Is the future of automotive now in the hands of major technology firms?
There is no doubt in my mind that autonomous vehicles will change the automotive sector, and all the various industries connected with it, beyond recognition.
If all the big-brand, traditional automakers don’t figure out some way of working together to confront this challenge, then any hope of sustained commercial success will fade away.
Imagine a self-driving vehicle that is able to diagnose faults in its own systems and take itself off to the auto repair shop for repairs. This will be a very different place to what we all recognize as the local mechanic’s. It will be far closer to a lab than the rather grubby places we know today, even those with increasingly sophisticated diagnostics. And as AI develops, to monitor and control systems, there are unlikely to be humans there, to either point out or detect the problem.
Perhaps the very idea of people owning vehicles is going to be increasingly superfluous. Why have your won self-driving car parked outside your home when you could access a varied fleet 24/7, choosing alternative vehicles to match each journey’s needs and characteristics? None of the issues of depreciation or obsolescence are yours. None of the maintenance costs are yours – because you’ll essentially be renting access to a constantly upgrading mobile fleet.
It’s easy to see why policymakers would encourage that model. As well as the potential for reducing accidents, it would free up many areas of land that are currently taken up with empty parked cars waiting for their owners to need to use them. It would foster a more efficient use of vehicle stock, lessening the negative externalities associated with both manufacturing and eventual disposal.
Think of how insurance arrangements would change. Perhaps in the self-driving era, the owner of the fleet will bear what many anticipate will be a much-reduced risk, rather than the individual householder.
What sort of breakdown services will we need? Will there even be a demand for those organisations if fleet owners attend to their own call-outs, which would almost certainly have to be handled by more technologically sophisticated engineers, or perhaps a robot arriving in another autonomous vehicle.
If we turn to manufacturing, electric vehicles combined with 3D and 4D printing will reduce not just the number of components that go into cars, but the amount of floor space required to produce them. We will no longer require enormous plants spread across vast industrial estates. Towns and cities currently dependent on motor vehicle manufacture as a main provider of employment, should be making contingency plans.
What’s happening in automotive has a useful precedent in what happened to the music industry around the turn of the millennium. Labels didn’t take digitisation, and the consequent emerging downloading trend, seriously. Before they knew what was happening, Napster and its legion of users had flooded the web with illegally copied tracks.
While Napster was eventually replaced by legitimate online music distributors, those services weren’t devised by the labels. Instead, it was the likes of Apple, Spotify and Deezer – tech firms all – that seized the initiative from traditional players, who somehow couldn’t, or wouldn’t, collaborate to develop their own, shared platform. Such is the price of placing competitiveness above mutual interest.
But just look at how automotive is evolving: Tesla – founded only this century – has been reinventing the basic infrastructure of the car for several years. Now, Google, Dyson and Apple – decidedly non-traditional entrants – are all developing their own electric and/or autonomous vehicles.
Cars are changing dramatically, this recent piece from MIT Technology Review explains how Google’s Waymo team are training the vehicle’s AI with software normally used for fine-tuning algorithms in video games. I think we can all agree that this is a long way from tinkering with rusty carburettors.
If the Renaults, Chryslers and Nissans of this world don’t sort out their differences… if they don’t find ways of collaborating in a meaningful and non-competitive way… they may find that, while they’re squabbling over market share, the transformation of their industry will be taken out of their hands.
