This article is the second half of a two-part look at the future of driverless cars. This part considers the longer-term future opportunities driverless technology offers. Click here for part one, which looks at the current advantages driverless technology offers and the reasons currently holding it back.
Driverless technology offers a large number of opportunities for safer, cleaner, more efficient transport when compared to current private and public road technology. However there are a number of serious hurdles - technical and otherwise - that must first be overcome before that is realised.
If driverless technology was to become commonplace, it would also quickly open up a wealth of other opportunities to savvy investors and entrepreneurs - in obvious and less obvious places.
One major overlooked subsidiary sector that will see serious innovation as a result of driverless technology is insurance. The cost of insurance is likely to be seriously high when driverless technology is first released to the public, says Justin Peters, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Kabbee, a minicab booking app and sponsor of a roundtable on driverless technology in London.
“Early adopters will come in and then the price will start to erode slowly,” he says. “But it will need massive subsidies to get things moving before it reaches scale.”
Insurance providers, brokers and clients will have to deal with a tangle of issues surrounding driverless technology - some of which are not likely to be solved until they come up in case law. For instance there are issues of general liability. If something goes wrong, who is responsible, asks Chris Lamontagne, head of growth for the UK at GetTaxi, a mobile cab app. “Will it be the fleet supplier? The maker of the car? The provider of the driverless technology? I think there’s still lots of variables around that,” he says.
This also opens up a range of other possibilities. There is no guarantee that the traditional car makers will be the ones that end up on top of the production of driverless cars, says Helen Chapman, Transport for London (TfL) general manager for private hire and taxis.
Although traditional manufacturers like Toyota may be the producers of future driverless cars, it could easily be someone specialising in the technology, or even a third-party not yet considered, adds Phil Makinson, co-founder and chief development officer for Kabbee.
“Who will providers be? Will traditional car manufacturers bring cars to the street? Will companies involved in selling their names into transport sectors such as Virgin get involved? Will TFL itself provide?
This also means the design could change radically. Already the driverless cars planned for tests in the UK later this year look somewhat different from the more standard models Google has been testing in the USA. Future models may completely drop form for function, as impressing consumers with design will be less important, says Steve McNamara, general secretary of the London Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA).
There is likely to be a change in the functionality as well, says Lamontagne. Obviously controls will become significantly less important and there will now be the potential for the provision of additional services, he adds. “Whether its simply showing TV shows, playing music or providing wifi - it’s going to be a completely new fleet of devices because they’re going to be completely digital,” he says - adding that the opportunities are endless. For example driverless cars could eventually become something akin to mobile offices - able to cater for full meetings on the go.
Ultimately technology is going to have to improve vastly. TomTom is already involved with testing new real-time traffic routing with the LTDA. Beyond that, there are opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors in areas such as central monitoring and observation. One entrepreneur attempting to produce a product that could help with both issues is Robert Fejer, founder of Daily Roads an app that converts a smart-phone into a dash-cam. The device and - perhaps more importantly - its supporting infrastructure could help with issues such as insurance, remote monitoring and real-time traffic assessment in both a driven and driverless future, he says.
A combination of dash-cam footage from multiple vehicles could be combined together to give drivers a better idea of current road conditions - a project that is currently the subject of a Kickstarter campaign, says Fejer. It already can be used in insurance matters to show liability (at least in most countries, some such as Germany and Austria do not permit dashcam footage to be used in cases), he adds.
In the future it would provide the ideal link between driverless fleets and their central command, he says. “This could be integrated to driverless cars so that they can capture what is constantly in front of car. This would allow the owner or fleet manager to randomly check and see how it is performing even from miles away,” Fejer explains.
For now driverless technology remains more of a dream than a reality. But it is not far from becoming a normal part of life. Peters expects to see it appear in the suburbs of the UK before making its way into city centres “There’s a difference between a journey in the centre of London … where there’s all the one-ways and traffic - where intrinsic innate knowledge … makes a big difference and a one in the suburbs where a driverless car is going to pretty much get you there the right way,” he says.
So keep an eye out for a car lacking a driver in a cul-de-sac near you. But not too soon. The roundtable concluded that a target of 2020 for driverless technology was still exceedingly ambitious and that it could take much longer for automated cars to really emerge. In fact it could require a generational switch.
This forms part two of a two part look at the future of driverless technology. Click here to read part one.
