Motor Trader The award-winning and longest running UK magazine for car retailing professionals. Your first stop for News, Jobs and Reports for the motor industry.
The New Year signalled a revolution in the car business. For more than a quarter of a century, the Detroit Auto Show was the must-attend opening event for the world’s motor industry. But now the future of the car is presented more clearly at a rather different January event, CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas.
The keywords are “autonomous driving” and “connectivity”. At CES, the motor industry meets Silicon Valley. All the major carmakers were there, showing and explaining their latest electronic wizardry but with conflicting ideas of how and when it can be applied to the cars that everyday motorists want to buy.
The carmakers sense that this is a moment of change, the dawn of the fully electronic vehicle and are developing all this hi-tech kit so that they are not left behind. Everyone wants to be ready when the next big thing emerges. Judging by the amount of effort going into it, that next big thing would seem to be autonomous driving.
In the public’s mind, this means the car that drives itself. Uber predicts that the taxis that answer your call will not have, or need, a driver. Tesla sees no reason why an owner should not be able to use a smart phone to instruct his car to arrive, unaided, from a remote location – even to New York from Los Angeles.
Actually, autonomous driving is a staged process. Some elements are already widely available – adaptive cruise control, automatic emergency braking, low-speed traffic negotiation, advanced park assist. The US authorities define the next stages: Level 3 – for complete autonomy in certain situations (eg motorway cruising); Level 4 – no human intervention needed in specified conditions (separate traffic lanes); and Level 5 – never needing a human driver (and therefore without steering wheel and manual controls).
Most of the current trials are at Level 4 – Mercedes, Nissan, Volvo and Chrysler (in association with Waymo, Google’s mobility division) with predictions of production in 2021 but Ford is promising a Level 5 car for a ride-hailing service in the same time frame. All are expecting the price of the Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensors and associated cameras and systems to have reduced in price by then – at the prototype stage they can cost more than £50,000 per vehicle.
But giving autonomous vehicles electronic eyes and artificial intelligence is only part of the puzzle. Carlos Ghosn, the head of Renault and Nissan, said recently that autonomous driving was going to come because “customers like it.” In Japan, the initial order take-up for a semi-autonomous system on the new Nissan Serena van was some 70%. But he also warned that autonomy was not for everyone. These vehicles need certain pre-conditions: precise mapping, reliable road signals, and respect for driving rules.
In the case of his native Brazil, Ghosn said, “Drivers ignore red traffic lights at night. The autonomous car will always stop; there would be a lot of accident.”
Improved safety is held up as one of the advantages of the autonomous car but even its proponents admit that there could be problems mixing with human-driven traffic. The autonomous car would be programmed to keep strictly to speed limits and leave adequate braking space when following another vehicle. It is easy to imagine frustrated drivers stuck behind a car resolutely complying with the rules and press-on types squeezing into the gap ahead of it. And if there is an accident who is responsible? Who pays?
According to a study by the OECD’s International Transport Forum, these and other factors mean that autonomous vehicles are unlikely to exceed 3% of the car population by 2035.
The ITF found that 70% of serious accidents are caused by human error. If all vehicles had a high degree of autonomy, motoring would surely be safer but no-one is suggesting (yet) that all existing cars should be replaced and since the average life of a car is some 14 years, the two kinds will have to co-exist well beyond 2035.
It follows that, in most places, fully self-driving cars will need to have their own road space, separated from normal traffic closed areas of city centres or separate lanes on main roads or motorways. The majority of those vehicles will be electrically-powered taxis and CVs, not privately-owned cars – so not very good prospects for a dealer in today’s world.
In the meantime, more and more elements of the autonomous car will filter down to mainstream cars, adding complexity and expense. Dealers with premium brands already require regular updates on the latest technology for showroom staff to be able to explain it to customers and for the workshop to monitor, repair or replace. It is the march of progress but the question is: do customers really want it?
Ray Hutton
