up and down excited about building better transport solutions with technology. They’re about to launch an app that’ll help the UK (to start with!) travel smarter. This article is originally from their blog!
Best
Adam
