TRANSIT LEAP Over the past couple of years, prognostication has ranged from
“no more personal automobile ownership,” to “no more public transit,” to “instant-and-just-right robo-cab within 2 minutes of a request,” to “a clean and perfect car for every garage.” It still does. And this frames green utopias of no accidents, no park- ing, no congestion, and info-cocooning on the way to work. Or perhaps dystopias of sprawl, transportation inequity, increased congestion, and robots chauffeuring parent-free five-year-olds to ballet. In the 7 March issue of Time maga-
household owners or a robocab fleet operators purchase SAE Level 5 autonomous vehicles. The first is that these vehicles have to be capable almost everywhere, almost always, and in almost all conditions – and they are programmed to safely avoid places and circumstances that cannot safely operate in. The latter con- dition can probably be met soon, but a prospective buyer might pause to wonder if the vehicle can take them, or their customers,
zine, this year, Xerox Executive David Cummins, thinking about all the immediate, incremental changes, comes off as indifferent. “Cars paral- lel park themselves now. Cars speed up and slow down on their own already. Cars have all kinds of accident-avoidance technology. And you are going to have more and more and more of that intro- duced over the next three to five years. By the time that first car rolls off the factory line without a steering wheel, it’s not going to be that much of a shock. The collective response may be more of a shrug. As in, ‘It’s about time.’” This illustrates a critical issue. Generally, the autonomous vehi-
cle has been described as enveloping us in a gradual accretion of better and better features and capabilities until soon (2020 is often mentioned) the user can get in, provide a destination and the car will handle the rest. Most often this is framed as just a series of problems to solve, improvements to add, and prices to fall. Then urban utopia can begin. There are only two routes to having a meaningful number of
Peak of Inflated Expectations
Positive Hype
Innovation Trigger
Negative Hype
Slope of Enlightenment Trough of Disillusionment © Gartner, Inc from 2010-2015 Time
Figure 1: Gartner’s Emerging Technology Hype Cycles from 2012-2015 indicate the rising hype for the Autonomous Vehicle peaking in 2015. Gartner Hype Cycle model and the positioning of the AV in its context from Gartner, Inc. 2010-2015
www.thinkinghighways.com 19 CONNECTED CANADA SUPPLEMENT Plateau of Productivity
“In 2010 self-driving hype was about Sebastian Thrun winning the DARPA challenge, retellings of the General Motors exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, and how many thousands of lives robotic vehicles could save since most accidents are caused by human error”
wherever and whenever they need to go. This would give rise to a new kind of buyer disorder we call access anxiety, akin to the market-limiting range anxiety that beset the electric car until now. The second route is to deploy Level 5 vehicles in constrained
environments making them suitable in transit applications and domain-constrained taxi applications, until the technology gets so good that access anxiety disappears. We describe this as Tran- sit Leap in the article that follows. Considering how long household and fleet buyers have
continued to avoid mass adoption of electric vehicles, it would seem that mass adoption of SAE Level 5 vehicles is still fairly far off. It is this sort of reasoning that has Jurgen Nieuwenhuijsen1 reason that the market will linger for decades over Level 2 and
Expectations
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