Self-Driving Cars And The Future Of The Fleet
By Brian Albright, Field Technologies
Autonomous cars are coming, and they are likely coming soon. New research (The Future of Autonomous Cars) from Berg Insight predicts that the first self-driving cars will debut on the road in 2020, and that the total number of new registrations for autonomous cars will have a CAGR of 62 percent from 0.2 million units in 2020 to 24 million in 2030.
The active installed base of autonomous cars is forecasted to have reached about 71 million at the end of 2030. These figures include SAE Level 3 and 4 cars, which are those that provide conditional automation or high automation.
Juniper Research has predicted 20 million driverless cars by 2025. Both major ride sharing companies, Lyft and Uber, have announced plans for fleets of autonomous vehicles (with human drivers present, as is required by existing laws and insurance policies).
According to Berg: “It is important to note that autonomous cars are not a single innovation; rather this technology can be seen as a continuum of various levels of autonomy where the amount of driver involvement is the main differentiating factor. Furthermore, several sophisticated technologies must come together to enable a car to safely drive by itself and autonomous cars will therefore roll out in incremental phases. In particular, software for interpreting sensor information and managing the driving logic is key to the development of self-driving cars.”
The self-driving car market includes traditional automakers (who are taking an incremental approach to autonomy) and tech companies that are trying to launch fully autonomous cars.
“These pathways do not contradict each other as different autonomous systems are suitable in different use cases. We will continue to see development from both sides for still some years before the two approaches converge”, says Ludvig Barrehag, M2M/IoT analyst at Berg Insight.
Large numbers of driverless vehicles in a city would reduce congestion, eliminate the need for lots of parking spaces, improve safety, reduce pollution, and generally reduce the need for so many people to own cars they don’t use that often.
Critically, Berg indicates that autonomy could improve vehicle utilization rates – something that should sound appealing to fleet managers and field service companies.
There are a number of ways that self-driving vehicle technology is going to affect field service operations:
- Improved safety – the technology that enables autonomy is already making the roads safer by way of advanced driver assist systems (ADAS), automatic braking, camera- and sensor-based blind spot alerts, and even self-parking vehicles.
- Navigation – Instead of a fleet solution providing directions to a driver, the vehicle can e automatically guided to the job site via the best route.
- Lower costs – There is already research that shows self-driving vehicles use less fuel, but vehicles that don’t require a driver could help cut down fleet sizes because (at least in some vertical markets) the vehicle wouldn’t have to stay with the technician at all times.
- Productivity – Technicians could use commute time to review customer information or repair histories prior to arriving on site, since they won’t have to drive the vehicle.
There are still a lot of questions to be answered, though. So far, driverless technology works best on freeways (where the conditions are fairly consistent). How will that affect Hours of Service (HoS) rules? What does this mean in terms of liability and insurance?
There are a number of other hurdles as well. Current law requires a driver to be in the seat, ready to take over where the current self-driving technology fails. And there are still some key failure points – bridges are a challenge, as are things like bicycles and pedestrians, road construction, and other unexpected obstacles that can’t be predicted with maps and may be difficult to capture with LIDAR or cameras.
The first autonomous vehicle fatality occurred in Florida this summer, when a driver was killed while using Tesla’s misleadingly named Autopilot feature. The technology in the car failed to recognize a large white tractor trailer illuminated by bright sunlight.
The other big challenge is that driverless vehicles only work perfectly if they are surrounded by other driverless vehicles. The mixed fleet on the road presents a significant safety hurdle, because the machine learning/artificial intelligence systems in the self-driving vehicles have to make decisions while driving next to highly unpredictable human drivers.
However long it takes self-driving vehicles to enter the service fleet, technology is going to play a big role in how field service and delivery companies operate going forward. If you have any experience or plans for these types of vehicles in your own fleets, please share your thoughts with us.