autonomous cars: breakthrough for electric vehicles ... · by fleets of driverless cars, ... car...

4

Click here to load reader

Upload: vudat

Post on 10-May-2018

214 views

Category:

Documents


2 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles ... · by fleets of driverless cars, ... car models for fully autonomous op- ... Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles

Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles

Dr. Alexander Hars

Inventivio GmbH

[email protected]

Rethinking mobilitySometimes the breakthrough for anew technology does not materializein one of those fields which receivemost attention and where everybodyexpects the solution. When theBritish needed a practical method fordetermining a ship's longitude in the18th century, they spent many decadesgazing at the stars, compiling lunartables and searching for astronomicmethods for determining longitude.But the breakthrough came with anentirely different technology: anextremely precise clock! Longitudecould now be determined quickly andeasily by comparing the clock'sGreenwich time with local time(which can be calculated by trackingthe rise of sun).

Today, electric mobility is in a simi-lar situation: Billions of dollars havebeen invested in improving the usualcomponents for electric vehicles:Battery technology - already quiteadvanced - is being perfected; charg-ing infrastructures are being de-ployed; production processes are op-timized and many of the legal and fi-nancial obstacles have been removed.Nevertheless, a real breakthrough isnot in sight. As armies of engineerswork on these problems, a muchsmaller group works on another tech-nology which at first glance is not re-lated to e-mobility: They develop au-tonomous vehicles that can drivethemselves on regular roads and don'trequire human input or modificationsto the road infrastructure.

Only a deeper analysis shows howimportant fully autonomous vehicleswill be for e-mobility: This technol-ogy changes fundamental aspects of

mobility and enables alternative mo-bility scenarios which are more com-patible with electric vehicles andwhere the biggest disadvantage ofelectric vehicles - their limited range- are much less of a concern. Rangematters only in the currentconfiguration of individual mobility

which is based on individually-owned cars. If mobility is providedby fleets of driverless cars, thenrange limitations are no longer aproblem because urban trips have anaverage trip length of less than 10km.They are much shorter than the rangelimits of current electric vehicles.Thus e-mobility may not need abreakthrough in vehicle range at all.It is sufficient to find new ways forreducing the range requirements forthe vehicles!

Electric vehicles become competitiveCurrently self-owned or leased carsare the cornerstone of individual mo-bility. Only a very small (even ifgrowing) share relies on car-sharingand rental cars. These alternative mo-bility solutions currently have a bigdisadvantage: Every customer facesthe problem of getting to the nextavailable car and where it should bedropped off at the end of the journey.Once cars are capable of drivingwithout any human intervention,however, this problem vanishes.Anybody will be able to request anautonomous vehicle by phone or mo-

bile app. Within minutes a car willarrive to pick up the passenger anddrop him off at the destination, wherethe car will then be ready to servicethe next customers.

Thus autonomous vehicles will ini-tially provide the conditions for a

breakthrough of car-sharing systemsand autonomous mobility serviceproviders. Compared to self-ownedcars, they can provide individual mo-bility with a comparable level of ser-vice and comfort, and - because ofbetter utilization and fleet optimiza-tion (see further below) - at signifi-cantly lower cost. In densely popu-lated areas autonomous cars willtherefore ensure that car-sharing sys-tems greatly increase their share ofindividual motorized traffic.

This establishes the conditions forthe breakthrough of electric vehicles.As part of fleets of autonomous ve-hicles, the advantages of electric ve-hicles can now be brought to bear:more robust and longer lasting mo-tors, lower drive train complexity,lower service costs and lower emis-sions. Their shorter range is nolonger a problem because fleet opera-tors can dispatch vehicles that pre-cisely match the mobility demands oftheir customers (local vs long-dis-tance trips, number of passengers,baggage size etc.). As the vast major-ity of trips are local and short-range,most trips can be serviced with elec-tric vehicles. A smaller number offossil fuel vehicles can be used for

Hars, A: Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles. Inventivio Innovation Briefs 2014-02, Nuremberg, 2014, www.inventivio.com/innovationbriefs/2014-02.

Thinking outside the box: Inventivio Innovation Briefs Issue 2014-02

"Instead of trying to increase the range of electricvehicles, just reduce their range requirements!"

Page 2: Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles ... · by fleets of driverless cars, ... car models for fully autonomous op- ... Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles

long-distance trips. Thus fleets arelikely to consist mostly of small elec-tric two-seaters; only a smaller partwill consist of larger vehicles or relyon fossil fuels. This potential for de-mand-based fleet optimization is anovelty that is only possible whencars can drive themselves to the cus-tomer. In this way total costs and re-source consumption related to mobil-ity can be reduced significantly.

Of course, fleets of autonomous carsdo not have to use electric vehicles.However, there are three good rea-sons besides those already discussedabove, why electric vehicles are par-ticularly well suited for the first fleetsof autonomous vehicles:

1) The first fleets with fully autono-mous vehicles will appear in nicheareas where it is easiest to controlrisk. Their speed and range will ini-tially be quite low. At first, they mayeven travel partially on their ownlanes and only later will increasetheir capabilities. An example is theproject in Milton Keynes where 100autonomous electric vehicles will beinstalled between 2015 and 2017 toferry people between train stationand city center. The requirements forthese vehicles with respect to range,maximum speed, number of seats etc.differ markedly from therequirements for traditional cars.Current car models therefore do notconstitute a good match for the firstautonomous car fleets - even if theyhad been adapted for fullyautonomous operation. At the sametime, car manufactures are probablynot eager to develop specialized low-volume models for use in earlyautonomous car fleets.

2) Current car models of the auto in-dustry are not suitable for fully au-tonomous operation - even those withadvanced driver assistance systems.They must be modified for pure fly-by-wire operation. All safety-criticalcomponents and systems have to beredundant. The modifications used incurrent prototypes and test vehiclesare not suitable for productive use. Itit is not at all trivial to adapt currentcar models for fully autonomous op-eration. Therefore the auto industryneeds to develop a new vehicle plat-form from the ground up for fully au-tonomous operation. This could be acomplex and time-consuming effortwhich will take longer than many

fleet operators will be prepared towait for.

3) The design and production of asmall number of fully autonomouselectric vehicles for local transport aspart of fully autonomous fleets ismuch faster and easier than the de-sign and production of classical carsadapted to the needs of fully autono-mous mobility service providers. Thecomplexity of electric vehicles islower; relying on electric propulsionsimplifies the redundant layout of allsafety critical components. As anexample, an electric motor has inher-ent safety benefits: It can be used forbraking; if the motors are integratedinto the wheels they could even playa role in emergency steering.

Whereas currently the lack of a na-tional charging infrastructure forelectric vehicles is often cited as amajor problem, this problem alsogoes away when fleets of driverlessurban cars are used. Because thesevehicles are only used in local trafficin a specific region, it is sufficient todeploy the charging infrastructure forexactly that region and the actualnumber of electric vehicles andactual mobility demand. Theinfrastructure can then grow in synchwith the fleet; it is no longernecessary to build up largeinfrastructures long before the firstelectric vehicles are placed intooperation.

Economic pressures accelerate the trans-formation Some innovations trigger intensiveeconomic and societal changes whichcan advance with astonishing speedif they significantly change the coststructure and efficiency of processes.The power loom and the railroads areonly two examples that highlight thepotential dynamics.

Market forces work especially well,when they are brought to bear on in-efficiently used capital-intensive re-sources. Such inefficiencies are verypronounced in transportation: Carsare among the largest single invest-ments of private households; buttheir average utilization rarely exceed6% - an incredible waste of capital.Therefore the potential for savings is

enormous. The average US house-holds spends more than 16% of itstotal expenses on car-based trans-portation.1

A study of the Earth Sciences Insti-tute at Columbia University has ana-lyzed the savings potentials associ-ated with fleets of self-driving cars indetail.2 They performed a simulationstudy based on the mobility patternsof Ann Arbor, a medium size city inMichigan which had about 285,000inhabitants and 200,000 cars in 2009.120,000 of these cars were used pri-marily for local traffic. Each day,528,000 local trips occur in Ann Ar-bor with an average trip length of9.3km and about 1.4 passengers pervehicle. The authors found that afleet of 18,000 autonomous vehicleswould be sufficient to satisfy the lo-cal mobility demand in Ann Arborand ensure that no passenger wouldhave to wait more than 60 secondsfor their car - even during rush hours.This translates into a reduction in thenumber of cars by almost a factor of7! Whereas a privately owned carwith a range of 16,000km per yearleads to costs of 0.46$/km, the fleetof driverless cars would reduce thecosts per passenger-km to 0.25$. Thestudy also examined the use of lightelectric vehicles instead of mid-sizesedans which are typical used for carrentals. With electric vehicles, thecosts would fall even further to 0,09$per passenger-km. This is a costreduction by a factor of five!

Although the study has not includedall potential savings (not includedwere savings related to parking,congestion, aggregation of mobilitydemand, freed-up time) it clearlyshows that this innovation has veryhigh savings potential and can lead toa large increase in spending powerfor the individual. Even if not allconsumers act rationally at all times,these calculations imply that a largenumber of households will chooseautonomous mobility services insteadof buying their own car in the future(we subsume the special case where ahousehold purchases their ownautonomous car but then rents it outto others as another variation of thefleet model). Only a smaller numberof households will value the prestigeof their own car or their love towardsa car high enough to continue owninga car.

Hars, A: Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles. Inventivio Innovation Briefs 2014-02, Nuremberg, 2014, www.inventivio.com/innovationbriefs/2014-02.

- 2 -

Page 3: Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles ... · by fleets of driverless cars, ... car models for fully autonomous op- ... Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles

Another factor which will acceleratethe growth of fully autonomous mo-bility providers is that even house-holds which own a car will becomecustomers of autonomous mobilityservices because they need theirservices in some situations: when amember of the family needs to bepicked up somewhere, when multiplemembers of the household need todrive to different locations but thehousehold does not have as manycars, when flying to other cities, etc.More and more people will then findthat they can get around quite wellwithout their own car. The number ofsituations in life where owning a caris almost a necessity will dwindle.Today there are many people forwhom their own car is the only real-istic way for getting to work. Fleetsof driverless cars will greatly reducesuch cases and therefore reduced theperceived need to purchase a car.

Paths toward new mobilityThe transformation of mobilitycaused by fully autonomous cars willrequire some time. Despite the largeadvances of the last 30 years and theimpressive prototypes which havebeen demonstrated by car manufac-tures (Daimler, Audi, Nissan), re-search institutes, Google and others,significant hurdles remain until fullyautonomous cars will be able to driveon all roads without human interven-tion.

Currently there are two different vi-sions of the path towards full auton-omy. The conventional vision as-sumes that autonomous technologywill gradually evolve towards moreand more advanced driver assistancesystems until finally reaching full au-tonomy. It uses the typical diffusionprocess of automotive innovations(such as airbag and anti-lock brak-ing) as a reference and assumes thatthe technology will slowly trickledown from the premium models tothe middle-class models until it be-comes standard for all new cars.However, there are significant hur-dles - including regulatory problems- on this path. Several generations ofmodels with ever more advanceddriver assistance systems, with com-plete fly-by-wire and redundant lay-out of all safety-critical systems will

be needed until models with full au-tonomy will appear on the market. Ifwe follow this line of reasoning, thenit may be well after 2030 that suchcars are available in larger numbersand a decade or two more until fullyautonomous technology is availablein most cars. In addition, electric ve-hicles do not feature on this path, be-cause it is based on personally-owned vehicles where range limita-

tions of electric vehicles will con-tinue to be a major problem.

However, there is a second path to-ward full autonomy which does notadhere to the standard car industrymodel of technology diffusion. In-stead of trying to gradually integratethe technology into consumer cars,this path seeks to capitalize on the in-herent advantages of full autonomyand targets those niches where fullautonomy has the largest impact andcan be implemented with a minimumof risk. We have seen above that fullautonomy can greatly reducemobility costs by providing mobilityas a service using fleets of self-driving cars. A natural path towardsfull autonomy therefore starts withsmall, short range and most likelyelectric vehicles that provide localmobility at low speeds and inincreasingly less controlledenvironments. The challenge for thepioneers is to find those settingswhich are best suited for limited, lowspeed operations of autonomousvehicles and which provide the bestenvironment for their growth.

There is no shortage in candidates.Several systems with very low auton-omy are already in operation: The'UltraPods' at Heathrow Airport areelectric autonomous four-seaterswhich ferry passengers between Ter-minal 5 and a parking lot. They runon separate lanes and use transponderchips embedded every few meters inthe lanes for determining their posi-tion accurately. They also rely on in-ternal lane maps for navigation. Asimilar approach has been adopted inthe Netherlands where 6 autonomouselectric buses carry people along astretch of about 2km. A next step forsuch systems is to leave the confines

of separate lanes at least in somecases and merge with regular traffic.Such an approach is planned for Mil-ton Keynes, a British city, where 100electric autonomous vehicles will beinstalled between 2015 and 2017 totransport people between the trainstation and the city center at lowspeed. Initially these vehicles willrun on dedicated lanes (taken fromcurrent sidewalks); by 2017 they will

expand their range and will be able toshare lanes with pedestrians (thereare currently no plans to put thesecars onto the streets). This project hasthe advantage of minimizing riskwhile at the same time advancing theenvelope of autonomous vehicles: al-gorithms will be perfected; ap-proaches for the operational manage-ment of distributed fleets of self-driv-ing vehicles will be developed; cus-tomer experience, preferences andservice valuation will be understoodbetter, a vehicular platform and tech-nology architecture will be devel-oped.

There are many areas where autono-mous electric vehicles with even thislimited capability are useful and canbecome economically viable veryquickly. Similar approaches can beimplemented in many cities whereelectric cars or buses may beinstalled for specific routes. Initiallysome infrastructure measures (suchas separate lanes, fences which keeppedestrians away from the street,external sensors at critical locations)may be adopted; as experience andintelligence of the vehicle increases,these infrastructure measures canbecome obsolete.

Another variant of this approachwould be if car makers or Google de-cided to implement their autonomoustechnology in a fleet of electric cityvehicles that would operate on care-fully selected routes in a suitable city.There are many ways in which thiscould unfold but there is no shortageof possible approaches for starting ona growth path for such fleets of au-tonomous electric vehicles. As theMilton Keynes Project shows, this ispossible even with limited budgets.

Hars, A: Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles. Inventivio Innovation Briefs 2014-02, Nuremberg, 2014, www.inventivio.com/innovationbriefs/2014-02.

- 3 -

"Electric low-speed, short-range autonomous vehicles are the most viable path to autonomous mobility."

Page 4: Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles ... · by fleets of driverless cars, ... car models for fully autonomous op- ... Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles

Another advantage of this secondpath is a legal issue: A fleet of self-driving cars can be regarded as an in-telligent transport system where thevehicles run on exactly specifiedpaths. For such systems the legallimitations of the Vienna Conventionon traffic which requires that everyvehicle must be controlled by adriver at all times do not apply. Thiseliminates key legal problems whichprobably exist in countries whichhave ratified the convention (not rati-fied by: US, UK, Spain, China, Sin-gapore and others). Even if the ques-tion has not been finally clarified, itis clear that countries have a consid-erable margin of interpretation whichallows the implementation of fleetsof driverless vehicles already today.

Overall, this alternative path to au-tonomous technology based on fleetsof electric vehicles used for niche ap-plications in controlled settings forurban local mobility is much morerealistic and faster to implement thanthe vision of a universal fully autono-mous car which can be used on allroads by anybody.

ConclusionWe are at the start of a developmentwhich could very quickly become anavalanche. Two years ago autono-mous vehicles were widely regardedas utopian; by now it is clear that it isjust a question of a few years untilthese vehicles appear on our roads.Right now, the view is still predomi-nant that autonomous technology willdo little to change the nature of carsand the nature of mobility. But acloser look reveals that the technol-ogy will lead to fundamental trans-formation from individually ownedcars to mobility as a service and frommostly fossil fuels to electricvehicles. These fundamental changeshold many opportunities. Now is thetime to take them...

About the authorDr. habil Alexander Hars is founderand managing director of InventivioGmbH, a software and consultingcompany focused on paradigm-changing technologies. He has pub-lished extensively on the impacts,challenges and opportunities of au-tonomous vehicle technology. Beforefounding Inventivio, he was a profes-sor of information systems in Ger-many and at the University of South-ern California (Los Angeles).

Related articlesSupervising autonomous cars on autopilot: A hazardous ideaA. Hars, 2013 (PDF)

As autonomous vehicle technologymatures, legislators in several USstates, countries and the United Na-tions are debating changes to the le-gal framework. Unfortunately one ofthe core ideas of these legal efforts isuntenable and has the potential tocripple the technology's progress. Weshow that the idea that drivers shouldsupervise autonomous vehicles isbased on false premises and willgreatly limit and delay adoption.Given the enormous loss of life intraffic (more than one million per-sons per year world wide) and thesafety potential of the technology,any delay will incur large humancosts.

Autonomous cars - The next revolution looms A.Hars, 2010 (PDF)

If only technical issues mattered,driverless vehicles would soon becommon place. However, progresswill be limited as long as our soci-eties continue to ignore the huge so-

cial, economic and environmentalbenefits of this technology.

In this paper, we examine how auto-mated vehicles will fundamentallychange our transportation infrastruc-ture and provide the opportunity tomake our societies better - less de-pendent on oil, less-resource con-suming, with less carnage on theroads and with more freedom for theold, young and underprivileged.

Get these and more articles at:http://www.inventivio.com/publications.html

1 US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2013): Consumer Expenditure Survey 2012, Table 1501. url

2 Burns, L.D.; Jordan, C.W. and Scarborough, B.A. (2013): Transforming personal mobility. Earth Institute. url

Hars, A: Autonomous cars: Breakthrough for electric vehicles. Inventivio Innovation Briefs 2014-02, Nuremberg, 2014, www.inventivio.com/innovationbriefs/2014-02.

- 4 -

Version: 1.2 (2013-03-10)