EMEA: Self-driving everything?

Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and Security. Having experience at an operator, software and hardware vendors and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless through daily contributions going forward.
It’s been a busy week for news about self-driving vehicles coming on the scene, it’s time to take a look at exactly how far reaching this trend is and who the major players are.
Everyone knows that Google is working on self-driving car prototypes to improve road safety and provide mobility to those who currently do not have these options readily available to them. Google self-driving cars will look different, sort of like a pod on four wheels. By now you’ve likely all seen the videos of the self-driving pod-like prototypes without a steering wheel, accelerator pedal or brake pedal.
The social implications of self-driving cars is wide reaching. The attached link shows a normal man running errands around California in his self-driving vehicle. What you don’t see until almost the end of the video is that he is blind. The possibilities of life changing independence for individuals with handicaps, the ability for elderly drivers to continue to be mobile on their own and a way to keep drunk drivers off the road are all topics that play into this project.
But Google shouldn’t be the only one getting attention on this topic. Players in the automotive industry in Europe, the United States and Asia are all working on solving this challenge.
The Volvo Drive Me program is a joint initiative between Volvo Car Group, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park and the City of Gothenburg. The Swedish Government also is endorsing the project. In April of this year they announced a trial with real customers and real cars.   There will be 100 cars in everyday driving conditions allowed on approximately 50 kilometres of selected roads in and around Gothenburg. The only addition to the Volvos is software. So unlike the Google ‘pod’, these are working with cars in the form factor we know them today and they allow for a shift between self-driving and traditional driving on demand. The goal is for these cars to be available for sale by 2017. Late for your meeting, finish up your last minute prep in the car .
Audi is also working on self-driving functionality for the A7 and was demonstrating this in Florida earlier this week. They say they will be offering cars to aid with traffic jam situations in the near future. The functionality includes the ability to steer, brake, speed up/slow down in low speed traffic jams below 20 mph. But the driver still must be touching the steering wheel. This is certainly a start.
The thing that looks really exciting from both Audi and Volvo is the ability to tell your car to go and park itself and come and pick you up via your smartphone. How cool is that!
The question is when do these cars hit the roads in more locations? Also this week, there was an announcement about driverless cars coming to the UK early in 2015. This has resulted in many stories about robots taking over the UK roads, whether or not this is safe, whether or not the culture will be accepting of this technology. Well who knows the answer to all these questions, but at least the UK is starting to work on the answers.
There are also many reports out about the impact to both safety enhancement and utilization of the roadway infrastructure that is already in place. A few statistics worth nothing as we all consider these topic and how we feel about them.
Over 90% of traffic accidents are caused by human error. In the US alone in 2011, there were 5.3 million auto accidents resulting in 2.2 million injuries, 32,000 deaths and a cost of over $230 billion. This figure is about 2-3% of the US GDP. Although this is only a small sample, the Google self-driving cars have 700,000 miles to date with only one accident. And that was caused by a traditional driver rear-ending a Google car. If this trend holds true as the number of self-driving cars scale, this would result in a major decrease to injuries, deaths and repair costs related to auto accidents.
As far as infrastructure utilization, the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transportation Research conducted a study in late 2013 on the impact of self-driving cars on the current roadway infrastructure. Today they estimated that the US has a utilization level of 2,200 human-driven vehicles per lane per hour which results in only utilizing 5% of roadway capacity. Because self-driving cars can drive closer together, they estimate that if 50% of traffic was coming from self-driving cars, this would result in a boost in highway capacity to 22% and if there were 80% self-driving cars, the highway capacity usage would grow to 50%.
Trucks in the mix?
Mercedes is also working on self-driving cars, but for the sake of this article we will take a look at their self-driving truck unveiled earlier this month. We’ve seen the videos of a long line of trucks following each other, but this is not the case here. This truck is operating alone and driving on the Autobahn. Mercedes has said this will be available by 2025 as it requires vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure WiFi to be in place.
And let’s not forget about planes.
The self-flying helicopter has also been in the news this week. It’s on its way home from Afghanistan after a three year tour of duty hauling supplies into dangerous territory. So this isn’t all about cars and trucks, think about your personal aircraft flying over the traffic in the future. I know this sounds a little too George Jetson, but there are companies actually working on this. We’ll hold that topic for another day.