Part 20 - Australia, that big island down south, you know, the one with the Kangaroos.

It looks like we are finally getting there.
Parts of Australia are getting into the swing and realising that this is happening here as well.

Automated vehicles are coming down under.

The Australian Road Research Board Principal Behavioural Scientist Paul Roberts has stated that automotive technology is a lot more advanced than people realise and goes on to say that they will be here a lot more suddenly than people realise. The full story is here:
The Australian arm of Carnegie Mellon University in South Australia is planing to build a research centre in conjunction with General Motors Holden to make Australia an export hub for this technology so it's good news for all of us in the antipodes.

We might be a long way away from the rest of the world but we do have some very clever people, if you discount politicians.

I have been saying for some time that many people have under estimated the speed at which this will happen and when it does, it will appear to happen virtually overnight to those that aren't expecting it!

Coming back to a common theme of the past few weeks, we need to look a little deeper at the question of what makes a vehicle fully autonomous.

The normal answer to that is when you can hop in, tell it where to go and sit back and relax, read a book or watch a movie or even become involved in more intimate activities as some other pundits have suggested.

That is fully autonomous.

That then begs the next question. Is the tech behind it safe enough?

At this point there are no standards.

There are a number of ways of sensing what is around the vehicle, be it cameras, radar, lidar and cloud based GPS systems or a combination of all four.

Obviously the more systems you have the less chance of something being missed and when weather conditions are bad the use of all of these can make it as safe as houses to keep driving.

Therein lies the rub. If you base it on one system then you will never have more than driver assist, as somethings either won't be detected or can be incorrectly identified and human intervention is required to analyse the situation. If the driver isn't alert then the system fails and the "driver" pays the consequence.

This was seriously highlighted recently with the death of a Tesla driver, presumably letting the car take full control. With only cameras, the car didn't see a light coloured truck crossing in front of it against a bright sky.

To be clear, autopilot is a great driver assist feature but is a single technology enough when lives are at stake to allow this as the basis for a fully autonomous system?

To use a bad analogy, would you jump out of an aeroplane with only a single parachute with no backup emergency 'shute?

So we come back to the same question, who decides how many systems need to be used and how many of each?

Cost, obviously is a factor but if you buy in bulk then the cost comes down. Tesla model 3 so fr has advance orders in excess of 300,000, so if you have 2 lidars on each that's 600,000 units straight off the bat. Build in the cost for a full production run over the life of the vehicle model and we are talking millions of units.

Given that new products have to cover the development cost in the first few years then they are expensive. However once the development costs have been recovered the manufacturing cost is far lower and economy of scale kicks in and the wholesale price becomes much cheaper.

Why not then have systems in the vehicle from the start. It will add to the base price of the vehicle obviously but think about who will be the early adopters.

These will be the big fleet buyers for taxis services who are lining up to corner the market as soon as the tech is approved for use, and these players have very deep pockets and are prepared to pay a premium to have the safest systems on the road right from the beginning.

This covers the recovery costs and economy of scale starts to kick in from these clients and the rich private buyers and by the time it trickles down to the rest of us plebs, the costs will be far lower. That is if we even need to buy a car at that point but that's another discussion altogether.

Hopefully there will emerge an international body that sets industry standards and we can get the best possible results, we're talking of saving millions of lives a year after all and every single life counts, especially if it's my family.