Why are we still driving ourselves?

We generally have a personal relationship to the ton of metal, electronics and software sitting outside (or inside) our homes. I can appreciate the reliability, convenience and autonomy to go where I want, when I want with relative ease. In the wds office, the current dialogue on a number of transport topics related to our clients has focused on the movement of people that is environmentally sustainable; a transport mode that could contribute to ‘smarter cities’ and potentially develop an ecosystem of innovation. And on a more personal level, how could this impact our lives in the near-future?

With the number of newspaper headlines, social media articles and events spruiking the latest embodiment of the so-called autonomous, self-driving, automated or driverless vehicles, I pondered how close am I in fact to be trading in my 2010 Volkswagen Golf for one of these featured vehicles. Are the reasons for the void today between the what-if and what-is on the road something surmountable in the time I will update to a new vehicle? Or will I be presented with much of the same choices at the end of this decade? I ponder three assumptions to see if this sheds some light on this topic.

Regulators have yet to catch up to technology.

The Geneva Convention on Road Traffic requires every vehicle to have a driver who is at all times able to control it. This implies a state of presence, to have an ability in real-time to intervene and safety control the vehicle. This applies to the cruise-control and automated parking features in many cars today. Could this naturally extend to fully computer-controlled navigation of routes from point A to point B? First, many common rules regulated by authorities mandates reasonable, prudent, practical and safe driving. This complicates some key benefits of autonomous vehicles such as distance requirements and restrictions on what the *‘driver’ could be doing. But this doesn’t obliterate the possibilities. Given that the policy objective is safety, there are many ways to meet this objective such as distance control, improved object recognition and complex decision-making. Accidents due to human-error, fatigue or being under the influence could be minimized; bottlenecks and slow-down points avoided.

Consumer aren’t ready.

Presented with the scenario between risking bystanders or sacrificing the passengers, autonomous vehicles present a social and moral question. Simply, should the vehicle be programmed to save as many lives as possible (minimise damage) or programmed to protect the passengers within? An interesting study published in Science journal earlier this year revealed that most respondents believed the vehicle should be programmed to save the most lives. But they themselves (over 80 percent surveyed) would not purchase a vehicle that was programmed to be utilitarian. If accidents are reduced in total by a percentage of fatalities and cars can mathematically compute minimal damage, then do we care at an individual level? End user and customer adoption throughout the value chain should have a design influence on the new innovation. Contextual reality of how new objects, offers and services are adopted or change our behaviours will drive uptake.

Still developing the smarts to navigate busy cities.

Since the Teetor cruise control was invented in 1945 to set the vehicle’s speed and later commercialized in 1958, technology to automate car functions have come from all sorts of fields from space exploration to drones. While navigating highways have come a long way, the treacherous cityscapes still pose some difficulties. Google’s self-driving car relies primarily on pre-programmed route data. Consequently, it has difficulties currently in complex, unmapped intersections, identifying harmless debris, or discerning human signals such as a traffic police officer. Projects are currently underway to address these.

By 2020, although just over 3 years away, the public policy, consumer and technology readiness challenges will have a lot of science and support thrown at it. The choice to no longer drive ourselves could be influenced by the ubiquitous of the technology, our behaviours, social standing and macro transport needs, which already has Tesla, Audi, Ford, GM and Uber investing in their respective driverless vehicle lines. So there’s a very high likelihood, I’ll be handing over control to a machine in my next car in some form of autonomy.

Still, don’t we want less not more cars on the roads?

Exactly. The era of cars as we know them have typically required space-hogging infrastructure, with ineffective utilisation contributing to congestion, pollution and sprawling concrete. The opportunities to shape the urban environments may focus less on the passenger car but look towards the social and environmental impacts in automating trash pick-up, delivery, taxis and public-private partnership are what could be very exciting for the transit spaces around us. In the meantime, the paradigm of car ownership is seeing variations in asset-sharing and on-demand convenience. Hello uber. So, perhaps the next time I step into my new ‘car’, it may be in to a very different type of personal vehicle I know today.

At We Design Services, we are working on some exciting projects on smart cities, autonomous vehicle research partnerships and public transport. In short, developing new ecosystems of mobility using service design thinking and innovation management.

Part of the autonomous vehicle ecosystem has been visualized using ECOS — our ecosystem prototyping software — currently being developed. The mapping shows current actors, and selected value flows of knowledge, service, products and commercial relationships that goes beyond a simple business model framework. While still developing maturity, it gives a sense of the exponential possibilities of partnerships and collaboration, a system greater than the sum of its parts.

To find out more, visit us at www.wedesignservices.com.

*Naming conundrum. When the principal controller of driving becomes the computer, what is the appropriate term for the human inside? ‘Driver’ denotes a primary role which is made further redundant, ‘controller’ seems rather passive.