Autonomous Vehicle Engineering - November 2019 - 12

Burns

Cover Story

FIG. 2- The road to automobility. The outer circles represent all of the places one could go under all times and conditions
with all ground transportation modes. The yellow circles represent the use cases that will be served by each automobility
generation. The blue doughnuts represent the rest of the market being served by human controlled modes.

This means the quest for automobility leadership becomes the quest for safety leadership, which
is exactly the way it should be: market forces driving
safety and safety driving market performance.

Mature automobility - what's at stake

My perspective on the mature age of automobility is
conjecture based on my experiences in the auto and tech
industries and what I have learned as a student of transportation and innovation. I know such speculation will
likely prove to be wrong in some respects. Nevertheless,
the six defining features of mature automobility shown
in Figure 3 are what I see when I "connect the dots" for
automobility. This is my best foresight at this time.
Automobility will be significantly safer than
automobiles for all road users. Transportation service
providers will be required to meet safety standards and
regulations emerging as this new industry matures.
Nearly all trips will be supplied by transportation services using autonomous EVs. This will result
because the value offered by these services will far
exceed the value of owning and operating a car due to
the compelling experiences and relatively low cost per
mile of automobility. Riders will subscribe to a service
and pay for shared and exclusive use of vehicles by trip,
hour, day, week, month or year. You will not need to
focus on driving, look for parking or stop to buy gas.

12 November 2019

You will avoid the hassles of shopping for, insuring,
financing and maintaining a car. You will be picked-up
at your door at a moment's notice and safely dropped
off precisely at your destination. And, you will likely
end your ride feeling better than when you started it.
The transportation service market will have differentiated segments for people and goods - from value
to premium experiences; urban to rural settings; from
short one-rider to long family trips, and from local
delivery to long-haul trucks.
Vehicles will be owned and managed primarily as
fleets with customer experience, service quality and
cost per mile being the bases of competition. These
companies will optimize lifetime fleet utilization
and cost. They will use past and real-time data and
advanced analytics to continuously improve operations, enhance customer experiences and optimize
cost per mile.
A penny per mile will matter a lot, whether earned
through higher pricing (from better experiences) or
saved through lower cost (from better operations and
vehicles). To illustrate, a penny per mile is $3,000 for
a 300,000-mile-life autonomous EV and $30 billion a
year for the 3 trillion miles Americans drive annually.
Operational excellence will be essential for
automobility service providers to prosper. Managing
transportation operations is challenging given the

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE ENGINEERING

Autonomous Vehicle Engineering - November 2019

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