Technology Revolution The technology revolution is changing everything.
Like other industries, the rapidly declining cost of digital technologies will have a profound impact on school bus transportation. One example is the cost of sensors. I was at the launch of a 300 km/hour, or 186 mph, high- speed train in Rome, Italy. Trenitalia, Italy’s rail company, installed 1,000 sensors that are Wi-Fi enabled on the new train. These sense when a part is about to wear out or break and send an alert that says, “Hey, replace me.” The intelligence in the system decides whether the part needs to be replaced immediately (if it’s the brakes or some other critical part) or whether it isn’t urgent and can be scheduled. It’s called predictive maintenance, and it’s targeted to
save 10 percent of Trenitalia’s $2 billion a year mainte- nance budget. The initiative relies on internet of things (IoT) sensors.
Why is This Important? A similar approach to equip school buses with IoT
sensors, and this is already occurring, would reduce breakdowns and down time, increase efficiency and result in better scheduling of maintenance. This is just one example of a technology that is po-
sitioned on a declining cost curve that can have a bottom-line benefit for an organization, while reducing risk and increasing customer satisfaction. That is a certain win-win-win. Exponentially improving price performance of a num- 707
22% 1,160 21% 899 8% 650
ber of different technologies is going to transform the student transportation market. Three areas to discuss are digitization, automation and electrification. 288
11% 35% 577 373 23% 26%
Exponential Technology Improvements Many people have heard of Moore’s Law, but most 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
214 176 Average Sensor Cost Forecast
$1.40 $1.20
$1.00 $0.80 $0.60 $0.40
$0.20 $0.00
2004 2006 2008 Source: Business Insider 32 School Transportation News • SEPTEMBER 2019 90% Buses 2010 2012 2014 2016E 2018E 2020E $1.30 $1.11 $0.95 $0.82 $0.70 $0.60 $0.51 $0.44 $0.38 18%
people don’t understand how powerful exponen- tial change is over time. Moore’s Law was coined by Gordon Moore at Intel in 1965, when he noted that the number of transistors on a computer chip will double every 18 to 24 months while staying at the same price point. In 1970, an Intel chip had 2,000 transistors. To- day, computer chips have as many as 23.4 billion. This has had a profound impact on computing cost.
A gigaflop is a measure of compute speed—performing a billion transactions in a single second. In 1961, a giga- flop cost $153 billion on mainframes. In 2018, a gigaflop cost just two cents (the one on your smartphone). Technologies that are exponentially improving
not only get cheaper and faster, they also get small- er, better and lighter. Many of the technologies that are improving safety for school buses and student transportation are following exponential price perfor- mance improvements.
Google’s Self-Driving Car Google launched its first self-driving car in 2008.
At the time, the technology cost $200,000. So, Detroit auto executives asked themselves, “Who is going to spend an extra $200,000 on autonomous features on top of the purchase price of the car?” They dismissed Google’s efforts. But these executives didn’t under- stand Moore’s Law and the power of exponentially improving technology. Just two years later, the technology cost $100,000.
At that time, the auto executives still felt justified in leaving the field completely to Google. One year later, the technology was $50,000. Today,
it’s fallen to $1,000. And now, all of the car companies are scrambling to buy autonomous driving technol- ogy companies. They are only now beginning the eight-year development process to incorporate these new features into their cars. Do you see a problem here? If the world is changing faster than our organi- zations can adapt, disaster is imminent. One component of autonomous vehicle technolo- gy is the LIDAR, which is like radar, but it uses lasers to detect objects and distances. In 2012, LIDAR cost $75,000. By 2018, it fell to only $40 and in 2020, it will be just $10. At that point, it will dematerialize to the size of this tiny purple strip on a dime, which will be embedded into your new $1,000 smartphone for free. And then you will have two navigation systems—one in your car and one as a backup on your smartphone. If you have trouble believing this, consider that
10 years ago, you might have bought a $750 Garmin GPS. But today, your smartphone already has GPS embedded in it for free. It is used in conjunction with cellphone towers and Wi-Fi, so it allows you to use Google maps or the Waze app to navigate traffic and get home earlier.
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