BUSINESS MOTORING
committing investment to the innovation of ultra-low-emission vehicles as part of its Industrial Strategy white paper, while at the same time backing the roll-out of the battery charging infrastructure,” McCarthy says. “A number of oil majors and utility companies have also started making big moves into charging networks. Shell, BP and Centrica have all made multi-million- pound acquisitions of fi rms working in this area over the past couple of years.”
FURTHER DOWN THE ROAD Self-driving cars and delivery drones are expected to become a familiar sight by 2030. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are likely to enter the mainstream fi rst. They will “offer genuine alternatives for some fl eet users”, according to Phatak, who adds: “These vehicles will interact increasingly with their operating environment. This is what we mean when we talk about ‘smart vehicles operating in a smart world’.” Drone tech is already being used as a safe means of inspecting the integrity of structures in inhospitable environments. (See “Ask the execs”, September/October 2018, to read about the oil-rig inspection business founded by IoD 99 member
Kieran Hope). But drones promise a huge effi ciency gain over the next few years for the logistics sector in particular. DHL has been testing its Parcelcopter, for instance, while Amazon has been developing its autonomous Prime Air service. Cheesewright notes that ground-based drones are “fast becoming a realistic option
Case study: Aptiv
AV technology developer Aptiv began operating a fleet of 35 self-driving BMW taxis in Las Vegas in May 2018. By the end of the year, these vehicles had completed more than 25,000 paid-for journeys, prompting observers to predict that AVs will transform personal travel within two decades. Last December Aptiv opened a state-of-the-art R&D centre in Las Vegas. Karl Iagnemma, the firm’s president of autonomous mobility says: “Having logged more than one million miles globally, we have proved our ability to launch, build and scale up a successful autonomous mobility solution. We’re proud to be setting the stage for future deployments, as we expand to serve more passengers in more cities around the world.”
for deliveries in metropolitan areas”. But he adds that, while they promise to cut road congestion and pollution, they’re also likely to cause big job losses in the sector. “Forget the shutdown at Gatwick before Christmas last year – the drone economy is still coming,” predicts Dan Lewis, chief executive of Future Energy Strategies, a consultancy and research provider. “In the next decade, many businesses will possess or use a small fl eet of drones, just like they do with cars today. The benefi ts are simply too great to pass up.” Lewis, a former senior adviser to the IoD on energy and infrastructure policy, believes that the biggest barrier to the widespread uptake of drones is “not so much regulatory as technological. The UK’s main legal restrictions on drone fl ights – not too close to airports and not higher than 400ft – actually aren’t onerous. For deliveries, an operating range of several tens of miles will be necessary, but the freedom to fl y beyond ‘visual line of sight’ [generally defi ned as a horizontal distance of 500m from the controller] won’t happen without developing more powerful batteries; rolling out a national 5G and fi bre
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