Driveless Title

INTRODUCTION

We live in an age of acceleration. Our understanding of artificial intelligence is growing at an exponential rate, enabling us to automate complex processes, and in the next phase of human history we will witness some of the craziest changes in the way we live, work and relate and very few sectors will be immune from this switch of paradigm.

The century-old industry of transportation is no exeption and will be particularly subject to the impact of new technologies. The new generation of driverless cars will allow us to sleep, work and enjoy some free time during our travels, revolution the way we design our urban spaces, the way we look at vehicle property and much more.

Under the bonnet

How a self-driving car works

The stack is huge, as those who will define the new standard will share a market worth not only billions, but the possibility to lead the revolution. The game is on. It's not only about automakers, it's about behemots like Apple and Google,

ride-sharing companies like Uber, companies with different purposes and resources, all focusing their efforts in order to be the first ones to assemple the bext exemplar of self-driven vehicle.

It's a game that requires strategy, vision, investments on a global scale and a never-ending thirst for technological innovation, that makes the players travel across continents and in order to discover, invest and support smaller companies and start-ups that could be the ones to make a breakthrough up to the 4th level of automation, a fully functional self-driving car.

The future of driving

Carmaker timeline for the autonomous car development

SOURCE: The Fully Autonomous Car Update (2017) by Peter Newman

PLAYERS

We took a picture of this intricate network connecting companies and start-ups from all over the globe. It's safe to say Europe, America, Japan and China will be leading the race towards this utopic future, as the companies with the most advanced technology will be, if not leaders, needed by the contenders in order to compete with each other, like we see with Nvidia. Recent studies pointed the beginning of the next decade as the turning point in the development of driverless cars: the rush-hour has come for all who have the ambition to dominate the market. Everyone is trying to assemble the dreamteam, whose strategy will be the most succesful?

We pushed our network analysis further by integrating the data from the 2017 Navigant Research Report, which outlined the 18 biggest competitors on the market by assigning a score related to the level of technological advancement and release of a fully-functioning AV in the next decade. We can see how our players have adopted different strategies.

PERFORMANCE

Disengagement

Reliability score

Miles per disengagement

We witnessed how companies are trying to get their monopoly over the latest technological innovation, but is this all that matters when it comes to crafting the new commercial self-driving vehicle? By a cross-analysis of the official reports about technology performance we discovered that while some companies are way above others when it comes to software complexity and level, this doesn't automatically lead to a better performance. Every years driverless automakers release a disengagement report that shows the advancement in their vehicles performance, specifically for how long automated cars can travel without human intervention is required. The other datas reported are about the navigation test score, an evaluation of the overall level of technology developed and performance of the car provided by

SOURCE: Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Reports 2016

AUDIENCE

People thinking

So what's the deal with AV? What are the expectations and attitudes of the public towards this close future? Many reports talk about how this revolution of transportation will deeply change the way we conceive transportation, but is the audience ready to abandon car ownership?

Would they trust a robotic taxi or public transport? The developing countries will be the biggest market in the next future and we wanted to outline the difference in attitude between first world and second world countries.

TAXIS THAT ARE COMPLETELY SELF- DRIVING

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION SUCH AS BUSES THAT ARE COMPLETELY SELF-DRIVING

RIDING IN A VEHICLE WITH NO DRIVER CONTROLS AVAILABLE

SOURCE: A survey of public opinion about autonomous and self-driving vehicles in the US, the UK, and Australia by Brandon Schoettle, Michael Sivak

Sharing vs personal car

Future predictions about mobility

Even though the technology is being developed mostly in wealthy western countries and Japan, we still see a certain distrust of AV, possibly due to being still in an embrional phase. Countries like China and India, used to massive traffic congestion, have a much worse response to the questions.

We expect this attitude to change as the world of transportation evolves providing us safer and more reliable options than regular car. This projection shows how inevitable is to find ourselves in a future where we don't own cars anymore, but share, through the use of purpose-designed robotaxies.

SOURCE: The Fully Autonomous Car Update (2017) by Peter Newman

LEGISLATION

Where in the world

SOURCE: autonomousvehiclelaws.com

While many states in America have passed laws to allow testing and even driving AV on public roads, many countries wich are the nest of AV companies still need to approve protocols and legislation to allow their full development and sale. Legislation will be key, as a fully automated net of connected autonomous cars could, in the future, save millions of lives, reduce pollution and allow people to spare massive amounts of time and money.

THE DRIVERLESS RACE

A game of Techs and Tactics