Replacing the car

Do you remember your first car? More specifically, do you remember what came with it? The car brought responsibility: you were being placed in charge of this lethal weapon, capable of killing you and anyone around it. It was terrifying. But it also brought freedom: you could now go anywhere, unbound by the limitations of public transport.In the first few months after I passed my test, I experienced both things. I promptly crashed into another car after taking a corner a little too enthusiastically. But I also got to drive my friends on trips, down to Cardiff to get a taste of university life, and out to the countryside for some extreme sledging (Beetles are surprisingly good in the snow). I drove up to Manchester to see my then girlfriend (who promptly dumped me, but that’s a different story).

Expanding horizons

The first car I bought myself a few years after graduating holds perhaps my greatest memories of the freedom a car brings. I had been living in Reading and working in Maidenhead for two or three years when I finally decided it was time to buy a car. Until that point, I had been getting public transport everywhere and that worked fine for me. I bought a car more because I liked cars than because I thought I really needed one. Though I was reaching the stage in my career where I was starting to go to meetings on my own and many of the meeting locations were on business parks outside nearby towns and cities. Hard to access by public transport.Once I got the car though, I realised how much I had been missing. I stumbled across a local lake where you could water-ski and wakeboard – something I had grown up doing. Without a car this facility would have been utterly inaccessible to me. Now I could stick my wakeboard on the passenger seat (not much space in my BMW Coupe) in the morning and detour on the way back from work to the lake. What freedom!

LTN battles

This all came to mind because my neighbourhood is in the middle of an intense debate about traffic and cars. There is a planned scheme, of which I am very much in favour, to trial a low traffic neighbourhood or LTN. The scheme is controversial. Some people don’t like the idea of limiting where cars can go. Some have concerns that the main roads and those bordering the scheme will be negatively affected.I have some sympathy with the latter concerns, which speak to a larger issue of class divides in developing neighbourhoods. The leafy backstreets tend to benefit first from LTNs, with traffic displaced onto main roads that tend to have more flats and fewer private homes. But ultimately, we have to do something about congestion, road deaths, and pollution. And LTNs are what’s on the table.The evidence supporting LTNs is thin, but growing. They have an immediate and very positive impact on the streets where measures are added. In the trial, my street will no longer be a rat-run for cars trying to escape clogged main roads or cut between them. This, I hope, will prevent the street being used as a drag strip: cars frequently top 40 miles an hour (by my estimate – I don’t have a speed camera) down this narrow 20 limit. Over time there is some evidence emerging that LTNs reduce car use overall.

Reducing ownership

What many LTN proponents really want though is to reduce car ownership. They make sound points about the impact cars have on our streets even when they aren’t moving. Parked cars take up a lot of our shared spaces. They make it less safe for pedestrians and cyclists. They frequently block pavements. And they make it harder for kids to use the streets for play.I don’t disagree with any of this. And yet, we currently own three cars. Well, two and a half: two are parked on the street while my EV project takes up our small driveway. One of those cars is practical. It’s the 10-year-old MPV in my wife’s name that carries us (in non-lockdown times) to family gatherings, walks in the countryside, to the shops and to the tip.The others…are not.My little Alfa, ultimately to be replaced by the EV when that is complete, is used for practical purposes once a week, on the rare occasion we need two cars so that I can run one child to dance classes. This is one of those journeys that is notionally do-able by public transport. But doing so would mean writing off my afternoon (I couldn’t get there back before having to turn around again), and be very costly. The bus fares are absurd (£6.80 for me and my daughter), and since there is no waiting room, I would need to spend two hours in a rather expensive café nearby.People say owning a car is expensive, but the Alfa currently costs me less than £50 a month to own. It only cost me £1200 to buy and with prices on the rise, I will probably sell it for that or more. That £10 a month over the cost of public transport and coffee buys me eight hours a month of free time and an object that gives me great joy. For all the issues, that still feels like a good deal.For the rest of the week, my Alfa is largely an ornament. It’s not an expensive car, but it is beautiful. Having it there reminds me of that first sense of freedom I felt when I first got my Beetle or my BMW.

The car's the star

The problem for those seeking to reduce car ownership is that we have built our world around cars for the last hundred years or so. Because this is how we have structured our world, cars don’t just bring a sense of freedom, they bring actual freedom over and above what is achievable via public transport or cycling – especially for families. Is there a public cost to that freedom? Absolutely. But a lot of people will feel they are giving up something very significant if they gave up their car. Purging the streets of cars will only serve to further restrict those freedoms to the wealthy, who can afford to store their cars off the street.In the long term, I think we can achieve these ends without disproportionate effects on the less wealthy. Though they are further away than many think, we will, eventually, have self-driving cars. These will make point-to-point travel in relative luxury more affordable than car ownership. They will park and charge themselves in out of town warehouses rather than on streets. They’re not an ideal solution for everything: mass transit still makes more sense for busy routes and intercity travel. But they should offer the freedom we crave with less of the downsides.We can’t wait thirty years to tackle this problem though. We need to find ways to give people the freedom a car brings without its consequences. That means trialling schemes like the LTNs. And it means finding alternatives to car ownership that work today, investing in public transport and cycling infrastructure, minimising the car’s impact on other road users. Car lovers like me might have to make some sacrifices or at the least pay more for keeping a second (or even third) car on the street.But the only way we make rapid progress on issues of congestion and indeed wider environmental issues is to make change a net luxury. Right now, the loss of the car feels too painful to too many people. And any threat to it will continue to be met with anger.

Your next new car might be a new brand, and a new shape

Your next new car might not look like your old one. And it might come from a brand you've never heard of.In 2019, I wrote a report for Auto Trader about the future car and the changes you could expect to see in the coming decades. I based the report on my Intersections process, where I examine the pressures facing and market and how they intersect (hence the name) with global change trends.One of those trends is about choice. Technology has compressed the world, bringing us all closer together. And it has cut friction from the innovation process, opening up access to the tools of creativity to many more people and lowering the cost of manufacturing. The result is that we have more choice now in a huge number of domains. The automotive space is the next one to be affected.

Han solo? Unlikely

I was inspired to write this piece by the announcement that BYD is coming to Europe. BYD is the biggest car maker you've never heard of. A Chinese giant responsible for building everything from passenger cars to utility vehicles - many of them battery powered.BYD's Han looks like a serious Tesla competitor: 376 mile range, 0-60 in 3.9 seconds. And it won't be the last new brand we see.Electric vehicles are likely to go through the same process as mobile phones in the next few years. Where once their incredible complexity meant only a handful of companies could design and build them, as the technology matures and becomes more accessible, more brands enter the market. Most will rely on third party integrators and manufacturers. But some will be design shops who have third parties build their more original designs. And some will assemble their own vehicles from a library of off-the-shelf parts.

DIY EV

I'm experimenting with how accessible the technology behind electric vehicles is myself right now. As I often do to understand the big tech trends, I have taken on a project to get under the skin of the technology. So, I'm trying to build an electric vehicle using recycled and open source parts. If you are interested in that sort of thing, I'm logging my progress over on my new projects site (very much a work in progress - both site and project).What I have learned so far is just how large the electric vehicle supply chain has become. There is a huge diversity in the array of motors, motors, batteries and electronics driving these vehicles. And there is much more to come as the likes of BYD enter the market. With scale comes possibility: more new entrants, white-label manufacture (expect to see luxury, fashion and technology brands launch cars in the future), and more new designs.

Horses for courses

Most of the cars on the road are poorly shaped for the jobs they do. How often do they actually carry four or five people? Or a full load of luggage? How often are they actually in motion? You can use the answers to any of these questions to argue that we should move away from cars, and I think that's a very valid argument. But placed in the context of our 100-year-plus love affair with the car, and the fact that most of our cities (and even countries), are designed around the car, this seems unlikely to happen fast. Instead I think we might belatedly see more variety in the design of vehicles.Right now, single or two-seater pods like the Twizy look pretty quirky and are mostly used as promotional vehicles. But as their cost falls, and the variety of them rises, we might see more and more such vehicles on the roads. In fact, I think we'll see a huge spectrum of different types of electric transport from single-wheelers, to electric juggernauts and every possibility in between. Machines that are more fit for the purpose for which they are typically used. Machines that are affordable to buy (or lease), take up less space, and cost less to run, but that fulfil 90% of the customer's need.The other 10% can be fulfilled by ride sharing services or short-term loans. Your lease might even include access to alternative vehicles for when you need something a bit bigger. Your two-seater covers the commute but you can borrow the 4x4 for the weekend trip to the countryside.

The future for dealers

This presents an interesting future for dealerships, which are usually located within easy reach of suburbs. If we are using a variety of vehicles for different purposes, where might these vehicles live when they are not in use? Dealers might still sell some cars, but they might also start to use their lots as storage space for flexible lease-and-loan schemes that give people access to a broader range of vehicles. With modular parts and continuous software upgrades, dealers might also find themselves keeping fleets on the road for longer. Maintaining, upgrading and customising the customer fleet might continue to be a big part of the business.

#AskAFuturist: Will we ever have driverless cars?

Will we ever have driverless cars? In my #AskAFuturist thread on Twitter, Ian (@ianeditz) asked a rather more negative version of this question: "Why will we never have driverless cars?" Ian is a sceptic when it comes to the idea of autonomous vehicles. In this post I will explain why he is right to be sceptical, but ultimately why cars will indeed drive themselves.

The case for scepticism

A truly driverless car, or autonomous vehicle, must be able to pilot itself in all conditions, with or without passengers. This means every street scenario, from a four-lane highway to the narrowest and busiest city street. And it means every weather situation, from three feet of snow to the glaring sunlight on a mid-summer's morning. If you think this is simple, then you underestimate the incredible capabilities of the human brain, body and senses. We are unbelievably good information processors. We filter huge numbers of signals from the noise around us and react constantly with small adjustments to our speed, road position and more. Replicating and even beating human capability in controlled road conditions is within the bounds of current technological capability. But doing so in a range of conditions to which humans so readily adapt, is much, much harder.So, before we can have truly driverless cars there is first of all a technological challenge to overcome. Can we equip the vehicles with an array of sensors, and a digital brain to process their output, that is better than humans?

Better than human

The key word in that last sentence is 'better'. Autonomous vehicles don't just have to be safer than humans, they have to be much safer. Perhaps an order of magnitude safer or even more. Because from their inception they are fighting a very natural fear in us: the fear of giving up control. It is scary to consider being in a vehicle that can move at life-threatening speeds and that is constantly making decisions about your safety and other people's around you. Every time an autonomous vehicle fails and someone is injured or killed, the date by which most people will accept riding in an AV is pushed back. And sadly, this will happen many more times.This is before we even get into the issues of security. What's scarier than being in a rogue driverless car? Being in one that someone has deliberately hacked to cause harm. Right now car manufacturers are some way behind the curve on internet security. Lots of vehicles have shown themselves to be highly hackable. In fact the very nature of current vehicle electronics, using lots of components, both critical (e.g. the throttle) and non-critical (the stereo) interconnected over a relatively simple networking system, opens itself up to hacking.

Red tape

Because of the incredible risk to life that autonomous vehicles represent, they will naturally be covered by extensive legislation. This will take a lot of time, as legislation does, however much ministers might like to announce programmes of support for the technology and the companies building the cars.The legislation will undoubtedly require insurance cover that is somewhat different to what is required today. That too will take time for the insurance industry to organise. But who buys that insurance? Is it the owner of the vehicle? If so, what grounds do they have to be confident in the algorithms doing the piloting? So, is it the manufacturer of the car? Chances are that they may have bought in all or part of the software running the system, as well as most of the components that make up the sensors and systems on which it runs. So we have a complex chain of liabilities. This is true today, it just gets more complex when a human isn't in charge of the vehicle.It gets even more complex when you look at the trends in car ownership that are likely to be accelerated by autonomous vehicles. In short, most of us are likely to slowly move to greater reliance on fleet services like Uber rather than car ownership, especially in large cities. Car ownership seems to be losing prestige amongst young people who are learning to drive later and later. They are choosing to spend their money more on things to do than things to own (the subject of a future #AskAFuturist post). If a car can be at your door in minutes whenever you need it, and you don't get to drive it anyway, why own one?

The case for the defence

Given all of these good reasons to be sceptical, you might rightly ask why I am so confident that we will - eventually - have self-driving cars. This comes down to four things: culture, cash, safety and good old-fashioned human laziness.

Culture: do we even want cars anymore?

What I mean by culture is that we care less about cars now than we did a generation ago. They aren't the status symbol they once were. And in the context of a changing climate, owning a car - particularly a fast or extravagant one - is looking more and more like an unnecessary luxury, even an insult to your neighbours. I'm still a bit of a car nut but I recognise that fewer and fewer people share my passion. Self-driving cars allow us to get away from car ownership without requiring the large scale investment in public transport, cycling infrastructure, and city redesign that I would love to see, but do not see coming any time soon.

Cash: human drivers are expensive

The second point is more about the wider economy than cash in your pocket, though a subscription to a fleet service could be much cheaper than car ownership. Especially with economies of scale if most people go down that route. Human drivers cause accidents and traffic jams, which cost the economy and the tax payer an awful lot of money. I believe it is inevitable that self-driving cars will eventually be a lot safer than human drivers, saving us all a lot of money - and time.

Safety: computers don't get distracted

That leads neatly to the third point: safety. Of course the greatest cost of failures by human drivers is not financial but the cost of lives, blighted and ended. Self driving cars will be, statistically, a minimum of ten times safer than humans. Probably at least 100 times safer. The lobbying power that will be brought to bear by road safety campaigners once a direct comparison is possible will be hard to resist.

Laziness: we like low-friction lives

Finally, there is good old fashioned human laziness. We have strived for a few million years to apply technology to take friction out of our lives. And what could be more appealing than a service that whisks you from one destination to another with barely any interaction required? Ultimately I think this leads us to overcome our fear.

So, will we ever have driverless cars?

Yes. But, it's going to take a long time for all the reasons that Ian is right to be sceptical. Longer than people think. I don't think the technology will truly be there for a 'Class 5' self-driving car that can operate in all environments and conditions until the end of this decade, and I think it will take a few years after that for all the legal and legislative wrinkles to be ironed out. Along the way, sadly, I'm sure more people will be killed by autonomous vehicles that aren't quite there yet. There will be a public backlash against them. But ultimately, we will accept driverless cars because they make us richer and safer, and allow us to be lazier.##(A reminder at this point is worthwhile, that this is not what I want to be true but rather what I see happening. I can think of better alternatives but that's not the question I'm trying to answer).