As my first industry do in London for two years, the Zenzic Connected and Automated Mobility (CAM) Innovators event 2022 was always going to be memorable. Actually, it was much better than that. It was a fantastic day packed with astute analysis and exciting announcements about self-driving in the UK.
It was also a reminder of the shared vision – the belief that we’re on the cusp of something momentous, that this technology can deliver seismic safety and societal benefits. And this is no pipedream. Thanks to a lot of hard work over many years by an array of seriously talented people, there’s a detailed Roadmap of exactly how we’ll get there.
Let’s talk self-driving
For starters, we couldn’t have wished for a more impressive venue – The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) on The Embankment, near Waterloo Bridge. Passing the statue of Michael Faraday, the father of electromagnetism, I bumped into a former colleague before I’d even reached the front door. How nice to see Tom Flisher of Thatcham – a real live human – after all the remote communications of the pandemic.
Hands up, I missed the morning sessions on cyber resilience, vehicle to everything (V2X) and the Interoperable Simulation project. Catching the fast train in to London to attend a real world event is, admittedly, more time consuming and expensive than clicking into a Teams meeting.
We’ll look at the Interoperable Simulation project in more detail another day as it’s a prime example of joined-up thinking, designed to enable seamless testing across the CAM Testbed UK facilities.
The main reason for attending, I thought, was to hear about the latest six UK-based companies selected for Zenzic’s CAM Scale-Up Programme – a business accelerator for almost ready-for-market products and services that can “meet required safety standards and operate in real-world environments”. There’s also the small matter of sharing £500,000 of government funding.
Of the six winners announced in October 2021, four are London-based: geolocation solution provider Albora; Intelligent CCTV designer Exeros; sensor fusion system developer Grayscale AI; and insurance claims visualiser Xtract 360. The other two are: Cambridge-based vulnerable road user safety specialist R4DAR; and Cardiff-based real-time movement experts Route Konnect.
Each will be supported by the UK government – via the Department for Transport’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) – and innovation platform Plug and Play. They’ll get time at the testbeds, benefit from introductions to corporate partners (including Honda, Thales and Vodafone), and gain access to a global network investor platform. Watch this space for in-depth profiles.
The curious among you will have noted the “I thought” a couple of paragraphs ago. Of course, hearing from these exceptional innovators was great, but the best was yet to come.
Wired editor and futurist Jeremy White talks self-driving at the CAM Innovators event 2022
Following an entertaining whip through automotive history with Wired editor and futurist Jeremy White – who urged the self-driving industry to “hurry up!” and make connected and automated mobility a reality – we adjourned to the Haslett & Flowers room for networking drinks.
And that’s where the magic happened: Talking shop and shooting the breeze with people I’d just met, connected with on Linkedin, interviewed on Zoom, been on mute with for hours. That’s where you hear the backstories and inspirations, discover obscure but pertinent bits of information, and see early signs of the next big things.
A maelstrom of tech wizards and engineers, CEOs and interns, the odd safety campaigner and motoring hack, most cautious about over-promising but overwhelmingly excited and optimistic about the fast-approaching road transport revolution.
That’s what self-driving industry events are all about. That’s what we’ve been missing.
DG Cities surveys UK views on driverless cars – roughly a third in favour, a third against and a third undecided.
DG Cities, a London-based company specialising in people-centred smart city technologies, has conducted interesting research into the UK public’s views on driverless cars.
The headline result was: Of 1,034 people surveyed in 2021, 36.4% would be happy to ride in an autonomous vehicle (AV) tomorrow, with 28.5% undecided and 35.1% less keen.
There were significant differences across the age groups, with over half (56.1%) of 18-34 year-olds confident that self-driving cars will be safer than human-driven vehicles, compared to less than a third (30.3%) of those aged 55 and over.
The work was part of the Innovate UK funded D-Risk project, focused on improving the safety of self-driving cars. DG Cities’ D-Risk partners include AI specialist dRisk.ai, software developer Claytex and Imperial College London.
We spoke to Edward Houghton, Head of Research and Service Design at DG Cities, to find out more.
Public engagement on driverless
EH: “We’re an urban innovation company looking at new technologies within cities to understand how they can be implemented with the public and communities in mind. We work on projects based around new tech, like autonomous vehicles, and we speak to the public about their experiences, supporting tech developers to implement their products in the most safe and appropriate way.
“Autonomous vehicles get a lot of press interest and, because the technology is still very much in development, the public rightly have questions. It’s a really interesting topic. I’m a behavioural scientist and environmental engineer, so my interest is in the public perception side – how people see and understand these vehicles, their experiences of using them.
“We look at how people could use this type of service in the future, and the kind of ethical design requirements the technologies will need to work effectively. DG Cities specialises in engaging the public in the debate around autonomous vehicles, working with our partners to understand how we can make the technology accessible.”
Driverless perception age differences
EH: “The idea was to try and understand how ready the UK public is to adopt this type of technology. We provided a definition of what we mean by self-driving – a vehicle that can operate by itself between points A and B with minimal human interaction.
“We found some interesting differences according to age. Older people seemed to be more concerned about safety and didn’t necessarily trust the vehicle to make the right decision. Younger people were far more likely to say they would trust the vehicle.
“There are a number of reasons why this might be the case. For example, older people may have seen technologies in the past that they now don’t trust, or there may be a low level of tech literacy.”
Near miss data
EH: “DG Cities has been a partner in other autonomous vehicle projects – we ran engagement on the driverless trial in Greenwich a few years – but D-Risk was the first where we looked specifically at safety and trust, and also tried to collect edge cases.
“The really unique part of D-Risk is the knowledge graph – our “map” of real-life edge cases from traffic cameras and police accident reports. We’re also using Facebook to ask the public about complex scenarios they’ve experienced – extraordinary things an autonomous vehicle might need to deal with.
“Whether you’re a driver or not, we’ve all heard scary stories of when things go wrong. But accident reports only capture incidents, so data on near misses is missing. The public can tell us about when they got very close to being in a severe accident. That’s very powerful in terms of adding to the library. Our partners then turn it into simulation and coding to train the vehicles.”
D-Risk Community Insights Report on driverless cars 2021
Self-driving experts talk constantly of the need to earn public trust, but driverless cars continue to divide opinion. Indeed, recent surveys have shown that people are becoming more, not less, wary of them.
Just this week, in Inverness, Scotland, where an autonomous bus trial is due to start later this year, The Inverness Courier reported significant resistance to the idea. 69% of respondents to its survey of local residents said they would refuse to get on a driverless bus.
What we need, of course, is for the media to convey an informed and nuanced safety message. Hmm! To illustrate the scale of the task, here’s a list of our top five hyperbolic headlines:
On a mission to drive more sensible debate about self-driving, Carsofthefuture.co.uk has renewed its media partnership with Reuters Events for the Auto Tech 2022 digital conference on 14-15 June.
The prestigious two-day online event will enable technology providers and automotive companies to meet and do business with vehicle manufacturers (VMs) including Audi, BMW, Cadillac, Daimler, Fisker, Ford, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Opel and Toyota.
Confirmed speakers include Mercedes Benz Mobility chief executive Franz Reiner, Hyundai Motor Company chief safety officer Brian Latouf, Polestar chief operating officer Dennis Nobelius and Lucid Motors vice president of software validation Margaret Burgraff.
Self-driving and AI at Auto Tech 2022
As part of The Key Steps Towards Safer Roads programme on 15 June, Carsofthefuture.co.uk editor Neil Kennett will moderate two sessions: 1) “The Growing Presence of AI”, with Sammy Omari, vice president of autonomy at Motional, and; 2) “Where are we on the journey to full automation?”, with Xinzhou Wu, head of Xpeng Motors’ Autonomous Driving Centre.
The former will cover the value of artificial intelligence in testing cutting-edge systems and its role in autonomous vehicle (AV) decision making. The latter will cover autonomous driving, in-car connectivity and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), evaluating the progress made and exploring when carmakers expect to introduce fully automated features.
Carsofthefuture.co.uk editor, Neil Kennett, said: “I’m delighted to renew our partnership with Reuters and look forward to lively discussions about these phenomenal but controversial technologies. It’s a shame, given everything Tesla’s done for electric cars, that so many hyperbolic headlines are caused by its confusingly-named Full Self-Driving (FSD) package. It simply isn’t self-driving as the rest of the industry understands it.
“Conflating assisted and automated driving is dangerous, because it risks drivers misunderstanding what their cars are capable of. News of so-called driverless car crashes then dents consumer confidence – the last thing the industry needs at such a crucial time in terms of public perception. These are safety-critical issues and utmost clarity is vital. For the near future at least, the best advice is that drivers need to be alert at all times.”
Nabil Awan, automotive conference producer at Reuters Events, added: “The moves towards greater connectivity and autonomy that we are seeing will lead to safer roads while also deeply transforming the auto industry as we know it today. Our unique Auto Tech 2022 event will give innovators and technology providers a chance to discuss the latest advances and come away with valuable intelligence with which to drive the evolution of the sector.”
Carsofthefuture editor will moderate sessions on self-driving and AI at Auto Tech 2022
A few messages flew back and forth, and it transpired that he’s an expert in measuring driver behaviour, particularly driver-vehicle interactions in ADAS-equipped and self-driving vehicles. That was music to my ears, so we arranged a Zoom. What follows is the highly insightful result.
Lucas Noldus Ph.D., Founder of Noldus Information Technology
LN: “The future starts here. The world is changing. We see people living longer and there are more and more interactive devices – telephones, tablets, dashboards – with which we can interact, leading to greater risk of distraction while driving. I know personally how tempting it is to use these devices, always trying to keep your eyes on the road.
“We already have fascinating developments in connected driving and now, with self-driving, the role of the driver changes significantly. That has triggered research institutes, universities, OEMs and tier one suppliers to pay more attention to the user experience for both drivers and passengers.
“All these experiences are important because how people perceive the safety and comfort will influence their buying decisions, and their recommendations to other potential users.
“For autonomous driving, how far will we go towards level five? What happens at the intermediate stages? Over the coming decades, driving tasks will gradually diminish but, until full autonomy, the driver will have to remain on standby, ready to take over in certain situations. How will the vehicle know the driver is available? How quickly can he take over? These are the topics we’re involved in as a technology company.
“We make tools to allow automotive researchers to keep the human in the loop. Traditionally, automotive research focused exclusively on improving the vehicle – better engines, drivetrains etc. Until recently, nobody paid much attention to the human being (with a brain, skeletal system, muscles, motor functions), who needs to process information through his sensory organs, draw the right conclusions and take actions.
“Now, these aspects are getting more attention, especially in relation to reduced capacity, whether due to a distracting device, drugs, alcohol or neurodegeneration. As you get older your response time becomes longer, your eyesight and hearing abilities reduce, as does the speed at which you can process information.
“These are the challenges that researchers in automotive are looking at concerning the role of the driver, now and in the future. If the automated or semi-automated system wants to give control back to the driver because its AI algorithms decide a situation is too complex, can the driver safely take over while he’s been doing something like reading or taking a nap? How many milliseconds does the brain need to be alert again?
NK: “Draft legislation seems to be proceeding on a 10-second rule, but some studies say at least 30 seconds is required.”
LN: “Situational awareness – that’s a key word in this business. Not only where am I geographically, but in what situation. Oh, I’m in a situation where the road surface is very wet, there’s a vehicle just in front of me, the exit I need is near and I’m in the wrong lane. Understanding a situation like that takes time.
“If we take a helicopter view, from our perspective as a technology company, what should be measured to understand the driver behaviour? Which sensors should we use to pick up that information? If we use a microphone, a video camera, a heartbeat monitor and a link to the ECU, how do we synchronise that?
“That’s not trivial because one sensor may be sending the sampling at 300Hz and another at 25 frames per second. That’s something my company has specialised in over the years. We’re very good at merging data from different sources, whether it’s a driving simulator continuously spitting out data, a real car, or sensors mounted in the infrastructure.
“You then need to analyse that data and pull out meaningful quantitative units that give you actionable insights. Generating large matrices is no big deal, making sense of that information is the real challenge.
“For example, in dashboard design, a manufacturer might be comparing two or three displays of road quality. A driver behaviour study with our tools will give the designer a clear answer on which design leads to the least cognitive workload, the least confusion.
Noldus DriveLab
“This same technical challenge can be applied to a vast number of design objectives. The vehicle manufacturer might be looking to make incremental improvements to, say, the readability of the dashboard under certain light conditions. Or they might be working on a completely new feature, like an intelligent personal in-car assistant. A number of brands are working on that, but the concept is still relatively new.
“You cannot test every scenario on the road, it’s just too dangerous, so we work with simulator manufacturers too. On the road or in the lab, we can measure a driver’s actions with eye-tracker, audio, video, face-reader and physiology in one.”
NK: “Back to LinkedIn again, I saw a post by Perry McCarthy, the F1 driver and original Stig on Top Gear, who said something like: Simulators are getting so good these days, when you make a mistake they drop three tonnes of bricks on your legs!”
LN: “You have so-called high fidelity and low fidelity simulators – the higher the fidelity, the closer you get to the real vehicle behaviour on the road, and there are all sorts of metrics to benchmark responsiveness.
“You have simple fixed-base simulators right up to motion-based simulators which can rotate, pitch and roll, move forward, backwards, sideways and up and down. For the best ones you’re talking about 10 million euros.
“We work with OEMs, tier1 suppliers, research institutes and simulator manufacturers to build-in our DriveLab software platform. We also advise on what sensors are recommended depending on what aspects of driver behaviour they want to study.
“We try to capture all the driver-vehicle interactions, so if he pushes a pedal, changes gear or turns the steering wheel, that’s all recorded and fed into the data stream. We can also record their body motion, facial expression, what they’re saying and how they’re saying it – it all tells us something about their mental state.
Multi-camera eye tracker (Smart Eye)
“Eye tracking measures the point of gaze – what your pupils are focused on. In a vehicle, that might be the left, right and rear mirrors, through the windscreen or windows, around the interior, even looking back over your shoulders. To capture all that you need multiple eye-tracking cameras. If you just want to look at, for example, how the driver perceives distance to the car in front, you can do with just two cameras rather than six.
“Eye tracking generates all sorts of data. How long the eyes have been looking at something is called dwell time. Then there’s what direction the eyes are looking in and how fast the eyes move from one fixed position to another – that’s the saccade. People doing eye tracking research measure saccades in milliseconds.
“Another important metric is pupil diameter. If the light intensity goes up, the pupil diameter decreases. Given a stable light condition, the diameter of your pupil says something about the cognitive load to your brain – the harder you have to think, the wider your pupils will open. If you’re tired, your blink rate will go up. There’s a normal natural blink rate to refresh the fluid on your eyes with a fully awake person, but if you’re falling asleep the blink rate changes. It’s a very useful instrument.
“Then there’s body worn sensors that measure physiology. It’s harder to do in-car, but in a lab people don’t mind wearing electromyography (EMG) sensors to measure muscle tension. If you’re a designer and you want to know how easy it is for an 80-year-old lady to operate a gearshift, you need to know how much muscle power she has to exert.
“We also measure the pulse rate with a technique called photoplethysmography (PPG), like in a sports watch. From the PPG signal you can derive the heart rate (HR). However, a more accurate method is an electrocardiogram (ECG), which is based on the electrical activity of the heart.
GSR (EDA) measurement
“Further still, we measure galvanic skin response (GSR), also called electrodermal activity (EDA), the level of sweating of your skin. The more nervous you get, the more you sweat. If you’re a bit late braking approaching a traffic jam, your GSR level will jump up. A few body parts are really good for capturing GSR – the wrist, palm, fingers, and the foot.
“We also measure oxygen saturation in the blood with near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and brain activity with an electroencephalogram (EEG). Both EEG and NIRS show which brain region is activated.
“Another incredibly useful technique is face reading. Simply by pointing a video camera at someone’s face we can plot 500 points – the surroundings of the eyebrows, the eyelids, the nose, chin, mouth, lips. We feed this into a neural network model and classify it against a database of tens of thousands of annotated images, allowing us to identify basic emotions – happy, sad, angry, surprised, disgusted, scared or neutral. You can capture that from one photograph. For other states, like boredom or confusion, you need a series of images.
“These days we can even capture the heart rate just by looking at the face – tiny changes in colour resulting from the pulsation of the blood vessels in the skin. This field of face reading is evolving every year and I dare to claim that we are leading the pack with our tool.
“Doing this in the lab is one thing, doing it in a real car is another challenge, being able to keep your focus on the driver’s face and deal with variable backgrounds. Of course, cars also drive at night so the next question is can you do all this in darkness? We turned our company van into an instrumented vehicle and my sons agreed to be the guinea pigs.
“It took some work – overcoming the issue of light striking the face and causing sharp shadows, for instance – but we can now use infrared illuminators with our FaceReader software to make these measurements in full darkness.
“The turning of the head is also very important in studying distraction, for example, if the driver looks sideways for too long, or nods their head in sleepiness. When something shocks someone, we see the face change and the blood pressure rise, and these readings are synchronised in DriveLab.
“It is well proven that even things like changing radio station can be very distracting. Taking your eyes off the road for just a few seconds is dangerous. As we move to more and more connected devices, touchscreens and voice commands, minimising distraction is vital to ensure safety.”
NK: “I absolutely love this tech but what I actually drive is a 7-year-old Suzuki Swift Sport with a petrol engine and a manual gearbox, and I quite like it that way”
LN: “I’m doing research on cars of the future with my software but I am personally driving a 30-year old soft-top Saab 900. That’s my ultimate relaxation, getting away from high tech for a moment.
“At Noldus, we’re constantly pushing the boundaries of research, working with top level organisations in automotive – Bosch, Cat, Daimler, Fiat, Honda, Isuzu, Land Rover, Mazda, Nissan, Scania, Skoda, Toyota, Valeo and Volvo, to name just a few – and also with the Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR) and the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN).
“Our aim is make it so that the client doesn’t have to worry about things like hardware to software connections – we do that for them so they can focus on their research or design challenge.”
Ahead of a flagship product launch later this week, Bill McKinley, Automotive Strategic Planner at Keysight Technologies, gives his thoughts on self-driving and the fast-changing connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) landscape.
Avid readers may remember that Bill was on the panel I hosted at the Small Cells World Summit in May. He’s got 30+ years’ experience in wireless communications and his current focus is developing test solutions for the automotive sector.
BM: “The UK, in line with other nations around the world, is investing heavily in connectivity and electrification – both the vehicles themselves and the charging infrastructure. Connected vehicles have been demonstrated to enhance safety via cellular vehicle to everything (C-V2X) and dedicated short-range communication (DSRC).
“These technologies allow for more efficient driving, for example, by routing to avoid accidents or poor road conditions. They also enable higher levels of automation, all of which can lead to an improved overall driving experience.
“It is likely that the first fully automated vehicles will be delivery vehicles, controlled environment shuttle type services, and buses on specific routes. With the gradual introduction of robotaxis, we will no doubt start to see Mobility as a Service (MaaS) become more common over the next 10-15 years.
“Keysight was the first test and measurement company to be awarded Global Certification Forum (GCF) validation for C-V2X RF conformance. We have industry leading validated test cases for the C-V2X protocol conformance test, and we were the first to be awarded OmniAir Qualified Test Equipment (OQTE) status.
“Cybersecurity will play a critical role in connected mobility and Keysight is working with leading companies and organisations in this space to develop solutions to ensure vehicular communications remain safe and robust against attacks.
“Clearly, the main risks associated with self-driving vehicles are around the safety aspects, which in turn will heavily influence public acceptance of the technology. We are all very familiar with some of the headlines about Tesla vehicles.
“It remains incredibly challenging to overcome the complexities of urban automated driving, but things are improving all the time. Our autonomous driving emulator (ADE) system is designed with this in mind – to test many autonomous drive systems in a rich and authentic environment within the lab, before moving testing out into the field.”
More on that to follow soon. For further info see keysight.com
Navtech Radar puts figures on the benefits of port automation including reduced operating expenses and labour costs
While self-driving cars await a legislative framework, this ground-breaking technology is already being deployed in off-road settings. Ports are a good example and Madelen Shepherd, Growth Marketing Manager at Navtech, sets out a strong business case.
MS: “Ports are complicated operations and automation can massively improve efficiency, so we’ve been doing some financial analysis on the quantification of value. The benefits fall into three main areas: 1) reduced operating expenses; 2) reduced labour requirements; and 3) productivity increases.”
According to Navtech’s research, benefits resulting from port automation include a 31% reduction in operating expenses, a 40% reduction in labour costs and a 21% increase in productivity.
Automation at ports delivers significant cost savings
MS: “This kind of financial modelling is important for Navtech to demonstrate that our products are viable, but it also provides a compelling argument for automation in general.
“The findings are based on averages from multiple quotes, although there was quite a large range on the reduction in operating expenses, from around 25% up to 50%.
“Currently, only 3% of the world’s ports are automated, but the rate of growth is now exponential. Key drivers for this include the rise of megaships and increasing next day deliveries.
“About 80% of the world’s goods go through ports. There’s already time pressure on everything and the increasing global population equals ever increasing demand.
“New ports are a massive investment. For example, the first phase of the Tuas project in Singapore, which will create the world’s largest container terminal, is nearly complete and has already cost $1.76bn. There are three more phases to come.
“Of course, any cost benefit analysis must also include risks. If you’re retrofitting an existing port, how much is installation going to disrupt operations? What about the social impact of job losses or a shift in employment profile? Are the new jobs higher paid or more secure? How much time and money would an infrastructure-free solution save in operational downtime during installation compared to an infrastructure dependent solution?
“Automation has created so-called ghost ports, which are largely human-free, so there are clear safety benefits. And with automation you get remote operation, so maybe one person can now operate two straddle carriers.
“Also, operating bulky vehicles like terminal tractors can require an additional member of staff to supervise the movement. By using technological solutions – installing sensors which act beyond human capabilities – that’s no longer necessary.
“Terran360, an infrastructure-free localisation solution, delivers a detailed 360-degree map made up of around 400 slices and uploads this to a cloud-based server. The vehicle drives down a route continually scanning all these different landmarks.
“We’re always looking for new partners in the shipping world and other industrial settings. This kind of radar is perfect for self-driving cars too, so that’s another exciting growth area.”
Inma Martinez, author of new book The Future of the Automotive Industry, on self-driving and connected cars
Described by Time magazine as “One of the best talents in human digital behaviour”, Inma Martinez advises business leaders and governments (including the UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport) on AI and digitisation. She’s just written a book called The Future of the Automotive Industry, so obviously we had to ask her about driverless cars.
How did you come to specialise in automotive?
IM: “I first got involved in the auto industry in the early 2000s, when BMW recognised that they had to attract female drivers and buyers. We made a series of short films with directors including Ridley Scott and John Woo, starring Clive Owen as The Driver. Guy Ritchie’s had Madonna in it. In those days, I was working as a human factors scientist, looking at how humans use technology.
“Previously, I had been a telecoms engineer specialising in internet protocols. Then, because Nokia bought two of my start-ups, I landed in their innovations department. Together with Intel, we came to the realisation that telecommunications companies had to create alliances with auto manufacturers for vehicle to everything (V2X) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications.
“I worked for Volkswagen Group designing cars with AI and met Mark Gallagher and all the Formula One crowd. I thought: I have to write about the future of this industry, because in the next five to ten years it will not look anything like today – the massive influence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI, sustainability and the green economy. I wrote the book during the pandemic and it came out in June.”
Setting EVs aside, how do you view the autonomous side of things?
IM: “I love the topic, firstly because it needs so much definition. People interchange ‘autonomous’ with ‘self-driving’, but they’re separate things. Unfortunately, the media is not very sophisticated in talking about that.
“For me, it’s something that’s been happening for 15 or 20 years, initially because the industry was pressed to improve safety. You got level one autonomous features, like cruise control and parking assistance, making things easier and safer. Now we’re at level three, and no one understands what on earth is going on!
“I hate it when Tesla put out press releases claiming full self-driving. The PR houses are doing a disservice to the industry because they’re confusing people. I delved into this for the book and came up to the conclusion that we’re not going to see autonomous cars until the regulation is ready for them.
“The European Union put out a good first attempt to define self-driving in 2019, and Japan has changed a lot of its traffic laws to allow Honda to start putting level three cars on the road.
“This will only happen when the legal framework is defined. Otherwise, you have the massive legal issue of who’s at fault in a crash. There’s got to be an effort in the industry to help create these legal frameworks, and I don’t think it’s too complicated.
“The way I see it, we need to differentiate an autonomous car – a level five car which can do literally everything by itself – from self-driving cars which can drive and brake and accelerate and have situational awareness, but which can’t operate constantly by themselves and still need the driver to keep their eyes on the road.”
Proposed changes to the Highway Code talk of drivers not having to pay attention anymore. Is there a danger that regulators could jump the gun?
IM: “That is frightening. You can’t put vehicles on the road driving themselves with just computer vision, you need V2X, roadside units (RSUs), Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) – all the beacons that make roads smart. You need 5G infrastructure, so the car is actually guided by connectedness. This has to do with urban planning and smart cities, not with the automotive industry per se.
“The point is not just whether can we make cars autonomous, it is whether we can make them street smart. The way people drive is different in every country. In Rome, people brake all the time. In Kuala Lumpur, there are mopeds everywhere. So, the car of the future is going to have to be adaptive – the AI, computer vision, all the settings will be different depending on where it is.
“There’s a wonderful thesis that asks whether people are born street smart or whether they get it when they move to a big city. I began to think about autonomous cars driving around big urban centres – they’re going to have to get the pulse of how you drive in a certain city. We need to train the system to learn how to integrate itself.
“We’ve only just begun to consider what autonomous is, and we need to have a bold vision as to what it should be. In my view, we need to make cars smart, not just autonomous.”
What are the main risks in the shift to self-driving?
IM: “We need a legal framework. We need integration into the smart city infrastructure, including telecommunications. We also need definitions.
“Cars look fabulous at the Geneva Motor Show, but nobody talks about them in contexts. Should there be designated lanes for hands-free driving? How are we going to deal with a car parc that is not all digital, that still has a lot of older vehicles?
“Automotive is one of the hardest industries to create innovation because you have the pressure of safety, safety, safety at all costs. For example, nobody’s working on voice commands anymore because it turned out they were a distraction, a nuisance.”
Can you address the challenges specific to the UK?
IM: “Yes – your road network. In the UK you have a lot of 60mph rural roads where you can barely see what’s coming. I drive in Somerset and holy cow! It’s only because humans drive in such a super intuitive way that there aren’t more crashes.
“Perhaps it’s also because your driving test is so rigorous. I did my test at school in a small town in Pennsylvania. The police would make you drive around the car park and give you your licence. That was it.
“Then you have London, which is like no other city. It is a Dickensian city with 21st century vehicles running through it. It is a costly challenge to test smart road infrastructure without creating congestion. Where are the budgets going to come from?”
Anything else you’d like to mention?
IM: “I was speaking to a board member at Volkswagen recently and he said that one of the revelations of the pandemic was that it motivated people to own a car, rather than use public transport, for health and safety reasons, and a certain level of freedom and privacy. People have conversations when driving that they wouldn’t have on a train.
“It is also worth highlighting the prospect of the automotive industry partnering with healthcare companies on predictive medicine – keeping track of your vital biometrics to help detect serious diseases. If you’re going to be sitting in this highly technical environment for two hours a day, data such as the way you check your mirrors can reveal early symptoms of things like Alzheimer’s.
“Connected cars will add another layer of personal profiling and data authentication. Digital fingerprinting companies will be able to see that it’s me on my usual route, doing what I normally do. The cybersecurity will have to be very strong though. Imagine somebody hacking into the traffic management system of a future city – that’d be the ultimate hack.”
One of the biggest barriers to the successful introduction of driverless cars is confusion over what constitutes true self-driving.
In America, the controversial autonomous vehicle expert, Alex Roy, has suggested a self-driving litmus test called Roy’s Razor. “Can you get in, pick a destination and safely go to sleep?” he asks. “If yes, it’s self-driving. If no, it’s not.”
While this has some merit, the key word “safely” gets somewhat lost. The internet is awash with less than sensible people climbing out of the driver’s seat with their Tesla in Autopilot.
So, here’s an idea to head off such recklessness… the best way to tell if a car is truly self-driving is to ask this simple question: Has it got a steering wheel?
Audi has apparently been down this road in the thinking behind its new Grandsphere concept car. When in “hands-off” mode, the steering wheel folds neatly away.
Audi Grandsphere concept car with fold away steering wheel
That certainly removes any doubt as to whether the driver is responsible for driving or just a user in charge, to use The Law Commission of England and Wales’ new lingo.
“We will be ready for Level 4 driving in the second half of this decade,” said Josef Schloßmacher, Audi’s spokesperson for concept cars.
“That’s an important timeframe for us and we will interact with authorities in the different continents and countries in all important markets on the homologation of this new technology.”
While somewhat open to the accusation of a fudge – if it is truly self-driving, why do you need a steering wheel at all? – this looks like progress.
Driverless Toyota e-Palette bus hits blind Japanese judo star
A golden PR opportunity for driverless cars backfired badly this week when a Toyota self-driving e-Palette shuttle bus hit a visually impaired athlete at the Tokyo Paralympic Games.
It had all been going so well. A fleet of eye-catching autonomous electric vehicles successfully ferrying competitors and officials around the Olympic village was a major triumph for the self-driving industry, and Toyota in particular.
But this Olympic fairy tale received a nasty reality check when a slow-moving e-Palette collided with Japanese judo veteran Aramitsu Kitazono, apparently ending his medal hopes.
Kitazono had been due to face Ukraine’s Dmytro Solovey the following day, but didn’t take to the mat. Toyota Chief Executive Akio Toyoda swiftly apologised, but the damage was done.
We first covered the e-Palette last year in our interview with Yosuke Ushigome, Director at Takram, who worked on Toyota’s future car concepts.
Somewhat ironically now, given the accident involved a blind man, our headline endorsed “flickering lights to replace eye contact in facilitating trust”. Perhaps audible warnings are also warranted.
Tokyo Paralympics Toyota e-Palette
“Throughout the development process, athletes, especially Paralympians, helped us understand how the e-Palette could be adapted and upgraded to better meet their needs for simple, convenient and comfortable mobility,” said Takahiro Muta, the project’s development leader, in 2019.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Last December, the idea of these autonomous vehicles playing a practical role at this showcase sporting event was enticing, to say the least – some questioned whether it would even be possible.
Now we are left with Toyoda’s grim assessment of the incident. “It shows that autonomous vehicles are not yet realistic for normal roads,” he said.
Use of the e-Palette fleet was suspended for several days but has now resumed.
