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Are Autonomous Electric Vehicles the future of Personal Transport?

· 7 min read

From the archive: written before or outside the Architect Tomorrow newsletter, so it may be out of date.

The car industry is certainly in for some disruption if the event I attended this week is anything to go by! I was lucky enough to get a place at the Great Debate at Reading University - the topic “Are Autonomous Electric Vehicles the future of Personal Transport?” was highly insightful so I thought I would share some of the content with a wider audience.

Summary of topics covered:

Some of you may know that I have some experience in this area - I used to work for an Energy and Climate Change consultancy and one of my projects was for an online system to manage grants for Low Emission Vehicles for the Department for Transport in the UK. So it was fascinating to see what progress has been made in the low emissions and electric vehicles space - as this (and other environmental and sustainability topics have remained personal interests).

Impact on the Grid

Whilst charging lots of electric vehicles (EVs) overnight could cause spikes in demand - this could be managed by smart charging (wait until there is capacity available to charge without causing issues to the grid). There was also the argument that EVs could become energy storage and could feed electricity back into the grid when they don’t need to charge but are stationary - smoothing out spikes in demand or blips in supply related to renewables.

There are 5 levels of Driving from manual to fully automated:

There were concerns about the viability of level 3 - a driver could have to take over quickly if there is a problem. If you are in the middle of reading a book - how long would it take you to take over control?

Charging and range

Technologies such as wireless charging and in road power transfer loops were discussed. There was also an argument that if cars are shared rather than owned you don’t need to worry about range long term - you just need a vehicle that has the range to carry you on your current journey (and that Uber is the start of this kind of approach). Also you could just hop out of one vehicle and into another.

There was also the suggestion that if you could have automated wireless charging, cars could just drive off and park somewhere to get charged whilst they aren’t being used - as most vehicles spend a lot of time stationary. The bus in the picture above is a live trial - where the bus charges for 10 minutes at the end of each route via a wireless charger that the bus drives over.

Technology trials

I was interested to see that there is a trial about to start in Greenwich - the UK Smart Mobility Living Lab - exploring how automated vehicles will work in a real life setting.

I had no idea that live trials were going on in London (the pictures of the Heathrow style pod are near the O2 arena).

Morals / ethics & hacking concerns

Significant deaths occur worldwide from car accidents - claims of around 90% of these deaths are as a result of human error. Therefore if automated cars could save 90%+ of deaths on the road is will it become morally unacceptable to prevent this technology from being adopted? Whilst it wasn’t stated - is there an implication that manually driving a car in the future will be looked at much like drink driving or smoking? And of course further lives could be saved from removing the NOx and particulate pollution in vehicle tailpipes - particularly in heavily polluted cities.

How automated cars will deal with moral challenges - such as those as explored by the Moral Machine by MIT. Problems such as:

What action does an automated vehicle take? And who is at fault when deaths inevitably occur as a result of these decisions?

The speaker quoted “that just because designers hold the technical abilities to engineer autonomous cars does not give them the authority to impose particular moral decisions on all users”. And also that surveys have indicated that people expect different decisions from robots than from humans - whilst we might choose to swerve to minimise deaths we might expect a robot to make a different decision.

What was really interesting was the suggestion of that product liability laws could be relaxed and that global civil airline legislation and accident investigation style approaches could be used to look into accidents. This way blameless root cause analysis could be undertaken and corrections could be deployed to prevent re-occurrence. However where it could be proved that a company had been negligent in the creation of the code or other parts of the vehicle that controls the car then the manufacturer should be able to be sued - much like any other serious product defect.

When the topic of hacking and security was raised there was a quite lot of IT industry bashing; that the IT Industry had completely failed on security. Personally I felt this was somewhat unfair - lack of senior management awareness (or interest), cutting corners and non-functional requirements (which is often out of control of IT) are as much to blame for the current cyber challenges we face.

On the panel were Dr Ben Potter from the University of Reading, Denis Naberezhnykh and Nick Reed from TRL and Dr Blay Whitby from the University of Sussex.

My thoughts

Some of my concerns on this (most of which were covered off - not just through arguments but through video demonstrations of current technology) are:

Other reading I’ve come across on this topic - it seems Tesla has competition in the form of a start-up called NIO. Here is an interesting article from their CEO. And also the Intel acquisition of Mobileye that has been in the news.

Sorry this is such a long article - there was lots of food for thought! I hope you found this interesting too - one thing is for sure - it looks like the car industry and driving is going to face some serious disruption!

Originally published on LinkedIn. Comments and discussion live there.