Google and Apple will become leading players in the automotive market — and car bosses are running scared.
That was the prediction of one leading analyst after chief executives at this week’s Geneva Motor Show, which saw the European unveiling of the Audi R8 e-tron, admitted they feared the impact of the US West Coast technology giants on their patch who have grabbed the headlines in the development of driverless cars.
“The car industry is very alive to and very aware of the impact of Google and Apple,” said one of London’s leading car consultants, who asked not to be named because of his closeness to conventional car manufacturers.
“I absolutely do believe that they [Google and Apple] are here to stay as a [car] manufacturer,” the analyst continued. “They will need other automotive manufacturers, but after they build up their own supply chains they can go their own way.”
Google has already begun manufacturing electric driverless test cars in a venture supported by car-parts suppliers such as Bosch, LG Electronics and Continental, the tyre-maker.
Apple has hired hundreds of engineers and is believed to be on the verge of unveiling its autonomous car.
In a world of autonomous, so-called driverless vehicles, the size or power of car engines will be meaningless it is reckoned because, if such cars are to drive on the road together, their interaction will have to be regulated.
In such a world, the gadgetry and in-car technology becomes paramount — as for younger drivers so does the badge or brand. It is on both those counts that Google and Apple as carmakers are expected to score highly.
Dave Leggett, a leading industry blogger at just-auto.com, said he believed Google and Apple were more likely to team up with existing car groups in brand partnerships much like Swatch, the Swiss watchmaker, did with Mercedes Benz to produce a car, which eventually became the Smart car.
“They have vast R&D resources, there’s a huge opportunity ahead and [cars are] a part of our everyday life that a brand like Apple can’t ignore,” said Mr Leggett .“It’s a strategically important question for the company’s long-term growth.”
The car giants in Japan and Germany are already far advanced in developing their autonomous vehicles to the point where hidden sensors for cruise control, automatic braking, lane alerts and parking assistance are already standard in most premium-priced vehicles.
Toyota has been trialling autonomous cars on the Tokyo expressway for at least two years. Driverless cars are on the streets of Britain in trials in London, Bristol, Milton Keynes and Coventry.
While many in the industry do not believe autonomous cars will go mainstream for at least ten years, Toyota has privately told The Times that it expects to have a fully functional driverless fleet ready for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.
The cross-industry name-calling has already begun with Sergio Marchionne, head of the Fiat and Chrysler empire, labelling Google and Apple as “disruptive interlopers”.
At Geneva, Mr Marchionne said the motor industry would be foolish to ignore the tech giants. “They are incredibly serious,” he said. “What’s more, I think their interest is exactly what this industry needed. We need a disruptive interloper to shake things up.”
The big German companies are less cowed. “There is tremendous opportunity from the convergence of the west coast technology and the auto industry with its huge technology depth,” said Dieter Zetsche, chairman of MercedesBenz. “We are not afraid. We are confident about our own strength.”
English Trials of Self Drive Cars
(Guardian 1 Jan 2015)
The future of motoring will accelerate into view this year in Bristol, Coventry, Milton Keynes and the London borough of Greenwich.
Driverless cars are to be tested in all those locations in trials that will put the UK at the forefront of automated vehicle technology.
Government funding of £19m will allow three separate trials to take place: one in Bristol, one in Greenwich and one split between Coventry and Milton Keynes. The trials, lasting from 18 to 36 months, will test different aspects of self-driving technology. All will take place away from public roads, though each is aimed at making automated vehicles on Britain’s roads a reality.
The trials will use semi-autonomous cars that can drive themselves for periods of the time with a human driver behind the wheel, as well as lightweight self-driving pods designed for low-speed shuttle services. The three projects will be linked by an external monitor who will coordinate all the data.
“We’re looking to start our first trial with automated shuttles with members of the public in May,” said Dr Nick Reed from the Transport Research Lab (TRL), leader of the consortium running the Greenwich trials.
He added: “You’ve got the cream of UK transport organisations distilled into these three projects and each with its own twist on what should be tested.”
The Greenwich trials – named the Gateway project – will involve self-driving shuttles being tested on closed roads and in simulation facilities. The project is led by the TRL with contributions from the Royal College of Art, Imperial College London and the University of Greenwich along with General Motors, the AA and RAC.
“These shuttles are a relatively mature technology, so our trials will be more about how to manage participants and the vehicles, to get us towards these vehicles being a real proposition for public roads,” Reed said.
Gateway will also test cars that can drop off passengers then park themselves. The vehicles will then return on command, similar to concepts shown off by Audi and other carmakers.
The Bristol trials – named the Venturer project – will involve tests investigating legal and insurance issues, as well as public reaction to self-driving cars.
The Venturer project will be led by project management group Atkins Highways & Transportation. Also involved will be the Bristol robotics lab at the University of Bristol and insurance company Axa.
“This programme will help keep the UK at the forefront of this transformational technology, helping to deepen our understanding of the impact on road users and wider society and open up new opportunities for our economy and society,” said Lee Woodcock of Atkins.
The trials in Milton Keynes and Coventry will be run by a consortium named UK Autodrive. Arup is to lead this project with Jaguar Land Rover and Ford contributing. The project will focus on car-to-car and car-to-road communication and the infrastructure required.
“Our plan with the practical demonstration phases is to start testing with single vehicles on closed roads, and to build up to a point where all road users, as well as legislators, the police and insurance companies, are confident about how driverless pods and fully and partially autonomous cars can operate safely on UK roads,” said Tim Armitage, UK Autodrive project director for Arup.
The government has made clear its support of the automated vehicle industry. “The UK is a world leader in the development of driverless technology,” said business secretary Vince Cable. “This not only puts us at the forefront of this transformational technology but also opens up new opportunities for our economy and society.”
Cable said the Department for Transport (DfT) would look at the legislation needed to conduct trials on public roads, like those taking place in California and Nevada by Google and others.
Funding for driverless car development was announced last July, when Cable promised to invest £10m. A further £9m in funding was announced in George Osborne’s autumn statement.
Transport minister Claire Perry said at the time of Cable’s announcement: “Driverless cars have huge potential to transform the UK’s transport network – they could improve safety, reduce congestion and lower emissions, particularly CO2. We’re determined to ensure driverless cars can fulfil this potential which is why we’re actively reviewing regulatory obstacles to create the right framework for trialling these vehicles on UK roads.”
But others have warned of the need for caution. “Automated electric vehicles have the potential to change driving patterns because drivers won’t have to slavishly devote their time to controlling a vehicle,” said Dr Gregory Offer from the department of mechanical engineering at Imperial College London. “However, unless governments plan effectively, the potential positive impact of automated vehicles could turn into a negative.”
Driverless Cars Are Nearly Ready For Prime Time
(London Times 21 Feb 2015)
It’s rush hour at junction 42 on the M1 on a spring morning in 2025. The M1 and the M62 are both busy with commuter vehicles, most of them driverless and hybrid. Lulled by the soft hum of so many electric motors, a rabbit darts out into the slow lane from behind a bush. Does it stop all traffic, get squashed or cause the closest car to swerve neatly and continue on its way?
The answer needs to be the swerve. The future of driverless cars, which is increasingly seen as the future of the automotive industry, depends on their ability to think like humans and break rules when necessary. The paradox of a potentially world-changing technology is that if these cars can only think like robots and obey rules all the time, they may be doomed.
Recent demonstrations at the Detroit Auto Show and the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science have shown that the hardware for driverless cars is virtually ready for production. Google, Mercedes and at least six other manufacturers are testing advanced prototypes with all the sensors needed to make drivers redundant in normal conditions. It is the software needed to enable “autonomous” cars to respond flexibly to driving’s myriad emergencies that is still a work in progress.
Stopping too abruptly for a hedgehog could save the hedgehog but cause a pile-up. Taking too much care to pass a cyclist could cause an unnecessary traffic jam. As Professor Chris Gerdes of Stanford University tells The Times today, driverless cards need to think philosophically to become an everyday reality. This is a challenge but also a business opportunity. Vince Cable, the business secretary, suggested this month that government-funded research projects have positioned the British to be “world leaders” in a driverless car industry that could be worth £900 billion by 2025. The claim would be laughable if it referred only to hardware, where US, German and Japanese firms enjoy a daunting lead. In the business of teaching cars to mimic intuitive human thinking, there is still a chance to make inroads on the competition.
It is not hard to make a fool — or a murderer — of a fast-moving robot. In the so-called trolley test a runaway railway coach (or driverless car) is about to kill five people standing in its way unless it is re-routed to a siding (or slip road) where only one person is standing. A robot might choose the latter, but a bystander will still die unless it has been pre-programmed with other “human” options such as driving off the road.
Such programming is possible, but it takes millions of lines of code and there are no shortcuts. Despite this, a gradual shift towards driverless cars is inevitable. For all their binary thinking, they will be safer. Ninety per cent of road accidents are caused by driver error, and driverless cars do not drink, doze off or text behind the wheel. In conjunction with ride-sharing apps already used on smartphones they offer long-term cost savings for consumers, and a revolution in convenience.
Driverless is a particular boon for baby-boomers now entering old age, who might otherwise have to give up the freedom of having their own car. It is, finally, a suitable challenge for the world’s biggest companies. One reason why Google, currently worth six times more than General Motors, is leading the competition is its sheer size and appetite for new product lines. Britain’s challenge is to hitch a ride.
Huge Benefits From Self-Drive Cars
(London Times 30 Mar 2015)
By the time HS2 is fully operational in 2033, more than a quarter of all cars on our roads will be fully autonomous, according to a forecast by the consultants KPMG. That may well make fast trains less urgent, and decongested motorways more so. The economic case for HS2 is fragile enough before taking future driverless cars into account.
Last week on the very same day that a House of Lords committee savaged the economic case for the HS2 railway — costing £50 billion with contingency — another report by KPMG, for the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, estimated the potential benefits to Britain of driverless cars at £51 billion. Per year.
The two are connected.
The Lords report, chaired by Lord Hollick, urged the government to make incremental improvements to the existing rail network instead, plus better links between cities in the north. It said it had not seen evidence that the capacity constraints on the west coast line warrant building a line to take trains that would go faster — at 250 mph — than the fastest trains in China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and America.
The report also said the cost-benefit analysis for HS2, which came out with a marginal result, relied on evidence that was “out of date and unconvincing”, depending for example for its valuation of non-work travel-time savings on a study done in 1994. About four fifths of the putative benefits of HS2 are derived from the value placed on work and non-work travel time — yet these do not even take into account the fact that time on a train can be used productively, especially so in the age of the mobile and wi-fi.
Pretty well the first thought in my head when I decide to take the train for a journey of 100 miles or so, rather than drive, is that I can use the journey time productively: one of the biggest attractions of a train is the fact that you don’t have to drive it. If you didn’t have to drive a car, so a road journey could be productive (and not spent listening to, say, Test Match Special), the attraction of the train is less; the car, after all, can start and end at your front door. In effect, the driverless revolution could bring the chauffeur-driven experience to the many.
No doubt we would love to have both driverless cars and faster trains, as well as HS3 for the north, and a bunch of new airport runways, and lots of improvements to the road network too. But we cannot afford everything. (Incidentally, as the Lords report says, the benefits of HS2 will be received mostly by businessmen, so why is the government paying for it, not business?) HS3 will cost more per mile than HS2, so a combination of the two high-speed rail lines is quite unaffordable. We have to prioritise.
In Britain, roads are just as full as trains. But there is no innovation on the horizon likely to transform the demand for rail travel as much as the driverless revolution could transform the demand for road space.
In cities, driverless cars could cut congestion. A recent simulation at the University of Texas of a city with driverless cars prowling for business found that passengers need wait an average of 18 seconds for a driverless vehicle to show up and that each shared autonomous vehicle could replace 11 conventional cars. A study by Columbia University concluded that a driverless vehicle fleet could cut the cost of transport by 80 per cent compared with a personally owned vehicle driven 10,000 miles a year — not counting the reduction in parking costs and the value of time not spent at the wheel.
However, I suspect that on routes between cities, the advent of driverless cars could increase congestion. When taking an autonomous car allows you to work, motorway traffic is almost bound to increase. An older person, for example, currently deterred by both the difficulty of driving on the M1 through the rain, and the effort of getting to a station and walking to a train, might today decide to stay at home.
If in 2030 she can be collected from home and driven direct to her destination 100 miles away while reading or snoozing, then she is a bit more likely to make the trip. Since motorways are even more congested than railways already, that is surely where the problem will lie. We should be planning now for more lanes on motorways in 2030.
Driverlessness will arrive in stages. Although Google’s and other driverless vehicles have clocked up impressive trial journeys without problems, and for all the experiments going on in Coventry, Greenwich, Milton Keynes and Bristol with fully autonomous vehicles right now, I don’t expect to be able to buy a fully driverless car for about 15 years.
But already half of all cars are connected: I have an app that lets me check where I left my car and how much is in its tank. It tells me when I am wandering out of a lane and warns me of congestion. It tells the garage if I have a fault. Some cars already park themselves, though the “valet” system where you leave the car at the entrance to a multi-storey, tell it to find a space and pay is some years off.
Some cars already have adaptive cruise control, slowing down automatically if they get too close to the car in front. Soon cars will have “traffic jam assist” so they can take over in stop-start traffic at slow speeds. By 2020, KPMG reckons, some cars will have autopilot on motorways, but the driver will have to be ready to resume control. By 2025 there should be lightweight, driverless two -person taxis patrolling cities. Overtaking or navigating rural lanes may take a long time to master, as will swerving for cats. By 2030 perhaps we can expect fully autonomous cars that can go anywhere.
They will never be flawless, but nor are drivers. Insurance needs sorting out. Yet KPMG reckons that the driverless revolution may save up to 2,500 lives by 2030, and points out that Britain has a technological head start in all the relevant industries, so there is every reason to think we can become a centre of excellence in connected and autonomous driving, and get 320,000 jobs out of it.
Alongside this kind of stuff, I just cannot help feeling that a very fast train, built at glacial speed (half a mile a week) over many years of consultation, review and challenge as it punches through Nimbyland, and at up to nine times the cost per mile of French high-speed rail, feels like a white elephant waiting to happen.
Self-Drive Cars And 1815 Law
(London Times 23 May 2015)
Government lawyers are seeking to redraft the Highway Act 1835 to allow revolutionary “pods” to be tested on pavements in southeast England. The two-seaters will undergo a three-year trial — part-funded by the taxpayer — to put Britain at the forefront of the development of driverless technology.
Under the plans, the vehicles are supposed to be used on paths rather than roads, providing passengers with low speed transportation to shops, hospitals and workplaces. It is one of a series of large trials of driverless technology starting across Britain next month.
However, the 1835 legislation, passed in the year that Charles Darwin landed on the Galapagos islands, is proving a stumbling block. The law sought to protect footpaths from road traffic, banning people from riding horse-drawn carriages and driving a “horse, ass, sheep, mule, swine or cattle”.
In the 21st century, the legislation can be used to bar cyclists from riding on footpaths and motorists from mounting the kerb when parking a car.
Tim Armitage, project director of the £19 million UK Autodrive project, a consortium leading the development of driverless cars, said that the rules acted as a legal bar on pavement-mounted technology.
Forty two-seat pods designed to travel at up to 15mph on footpaths will be developed by engineers and scientists. Mr Armitage said they would provide a “completely new and revolutionary, inner-urban transport system”, carrying people across town centres. The pods are expected to be on the footpaths of Milton Keynes within the year.
Mr Armitage said: “We couldn’t do that now because the legislation wouldn’t let us. You’re not allowed to drive on pavements, according to the 1835 act. So there is going to have to be some work done to either redesignate the surfaces we want to operate these vehicles on or to change that primary legislation that goes back centuries.”
Lawyers from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Transport are reviewing legal obstacles to the trial of driverless cars. Mobility scooters can travel on paths but only at 4mph. The pods, one of a series of vehicles being tested by UK Autodrive, will be able to travel at 15mph, although most will travel no faster than 10mph.
Mr Armitage, associate director of the engineering group Arup, which is involved in the trials, said he was confident that the legal obstacle would be overcome, adding: “An amendment to the legislation would have to be national. We would need to define the vehicles which can use the pavement.”
His comments were made before a speech next month to the Imagine Festival, staged by the governmentbacked Transport Systems Catapult centre.
Mr Armitage said that the pods were “not designed to work on the road” but they would be safe on pavements. They would use only a “reasonably sized” paved area that was clearly marked.
“It might operate at the upper end of its speed and once it detects something else in its way it will start to slow down,” he said. “It will adjust its speed according to the conditions. If it finds itself in the middle of a busy pavement, with people moving in lots of directions, it will slow its speed accordingly.