Published April 20, 2022 | 4 min watch
Key Points
- How transformational could vehicle automation be for our society?
- What are firms doing to accelerate the move towards fully automated vehicles?
- What will the future of driverless vehicles mean for road safety?
- How will firms monetize these new technologies?
Over a million deaths occur globally and there are a hundred million serious traffic accidents every year - over 90% of which are caused by human error. The average speed of a commuter in Europe, including traffic and idling, is six miles an hour, noted Tom Narayan, RBC Capital Markets’ auto analyst, during the 12th session of the 'Navigating the Energy Transition' series. Vehicle automation will therefore be hugely transformational - not just in terms of user experience and safety, but for society overall, argued the panelists, which included Nakul Duggal, Sr. Vice President and General Manager, Automotive for Qualcomm Technologies; Richard Tame, VP of Finance at Aurora; and Tom Fennimore, CFO at Luminar Technologies.
Rethinking the car architecture
Nakul Duggal expects electrification to accelerate the pace at which automakers rethink the physical chassis and the overall car architecture. Vehicles will have multiple lives and owners, forcing a rethink of use cases and the value they can generate.
"We are actually thinking about architectures where there are blades hosting semiconductors that will be connectorized, that will have the ability to be replaced physically over the life of the vehicle. The software that is running on these platforms is highly abstracted, so you can make applications running on the underlying processor," Duggal remarked.
A huge amount of data generated by vehicles can indeed be aggregated with the data sitting in the cloud across various ecosystems, creating efficiencies in productivity, insurance, etc he added.
Towards a subscription model
As a result, the auto sector is likely to shift to a different consumption model.
"Today we consume so much content. We have so many subscriptions that we pay for in our home that we were not paying for five or 10 years ago. It's because the way that technology has entered the home has been seamless, has been faster, has been offered by the same types of ecosystems that we are used to working with on our mobile phones or in our offices. I think the car is going in the same direction," he added.
Aurora’s Richard Tame also expects its customers to subscribe to their services and pay a per mile fee as the company does not own vehicles. A leader in self-driving, Aurora is now entering the truck market, soon followed up by the launch of Aurora Connect for ride hailing. The company has recently struck a commercial agreement to deploy Aurora Drive with powered cars on the Uber network and they have a unique data sharing agreement with them to access price data.
Life-saving technologies
Meanwhile Luminar, which focuses on proactive road safety and highway autonomy, is developing technology that could help save 100 million lives over the next 100 years and 100 trillion hours of productivity, Tom Fennimore explained. In the longer term, the company bets on robotaxis, which he expects to start becoming prevalent at the end of this decade, with full Level 5vehicles on the road in scale.
"To deploy highway autonomy, you need a long-range LiDAR that works. You need to be able to see out 250 meters, because what that allows you to do is bring a passenger vehicle to a safe stop if it detects an object in its way," he pointed out.
There will, undoubtedly, be many regulation hurdles to overcome and consumers will need to be educated to embrace this technology. Another challenge is costs.
"There's a computer, there's sensors, there's a Lidar. This is still early in its life. It's not being produced at a large scale. So, on a unit cost basis, it's expensive today," Richard Tame acknowledged.
Tom Narayan
Equity Analyst, RBC Capital Markets