The cars of the American company Waymo, owned by Google’s Alphabet, are somewhat lonely these days as they test autonomous driving on the streets of San Francisco. With virtually the entire country confined to their homes, Americans no longer take the car except on those occasions permitted by state and federal governments and authorities, and, somehow, any autonomous car (AV) that currently has to test drive in “real” time and in normal situations, is having a much easier time passing all the tests it may encounter, There are no children on the streets playing with balls that can run away, there are no people crossing crosswalks, traffic lights or intersections without looking, and there are no cyclists riding at full speed between cars that have to be quickly detected by the hundreds of sensors installed in each autonomous vehicle to make sure you are not going to hit one of them, and you are not going to send it to the side of the road when you turn at an intersection because you did not detect it in time.
Thus, the process of converting road traffic in our cities into autonomous and driverless traffic continues to advance, and kilometers continue to be driven both virtually, in simulations within the companies’ own test laboratories, and on the streets wherever this has been permitted, and under the monitoring, safety and observation conditions already agreed by Waymo and other companies in the sector with the local authorities.
A somewhat “futuristic” service
But, on the other hand, the population is still far from wanting to ride only in autonomous cars. It is perceived rather as something “futuristic”, and in the long term, where other passengers will first have to be the guinea pigs for years, if necessary, to make sure that everything works as it should. A study by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, titled Public Perceptions: Driverless Cars in 2019, showed that 32% of people surveyed wanted a maximum 30mph speed limit and that 66% of them felt little or no comfort in the idea of getting into one. In the UK, the global Autonomous Vehicles report from the company ANSYS, said that 43% of people would never get into an autonomous car, compared to 26% in Germany and only 3% in China. We have seen too many movies where the “bad” hackers on duty manage to control the brakes of a car and make it roll down a hill, almost taking the protagonist out of the way.
Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but what is no less true is that we are still reluctant to anything that does not have a human control in the middle, at least in a high percentage, since we can reproach that person for something, we can yell at him if something happens, or we can help him if necessary, but, to a vehicle that does everything alone, who do you yell at or talk to if there is an anomalous situation and you do not know how to react?
None of that will happen, we are told by those responsible for these autonomous driving tests, from Tesla’s Elon Musk to Waymo’s safety directors, because by the time driverless vehicles are approved to drive with full freedom of movement in our cities, they will have passed millions of tests of all kinds and those cities themselves will have been adapted to make their use safe, efficient and appropriate.
Adapting their routes and facilitating their circulation
So what we seem to have to do is not just to build vehicles that work properly without a driver or human hand to watch over them, but to adapt the city so that it can offer them the movement and transportation facilities to ensure it. This is not new, it is already part of the urban planning of many cities to change the way in which citizens move around, but, ironically, what many local authorities are proposing, as in the city of Barcelona and many other capitals already very saturated by road work, is to further restrict the use of vehicles within the city, and encourage public transport, the opposite of what perhaps executives of companies that aspire to popularize the autonomous car for daily and private use are wanting to hear or see.
How would the city have to be transformed to make it safer to ride in vehicles that circulate without direct human supervision? Perhaps initially, special lanes would have to be created for them, something that seems far from feasible in cities with streets saturated with vehicles and where there are already separate lanes for buses and cabs, in addition to the thousands of motorcycles that circulate on them, also taking advantage of the maneuverability they have to enter and exit them. Exclusive traffic zones could also be created on small routes for driverless cars, so that some streets would be closed to regular traffic and some kind of autonomous transport service would be created, such as a version of a four-wheeled streetcar to move in restricted and closed areas of the city.
A door-to-door service
But this also doesn’t seem like it could be a real or viable solution. When someone takes a car, he knows where he has to go, and tries to go from door to door with it, because, otherwise, you take the subway or the bus, which you know will stop where it has to stop even if you have to walk two or three streets to get to where you really have to go. So it doesn’t do us any good to be offered a gated or delimited area where I can take a trip in autonomous cars from any service company if where I have to go is five blocks beyond where the driverless vehicle is allowed to pass.
Therefore, it is not going to be the cities that will end up adapting to the car, nor facilitating its incorporation to the existing traffic in them, but the people will have to be the ones who really, if we want to see how the quality of life within our cities improves, We have to leave all types of cars aside and move in a more sustainable way so that we can help to reduce the level of air and noise pollution and increase the quality of life by many percentage points both in the center and in the outskirts of the cities we live in.
Lack of space for a greater concentration of people
The fact is that our cities will continue to grow at an enormous rate all over the world as more and more people leave towns, the countryside and rural areas in search of a better quality of life and professional opportunities for growth and development at all levels. Therefore, the more inhabitants in the city, the more space you need for housing and basic services, spaces that are now occupied by streets, avenues and passages that, if there were even half as many vehicles as there are now, could be reconverted to other uses, at least partially, and accommodate those services that citizens continue to demand as their numbers continue to increase.
So why so much emphasis and interest in autonomous driving if it does not really seem to be a proposal with a future?
Evidently it is a future process, or to put it another way, the technological and scientific development that is underway leads us in the field of mobility to the autonomous vehicle in a “natural” way, just as other fields of research naturally lead us to other developments. Economics tends towards cryptoeconomics, genetics tends towards bioengineering and posthumanism, computer science tends towards quantum computing, and so on. Therefore, it is not a question of “why” we put so much effort into bringing forward these types of projects and new technologies, but how we are going to be able to incorporate them in a “balanced” way with what already exists when we have them ready for mass use.
Preparing future customers
In a way, no matter how well autonomous cars are ready to go, if no one gets into them, it will be a failure of the industry and millions of dollars of investment and the last ten years of work will have been thrown away. It’s like developing the best connections and speeds in new and new generations of mobile telephony and no one wants to buy a new terminal, to continue using the same model as always, that “they’ve had enough”.
So the problem that companies like Waymo, Tesla, Uber, Apple with its iCar, and all those working on this type of driving “of the future” have to deal with is not so much the technology of their vehicles, which they have to make work properly, but the psychology of future consumers, because, as we have said, we are still not clear why we would have to get into an autonomous vehicle if we can go driving our own with all the pleasure that this, for many millions of people, still gives them.
The car as an object of social status
Here is another important point of the subject. The car is an object of worship for millions of human beings on the planet. It is an element that reflects social status and driving is a pleasure for many of us. Others, obviously, prefer to ride in the passenger seat and go about their business while being driven to work. So those are the potential future customers, at least in the first phase, because those who like to drive, and want to feel in control of the vehicle they are driving, no matter how modern the new autonomous cars are, will not be attracted by the idea of having to spend the journey doing anything other than pressing the accelerator or changing gear when they see fit.
This psychology of the future profile and user of the autonomous vehicle is already being studied by companies in the sector, and in universities, such as the one carried out by Ilias Panagiotopoulos and George Dimitrakopoulos (An empirical investigation on consumer’s intention towards autonomous driving, of the Harokopio University of Athens), where they are already considering how to create marketing campaigns to attract the interest of those who want to be taken everywhere and not worry about how to do it, the traffic, the road, the route to follow and the tolls to pay along the way. Kind of like sitting on the train and getting to work, which is what many of us do if we have a half hour drive in which we forget about the outside world while we focus on our laptop to answer the day’s emails before arriving at the office. Well, the same thing, but this time in a car that picks you up at the door of your house and drops you off at the door of work, without you having to do anything more than request it through an Uber or Cabify type app, and the rest of the company’s systems and workers are already in charge of the total management of the experience.
There really is a good market niche for these companies that are already counting on the technology and autonomous driving tests to pass all possible tests in a period of approximately five years (there are five levels that mark the type of autonomous driving of a vehicle, level 5 being the one where the car no longer needs any type of driver or assistance to operate), hence the need to start raising awareness and finding ways to generate a customer base that can already begin to feel attracted by the idea of being the first early-adopters in the sector.
Target executives and senior management
The plan is to start with executives, “premium” services for companies that want to always have a car available for their delegates and managers to move around easily, to pick up important clients from train stations and airports and not have to wait in the cab queue or have to send an employee with the company car, etc. It is not that this type of service does not denote a certain “status” for the company that sends an employee to pick up a director, it is simply that the same director will no longer want anyone to come and pick him up if he has at his disposal an autonomous car that waits for him when he wants and takes him where he wants, while he continues to work during the time it takes to get from one point to another.
It is all a matter of convenience and efficiency, at least in some economic and business sectors where it is important to take advantage of every second we spend connected to solve a problem or answer an email, so it seems clear that it will be the sector of high business who will see with better eyes the tests of autonomous vehicles implemented as a service for their directors and managers of higher level.
Broadening the potential customer base
If this is successful, at least enough so that it can be opened up to other sectors of the population, then it will be a matter of starting to create bigger and bigger marketing campaigns so that people can see how the autonomous vehicle works perfectly, without problems or accidents throughout the city in all the possible situations that we are going to encounter. The collective psyche tends to accept that, if the “big executives” already use this type of service and it works for them, it must be going well, and since this confers a certain social status, little by little there will be other sectors that will want to try out the idea of having an autonomous car to move around in at their disposal. In the end, it will be a matter of it catching on in society and everyone will end up using them, being able to leave the private vehicle at home for good and take it out only on weekends, to go with the family, and continue enjoying the feeling of driving through those curves, with the window open and one hand on the wheel, and accelerating when you want or feeling how the engine roars when you change gears.
Not everything has to happen at once, and for many years to come we won’t see a decrease in private vehicle use in our cities, nor probably an increase in autonomous cars large enough to make it worth noticing their impact on the day-to-day lives of citizens, but let a couple of decades pass and we’ll talk about it again, We may be surprised to find that our children don’t even want us to drive them to school anymore, to at least share 20 minutes of chatting, driving and singing with them, and would rather have an autonomous car pick them up and drive them alone so they can play their favorite game online before getting to class and be forced to turn off their cell phones until the end of the day.
