L E A D IN G E D G E
ability to get stuff done. That’s worth something. Good as they are, some of the new entrants will find that a learning curve.” Battery technology comes with its own
environmental and political challenges in terms of the mining of elements, like lithium and cobalt, and making sure the maximum life was drawn from these products, even after they were no longer useful for vehicles. “Family groups, with a genuinely long
term perspective, you would think they even more than the listed entities would be the ones to pull the industry together to take a common stand on some of these issues,” Smith says.
These cars will be owned by fleets and used far more
than current vehicles, according to RethinkX modelling, travelling 100,000 miles per year instead of the current 10,000 done by the average individually owned vehicle. Smith says the widely accepted statistic is that the average
car spends only 3% of its time active, and the other 97% it sits in a carpark. “From an asset utilisation point-of-view, you don’t need
to move that very far for it to have a radical impact on the number of vehicles you need—even if they were inactive just 90% of the time,” he says. A need for fewer cars, coupled with the fact that EVs need
less maintenance, a different type of maintenance, and last vastly longer than their ICE counterparts, and you get a complicated future for car makers. “It is extremely tough to say where all this stuff is going to
land,” Smith says. “We still have a very large number of ICEs in the world.
Even if EVs penetrate new vehicle sales, existing cars take a long time to die off.” In terms of the so-called “sharing economy”, Smith says
the future is equally murky. “It’ll be all over the place with all sorts of different ride
sharing models as they don’t require new vehicle technology, just the [connectivity]. There will be new apps and map- based systems allowing people to share vehicles, travel to work together, and they’ll be all over the place in the developing and developed market spaces.” Then, there’s the move to get humans out from the behind
the wheel, with the introduction of autonomous vehicles. Several gimmicky pilot programmes for self-drive cars are
ROBOT CARS But car manufacture and the move towards electrification is just one aspect of the way transport is changing. Arbib predicts that the move towards
Top: Auto industry watchers have speculated that chairman John Elkann, great-great grandson of Fiat founder Giovanni Agnelli, could turn to Chinese investors to help Fiat Chrysler Automobiles catch up with rivals in the hybrid, EV and autonomous driving market
TaaS will lead “to the end of [personal] car ownership, as people can access cars when needed with no upfront costs, and pay a charge per mile (or a subscription) vastly lower than the cost of driving their own vehicle”. This, of course, is already happening
in cities with the likes of Uber, Lyft, and Zipcar, which all use technology to connect people, allowing them to grab a car or lift on-demand.
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taking place around the world at present, among the most high profile is Ford joining forces with Domino’s to deliver pizzas in cars with self-drive technology, though supervised by teams of on-board researchers. Ford is carrying out further testing in Miami this year, and
JLR has announced it will continue testing self-drive cars on UK roads, despite an Uber car killing a US pedestrian in March. One other autonomous vehicle-related death was recorded in 2016, when a Tesla Model S owner was killed when his car crashed while in self-drive mode. Trials so far have tested the technology, naturally, but
focused more on the human element and how people feel and behave around such vehicles. Widespread proliferation of AVs is also contingent on
people being happy to give up driving, difficult because some love it, some simply want the sense of control. Nieuwenhuis is a “not a great fan” of the current focus of
autonomous vehicles, and says he’s sceptical of the level of consumer demand. “I think it deflects, to some extent, from what [companies] should really be doing and that is the environmental agenda
ISSUE 73 | 2018
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