Part 11 - China, virtually in the drivers seat

In the last few blogs I have  been looking at how things are shaping up in the world for the implementation of this exciting new technology.

What has become obvious is a lack of coordination and cooperation. There doesn't seem to be a concerted effort to make this happen. Governments are doing things on a state by state basis and while a lot of talk is going around about national standards in many countries this does seem to be a long way off . Manufacturers are working on systems independently of each other, as would be expected in the early days of development but standardisation of technology allows economy of scale in manufacturing - required for a wholesale roll out of this across entire countries.
There are many other issues as I discussed last week holding back the technology - at least in the west.

I have written a few times about what is happening in China, and the more I look the more I see things accelerating.

One of the key things in making driver less cars available is the human attitude. In China a recent survey found 75% of people would like to drive in an autonomous car but in the US it's a different story with 75% of people fearing autonomous cars.

China has a lot of reasons to want this technology to work and is using the opportunity to couple this with the development of electric vehicles.

Given that china has massive pollution and congestion problems and estimated road deaths of 200,000 a year, they have a very strong incentive to make this work, and more importantly, because of the political structure they have the ability to make this happen.
More importantly, from a world perspective, they have the ability to make this happen very quickly.

The west is agonising over testing and many experts say that the testing phase will last for many years and untold millions of kilometres before governments allow it legally on the road.

However there is nothing like the real world to put things in perspective.
This is illustrated by an interesting article from the New Yorker which talks about Tesla gathering masses of data from their users driving on autopilot.
This data collected from Tesla in a single day is equivalent to the total mileage gathered by Google cars over the entire testing life - every single day. 
Just to be clear, Tesla cars are logging over  million miles a day in autonomous mode and that is providing free real world data back to Tesla.

Now, imagine the data that can be collected from fleets of cars on the road in China.

Is China leading he world with self driving cars?

China has already come up with a draft road map for the next 3-5 years to have self driving cars on the road and Li Keqiang, automotive Engineering Professor at Tsinghua University is leading the committee.

The draft will define standards including a common language for vehicle to vehicle and infrastructure to vehicle communication. 

This committee has the backing of the powerful government Ministry of Industry and Information Technology which give legitimacy to the proposed standards and a fast track to making it happen.

China also has a raft of new car makers springing up including Future Mobility Corporation Limited.
For a new company it has made large first steps by hiring top BMW designers to work on their cars.

There is a push happening and this article by the Chairman of Zhejiang Geeley shows the reasoning behind the push and how seriously it is being taken. 
From a financial perspective it makes great sense as well and the Boston Consulting group says "China will be the largest self driving market by 2035 taking up to 30% of sales that year."

China leading the push - is that a bad thing for the rest of the world?
Yes and (maybe) No.

If China has a large scale roll out of this technology in the next few years, which is entirely likely, then the standards implemented, refinements made from lessons learnt and the sheer prestige of having these fleets in operation gives them a huge edge in marketing to the rest of the world.
Not to mention the amount saved by using home grown technology rather than importing it.
Good news for China, not so much for the likes of Ford and GM who are struggling to get their test cars on the road due to the lack of standards, laws and legal liability.

On the flip side, there will be a huge amount of technology and data coming out of China which could be utilised to the wests advantage to leverage their own testing and development.
This is if the boom doesn't create a brain drain to Asia and leave the west trying to play catch up.

What this could be is a major shift in technology from the west to the east which from our perspective may not be entirely desirable.

Other Asian countries aren't sitting still either with Singapore to test its first fully automated taxi this year on the streets and wants a fleet running next year.

This is a simple statement but think of the ramifications.
A city state running automated taxis within a year! Johny cab is here....

In a state where owning a car starts at more than $200,000, then a car as a service makes a whole lot of sense. When you consider that they could have 300,000 auto cabs on the road to cater for the population and not wait more than 15 minutes for a ride then it does indeed make a lot of sense.

Last week I ended with the statement Automated vehicles - Who's driving?

Now it may make more sense to say "China - virtually in the drivers seat"

It will be very interesting to see what comes up at the Beijing motor show that opened this week (2016).