Can Autonomous Cars Redefine our Society


The automobile was one of the fundamental innovations of the twentieth century, and it revolutionized the development of cities. A vast infrastructure and ecosystem was built around it, to help fuel it, store it, and maintain it. Roads and highways changed the design of cities, and led to development of suburbs and exurbs, where people could live far away from their places of work and recreation.
It also had negative consequences, leading to decay in some urban cores in America, as newer homes, jobs and other infrastructure moved to the suburbs. In some cities, highways divided neighborhoods, creating economic divides as development flourished on one side over the other.

These days the promise of the autonomous automobile has spurred new thinking in urban planning, mobility, and infrastructure development. Are we thinking about the potential impact of this technology on our future infrastructure needs? Given the long term planning time frames and high cost of infrastructure today, are we planning for the future based on the technology of yesterday or tomorrow?




















However, less cars on the road are not good news to auto manufacturers. Today’s automobile business is geared around an ownership model, and the financial arms of every carmaker have built incentives to get people to trade in for a new car every 3-5 years. Naturally not everyone does so, and people are keeping their cars much longer than ever before, in part because of increased reliability and less model design changeover than in the past.
But the rapid ascent of the Uber and Lyft car-on-demand model, and urban based car sharing services like Zipcar and Daimler’s Car2Go have brought in new concepts of mobility. The automakers are starting to think of themselves as mobility companies and are making investments in these areas, as witnessed by GM’s $500 million investment in Lyft announced at CES in January.

Volvo has announced a goal to reduce accident deaths to zero in their automobiles by 2020 through better safety design and active and passive technology. Further, if its autonomous driving systems fail, it will assume responsibility. It’s an interesting and bold move, as lawsuits related to safety issues can bring a company to the verge of bankruptcy. In the 1980s, the unintended acceleration lawsuits almost drove Audi out the U.S. market, and it took years for the brand to recover. More recently, Toyota and GM have had highly publicized multibillion-dollar settlements around safety related equipment failures.

Like any connected device, cars generate lots of data. They have been doing so for a long time, and much of that data has been available through the OBD-II port built into cars since 1996. The port has long been used for vehicle diagnostics and repair purposes, and it can be thought of as the USB port standard for automobiles.
What has become interesting is that new IoT devices can connect to that port and connect vehicle data to the Internet. This means there are opportunities for connected car applications without the latest connected car technology and not necessarily desirable ones. Some current applications include dongles from Progressive and Liberty Mutual Insurance companies, where if you opt in you can share car data that monitors driving habits how fast you accelerate, how hard you brake, how many miles driven, etc. The incentive for this Big Brother-esque app is lower rates for good driving habits.






















In the context of smart cities, connected cars can tap into better information as they navigate around a city such as real-time traffic information, parking availability and pricing, street closings, charging station locations, and more. Devices like Automatic may bridge the gap to make dumb cars smarter, but ultimately the direction is that all cars will be connected platforms in the future. That said, it’s not clear that the automaker’s systems, Apple, or Google will become the in-car standard. History says that with any big technology platform shift, new winners often emerge.

Getting to connected and autonomous car and smarter city utopia will not be easy. We will still be driving our own cars for years, and may have to share the road with autonomous ones. There will be significant challenges with the aging American infrastructure, and congestion will get worse before it gets better. But we should remember that we can’t always predict the future, and that technology has a way of driving progress in ways we don’t anticipate.
Along that line, let’s humorously recall that at the turn of the century the horse manure problem was a significant issue on major urban cities like New York and London. Horse manure was that era’s pollution problem from ever increasing horse and buggy traffic. It’s always dangerous to extrapolate what we know today too far out into the future.

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