This post was not influenced by The Apprentice spoilers for next week’s episode…well, OK perhaps it was, but there is a point behind it!
Next week’s challenge sees the remaining candidates design, brand and pitch their own electric driverless vehicle. With the EV influence in the current market and new mobility solution providers across the globe, the autonomous mobility network will be amongst us a lot sooner than you may think.
The truth is, owning a vehicle is becoming less sustainable. What do I mean by this? Aside from toxic fumes affecting our health and damaging the environment, Goggo’s research states that vehicles are parked for 95% of the time, an average car journey consists of 1.2 passengers and as drivers we are wasting just over a whopping 130 hours a year…sat in traffic! I appreciate we all have work and social commitments that do require access to a vehicle, but think of how much money we could save without the ownership of a car - no fuel costs, road tax, insurance, maintenance or service costs.
Some believe manufacturers have already started to implement autonomous driving systems in their vehicles, however they are disguised to us, as the consumer, as “safety features”. From your adaptive cruise control (with stop and go function) to lane assist and collision avoidance… sound familiar? But what’s holding the full autonomous transformation back at this moment in time is firstly the manufacturing side of things, but most importantly the safety and legislation factors.
If we’re living in a futuristic world where we don’t own vehicles, we simply call a car to our location, an autonomous vehicle arrives and we hop in for the journey…who is responsible when things go wrong? Should an obstacle cross the vehicle’s path, is it up to the vehicle to stop or the passenger to take over? Would the passenger need a driving licence to step in or another form of motor qualification to understand how to stop a car? Will driving licences exist in years to come? If it works in the form of a taxi and you’re on your way back from a night out, can you ride whilst under the influence of alcohol? There are so many questions to be answered...
Goggo Network, a European mobility company providing mobility services of tomorrow, are already working across France, Germany and Spain building a autonomic mobility network. Developing the legal frameworks, they’ve recently released a food delivery concept called Goggo CART along with autonomous delivery robots and even a self-driving bus!
So what are we doing about it in the UK? Believe it or not, there are things happening right under our noses! Wayve have been testing autonomous vehicles on UK roads since 2018. With headquarters in central London, the team have been working away on a fleet of Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, pioneering artificial intelligence software for self driving cars. Wayve pride their values around safety and security to build trust within community, by ensuring electronic failures do not cause harm to human life and vehicles can operate with human-like behaviour by conducting vehicle trials safely, reducing risks for other road users. The embodied intelligence is an integrated driving system, learning through semantics, notion and geometry. Considering they built their first robot in 2017, they’ve already secured partnerships with the likes of Ocado Group and Asda, and will be using their technology in delivery trials across London in 2022!
Freakishly exciting times ahead! What are your thought on the driverless mobility revolution?
Wayve’s computer vision system – the “brain” of the car – learns from observing human driving via reinforcement learning. Traditional self-driving systems rely on expensive Lidar sensors, HD maps and heavy testing in a local area, meaning that they are unable to scale. Wayve’s systems have trained in one city and then successfully driven in a new city they’ve never seen before. This adaptability is why they aim to be the first to deploy self-driving technology in 100 cities.
Read the original article here