Electric vehicle sales may be driven mostly by policy and preference right now, but they'll soon be powered by dominant economics—including a profitable symbiosis between electrical drive and autonomous control, according to a former researcher for General Motors.
"What is going to happen here, I believe, is it's just going to become easier to build an electric car," said Lawrence Burns, until recently the director of the Program for Sustainable Mobility at Columbia University and a professor of engineering practice at the University of Michigan. He served as General Motors' corporate vice president of research & development and planning from 1998 to 2009. He know advises firms, including Google and Allstate, on mobility transformation.
"Beyond 2025, battery and fuel-cell vehicles could simply become the best way to design and engineer a light-duty vehicle," Burns said tonight at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. "Set aside all the motivations with climate change, oil dependence—it's just a better way to do a car. It's simple."
Electric vehicle sales have been tepid and may remain tepid in the short term. Internal combustion engines will continue to dominate until 2025, Burns predicted, as the nation's automotive fleet slowly turns over. "It's just arithmetic."
But as automakers strive to meet the 2025 fuel economy standard—54.5 miles per gallon—they will come to realize that reengineering traditional vehicles is more expensive and difficult than adopting an electric drive train that emits no carbon. They'll be building electric cars anyway, because California and seven other states have adopted standards requiring 15 percent of new vehicles sold to be zero-emission vehicles.
"What Karl Benz invented was really quite profound," Burns said. "It was a mechanically driven car with a combustion engine, oil-based fuel, mechanical and hydraulic controls, stand-alone, human operated and general purpose.
"The good news is, we've entered into a period now where there's a new DNA: electrical drive with electric motors, diverse energy sources, electronic and digital controls, connected, human coordinated, shared, driverless and tailored."
Many of those threads are evolving separately—electric vehicles, digital controls, connected cars, car sharing, and driverless cars. It's when they're combined, Burns said, that disruptive transformation occurs:
In the system we have now, cars are overbuilt: Why do we need cars that can go more than 100 mph in cities where speeds top out at 20-35 mph? Burns asked. Why do we need four to six seats when most trips convey two people or less? Why do we need a range of hundreds of miles when 75 percent of trips cover eight miles or less?
In a new mobility ecosystem, people could order shared autonomous vehicles tailored to their tasks—a single-seater for the commute to work perhaps, a seat on a shuttle to the airport, a vehicle with cargo space for groceries or supplies, a camper for the family vacation. Smaller vehicles would suit most tasks.
Burns's research group at Columbia University calculated that the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to 120,000 cars, could be efficiently served by 18,000 shared autonomous electric vehicles. Most of them small.
"This opportunity to tailor our vehicles to the kind of trips we actually make is a huge opportunity because it lets us reduce the mass of the vehicle," Burns said. "If you can get to that smaller vehicle, electric drive makes a lot more sense. It's three times as efficient as combustion."
Internal-combustion vehicles can be driverless, too, but as demand shifts to smaller vehicles, perhaps much smaller, Burns said, electric makes more sense.
"They go hand in hand," Burns said of autonomous and electric, which he called synergistic opportunities. "I believe autonomous and connected vehicles are huge enablers of electric vehicles because they get the mass out of the car, make the fundamental platform more efficient."
Burns envisions very different electric vehicles than the ones we know today—more like the GM-Segway Pod than the Tesla Model S.
"The problem with the battery is the size of the car. The reason there's an 80 kWh battery in the Tesla Model S is because it's a big car. And you need a lot of energy to move that great big car," he told a gathering of economists, scientists, public policy experts and students convened by the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago. But for personal mobility, something much smaller would do. The GM-Segway pod has a 5kWh battery.
"The car can be something we wear rather than something we drive, something we park in our closets rather than our garages."
Because of their efficiencies, autonomous vehicles cost about 15 cents per mile to operate, compared to 60 cents for personal cars, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute.
Burns calculated externalities—costs and benefits to society—for both types of vehicles as well. Costs include traffic, accidents, insurance, tickets, greenhouse gas emissions, inequitable access, lost time. He concluded that autonomous vehicles incur 25 cents per mile in externalities, compared to $1.60 for the average traditional vehicle.
Americans travel three trillion miles a year, he said, so shared autonomous electric vehicles could unlock $2-$4 trillion per year in savings.
"There is an opportunity for better mobility experiences at radically lower societal consumer costs," he said. "Safer, more convenient, more productive, more personalized, more affordable, improved simultaneously—people are really going to want this."
"There's a huge opportunity for those companies that get it right."
Which companies will get it right? Traditional automakers find themselves competing with disruptors like Apple, Google, Tesla and Uber. Google plans to have driverless cars on the market by 2018, Toyota by 2020.
Except for Toyota and Daimler, which Burns mentioned as leaders in innovation, traditional automakers have been lagging behind this transformation.
"They have just now begun to think about the transformational potential of what I'm talking about. I think they were pretty much stuck in their historical paradigm," he said. "I don't think they saw the potential for disruption."
Burns believes they will awaken to the transformation even more urgently as their engineers grapple with the pressing demands of the near future.
"In the current automobile system, the challenge the auto companies have is how are they going to find enough resource to meet these aggressive fuel-economy regulations, these new electric vehicle requirements, and still stay in the race against Google, Uber, Apple, Tesla, on self-driving cars? Especially if their approach is to evolve self-driving features that keep the driver in the loop and end up adding more cost to the car. I personally think this is a dead-end for the auto industry. They're going to have to think differently."
