While Jamaicans rejoice @ news of tourist zone "clean ups"..

[Don1]

Autonomous driving is here, and it’s going to change everything
Welcome to the hands-free world.
BY NABEEL HYATT APR 19, 2017, 7:30PM EDT




A couple weeks ago, I spoke to a working group of economists and climate change experts in Norway about what’s happening right now in autonomous driving — how fast it’s likely to go mainstream, the effects it might have, and the opportunities this creates both in government and in business. Below are my remarks.

Imagine what it must have felt like to be in a major urban center like New York or Boston in the early 1900s when, in a sea of horses and humans, the first automobile “putt-putted” past.

Now imagine, if you will, four people standing nearby, with four different reactions to that event: The first, “Wow, I want to get one of those!” The second, “Wow, that looks scary.” The third, “Wow, I want to build my own car company and make one too.” And lastly, “That thing is going to need a place to get gas.”

I believe fully autonomous driving has the potential to have as large an effect on our way of living as the car itself did. So it’s worth getting past the immediate “Wow” reactions, as well as some of the initial knee-jerk fears, and start to lay the groundwork for what’s coming next.

Why now?
Autonomy in automobiles has been in the research phase in academia and in large companies’ R&D departments for a couple decades now. On the surface, not a lot about the technologies has shifted from the demos you could see at places like Stanford and MIT a decade ago. So why all the activity today, and the excitement about it becoming a reality?

The primary reason is a combination of three interlocking trends that create a perfect storm for a massive disruption to urban mobility:

Computer vision: Advances in machine learning have allowed computer vision to finally be good enough to distinguish objects on the road, build 3-D maps of the surrounding area, and be supported by processor speeds powerful enough to be able to operate them natively in a car.

Ride-sharing: The self-driving technology stack is currently still quite expensive, but the advent of ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft has presented the possibility of amortizing that capital cost over many drivers. Projections of the cost make it look like consumers won’t be buying a mass-product autonomous car for more than a decade, but if you amortize the cost over a lot of drivers through a ride-sharing model, you could go to mass market tomorrow if the technology got there.

Electrification: Virtually every fully autonomous car company today is planning on an EV platform. This is only secondarily about the environment. Primarily, it is because the cost of maintenance of an EV car is dramatically lower. If a single company owns the car and it has an incredibly high utilization rate, then that lower maintenance cost is easily worth the higher upfront cost. An additional benefit is that when talking to local governments about getting clearance to put potentially thousands of new cars autonomously running around your city, it’s nice to be able to talk about them helping air quality.

These three trends in concert have created a unique moment in time, but a secondary reason should not be missed, either. In order to solve a problem, you first need to be paying attention to it. And while autonomy has long been a love of research labs, it has only recently become an area of entrepreneurship.