2017 is likely to be the year when autonomous vehicles stop being one-off trials and become more mainstream. It will also see the dramatic rise in telematics as data will change the way we drive
A few months ago, your writer travelled to Ford’s global headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, to attend a global conference of the carmaker. The highlight of the visit, however, was a ride in a prototype of Ford’s autonomous vehicle. Sitting in the back seat, it was quite remarkable to observe the engineer behind the wheel just sit back and take his hands off. The Ford Focus sedan, which had an array of laser sensors and high-definition cameras mounted on its roof and elsewhere, negotiated open traffic with ease, albeit the algorithm running in the computer brain that was driving this car left one awfully cautious.
But this was not a one-off case; Uber also began trialling autonomous cars in Pittsburgh. Yet the most valuable funded company in the world was beaten to the punch by a Singapore-based start-up, nuTonomy, which began a trial of autonomous taxies in a small area of the South East Asian city-state. But American (well, technically Belgian-Brazilian) beer company Budweiser was the first company in the world to make a delivery using an autonomous truck (Uber technology powered the back-end).
And the Europeans are not sitting idly by. In Sweden, carmaker Volvo plans to have a fleet of 100 autonomous XC90s running around Gothenburg by early 2017, in the largest such pilot in the world. The Germans are not sitting back either; Mercedes, which once owned a stake in Tesla, is well on its way to launching an autonomous car within a couple of years.
The Volkswagen Group — which had a disastrous 2016, thanks to the fallout of the emissions scandal — unveiled the I.D, an all-electric autonomous car, a few months ago. And the world’s largest carmaker Toyota, which was once skeptical about the future of autonomous vehicles, has finally upped its game and is acquiring high-tech companies with the specialised technology that such vehicles need in order to leapfrog their rivals.
So, it appears that the future that we were promised years ago is well on its way to becoming a reality. The human won’t need to drive anymore. And while driving can be exhilarating, that is usually on the open road, on the daily commute, it can seem like complete drudgery. And in cities with parking issues and traffic chaos, a fleet of autonomous taxis could indeed kill two birds with one stone.
But there were reminders that the technology is far from perfect. Google continued trials of its autonomous car, however, it made the news when it suffered an accident when another (human) driver ran a red light and careened into the modified lexus SUV the technology giant is using for its tests. Electric carmaker Tesla is equipped with a technology called ‘autopilot’, which allows cars to ‘drive’ themselves on highways. However, the carmaker suffered two highly publicised accidents of its cars using the technology. Both crashes were fatal and while Tesla is disputing the causes of the first accident, the second accident, which took place in China, seems to have been caused by the technology, as dashcam footage shown on Chinese broadcaster CCTV would indicate.
While autonomous cars are making leaps and bounds, these incidents prove that they are nowhere close to being perfect. As Raj Nair, the Chief Technology Officer of Ford Motor Company, said when he addressed an audience in Dearborn, working on autonomous technology has given him a fresh admiration for the “computer” in the head. Driving around in the Ford autonomous vehicle also revealed that mass-scale autonomous cars are actually not too far away. Indeed, given that this technology was born out of a United States Department of Defence grant, it is quite likely that the US potentially has some autonomous military vehicles out there.
But the thing is that the battlefield might actually be a safer place for autonomous vehicles than an Indian city. During the same Ford conference your writer attended, the company’s chairman Bill Ford said that in a survey, a large majority of Indians said they would be willing to be driven around in an autonomous vehicle. One reason the automobile executive gave for this result was because India was still a “young automotive market” where driving is not culturally ingrained. Yet, a month later, Renault boss Carlos Ghosn outrightly rejected the idea of autonomous cars making it to markets such as Brazil and India because while autonomous cars respected the rules, the people around them did not.
Therein lies a major risk for India, which is going to become the world’s third largest car market after the United States and China, overtaking Western Europe. As it is, despite some limited successes by Mahindra Reva, India remains woefully behind the curve when it comes to electric mobility as well. As market demand is driven mostly by price rather than environmental concerns, despite the pathetic air quality in most Indian urban agglomerations, there are no indigenously manufactured hybrid cars in India. Some ‘semi’ or ‘micro’ hybrids have entered the market, but those have little more than a bigger battery that gets charged during braking and provides electrical power to the car when it is standing at traffic signals saving fuel because the engine can switch off.
While 2017 may be the year when autonomous vehicles leave the shackles of small-scale tests and move to much larger pilot programmes, and possibly even limited production before the year is out, it is almost certain that electric and hybrid car sales are going to jump into the big league. Despite a programme that ostensibly encourages hybrid and electric car development, the Indian Government’s scheme to promote a group of local manufacturers to collaborate on a project is dead in the water as Maruti-Suzuki, the country’s largest carmaker, pulled out.
Can India afford to be left behind in either of these technological racesIJ Clearly, the Chinese have put their faith in both new technologies. Volvo, for example, is owned by Chinese carmaker Geely, and eventually there will be some technology transfer to enable small autonomous Chinese cars. While Tata Motors could look for synergies with Jaguar land Rover and the British car marque recently unveiled their ‘I-Pace’ electric SUV concept, there have been very few synergies between the companies over the past five years. There is a clear danger, that while India could become a hub for manufacturing small cars, it might only be making cars that are sold to secondary markets.
Maybe 2017 will be the year when the Indian Government will wake up and smell the coffee and realise the risk non-adoption of new technologies holds for Indian carmakers and manufacturing as a whole. Traffic congestion is killing our cities and modern technologies are giving some answers, but unless politicians have the will to get our unruly traffic in order, nothing much will change anytime soon.