Just in CASE: What’s happening in automotive technology – and why most commentators get it wrong
Article Gary Anderson
Images Daimler Global Media
At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sajjad Khan, member of the Divisional Board of Mercedes-Benz Cars, CASE and vice-president for Digital Vehicle & Mobility, discussed the future of mobility as it is visualized at Mercedes-Benz, presenting the four main themes of the company’s research: Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric powered.
The entire automotive technology community agrees these are the four most important technology trends that will affect the automotive and truck-transportation industry in the future, and there is a general shared vision of what that future will look like.
However, in my opinion, this emphasis on the long-term future may be understating the time required for realization of the vision, may be understating developments that are already having a positive impact on personal and goods mobility, and may be misstating what the future will actually look like.
A positive vision of the future
Like those memorable World of the Future pavilions that were a mainstay of world’s fairs in the 1950s, the vision we often see in the presentations about the future of transportation by auto manufacturers and the suppliers of the sensors, software and equipment used in their prototypes is attractive, efficient and pollution-free.
Connected – On the highways of the future, we see convoys of automobiles and trucks flowing together with only a few feet between them, connected with one another through software that controls their motion and senses changes in highway direction and topography. In the cities, there are no stoplights, and vehicles move seamlessly in all directions through the intersections because each vehicle can sense the presence of all other vehicles as well as being connected with a central grid controller.
Autonomous – In this future, vehicles don’t have drivers, but are totally autonomous. Passenger vehicles drive themselves based on destinations input by passengers or the location of pedestrians who wish to hail a ride; delivery vehicles automatically route themselves to their destinations on an optimal route based on the packages that have been loaded into them by robots at their terminals.
Shared – Because of all this optimization and the higher cost of individual vehicles, in this future no one but the very wealthy owns a private vehicle. Instead, people pay for the use of their vehicles and corporations pay for the cost of transporting goods based on actual use. Those vehicles that are owned privately, used by people who don’t want to wait for transportation or share their vehicles with people they don’t know – very much like today’s private jet airplanes – must be totally compatible with all the other vehicles on the road and be autonomously controlled through the common grid and by interaction with other vehicles.
Electric – In this future world, there is no pollution from transportation because all vehicles are electrically powered, recharging at their own terminals or at public charging points, with the few privately owned vehicles recharging off solar arrays on the roofs of condominiums or private residences. Power to the vehicle terminals and public charging points, of course, comes from renewable energy sources including wind farms, solar arrays and geothermal generating stations.
Debunking the vision
Technology specialists and journalists aren’t quite ready to buy this vision. In a recent article in Deloitte Insights, Craig Giffi, Joseph Vitale Jr. and Ryan Robinson discussed the reasons why the “utopian vision of the mobility revolution” needs to be tempered. Looking at each of the four technology themes, they believe there are some obvious flaws in the concepts.
For this vision to be realized, the authors noted that nearly all of the vehicles on the road have to be connected and autonomous in order to operate together. To make a dent in vehicle pollution, the majority of automobiles must be battery powered. So, the first challenge is the size and longevity of the current vehicle fleet.
Today, only a very small fraction of the global vehicle fleet has anything resembling the technological content of the vehicles that are part of the future vision, and the average life span of a new vehicle will be greater than 10 years. Even assuming for the sake of argument that every aspect of the required families of technologies could be installed in vehicles currently in the advanced stages of planning for introduction in 2024, we are more than 15 years away from realization of the vision.
Consumer resistance is another constraint on the introduction of autonomous and shared vehicles. Though percentages have improved since the first poll in 2017, nearly 48 percent of consumers in the United States, Japan, Germany, Korea and India responded that they do not believe that autonomous vehicles are safe. Widely disseminated reports of the few fatal accidents that have occurred do not help the situation. In addition, the legal issues of who is responsible for an injury or death caused by a driverless car – the manufacturer, the system designer or the owner – are often cited as a deterrent to having fleets of driverless vehicles on public roads.
Sharing use of vehicles rather than owning one outright is likewise a deterrent to realization of the rosy vision of the future of mobility. Initial acceptance of renting vehicles by the hour, such as the Car2Go systems introduced by Mercedes-Benz in carefully selected test cities, as well as the rapid uptake of Uber and Lyft transportation when those systems became available, is now declining. It turns out that only a few regional areas are appropriate for pick-up-here and park-there fleets of rental cars, so once the best areas were taken, additional penetration of more dispersed regions became difficult. Likewise, we are beginning to understand that the car-hailing companies weren’t inventing something new, but simply introducing conveniences in arranging and paying for rides that the taxi fleets should themselves have adopted more quickly.
Development of needed infrastructure and enabling technologies are deterring penetration of electric vehicles, the electrification element of the vision. Even the most optimistic of engineers believe that we still need additional breakthroughs in battery design and technology in order to build vehicles that can not only be produced and sold at a profit, but can be sold at a price that, fully loaded, is competitive with internal-combustion vehicles being produced today. And beyond that, some estimates indicate that we will need at least 10 times the number of current charging points – with a supporting expansion of the supplying grid – to be able to charge an entire global fleet of electric-powered vehicles.
The future is here
When we challenge the entire thrust of technology development by challenging the long-term vision, I think we’re missing benefits that are already being realized.
As freelance automotive journalists writing for newspapers and magazines, my wife and I have been driving the very latest models of vehicles from all manufacturers as our primary mode of transportation for more than 20 years. We can say with absolute certainty that the launch of CASE technologies, most pioneered by Mercedes-Benz, has already made a major improvement in automotive safety, convenience and efficiency, even though each individual change was controversial when first introduced.
We now simply expect that the automobile we’re driving will have advanced stability systems and traction controls, intelligent cruise control with distance monitoring, lane departure and blind-spot warning systems, collision mitigation with emphasis on pedestrian sensing and commonly active lane-keeping assistance. Every single one of these separate systems has been developed as part of the manufacturers’ long-term quest for the goal that is labeled – erroneously, I think – “self-driving cars.”
The fact is that with these technologies, we are better drivers for two reasons: they help alleviate the tedium of routine driving, especially over long distances and in heavy traffic, and they help us respond in emergencies quickly and more correctly than we would be able to manage ourselves.
There’s no way to measure the collisions, injuries and fatalities that have already been avoided because the driver was alerted to a car in the blind spot or a pedestrian stepping out behind the car, because a drowsy driver was awakened before losing control of the vehicle, or because a car didn’t spin out of control due to loss of traction on a slippery surface. My wife and I can personally attest that these situations happen more frequently than anyone would like to admit, and certainly more frequently than they know.
A more realistic alternative vision
In spite of all of the obstacles to realization of the CASE vision as it is being presented, there is nevertheless an argument to be made that a more measured and important set of changes in modes of mobility will be taking place in the foreseeable future.
Within the next 10 years – perhaps sooner – I believe we will see full-scale CASE systems implemented in major city centers. Traffic in the largest global cities – London, Berlin, Paris, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo and maybe a few others – is rapidly becoming almost unacceptable due to population growth, leading to congestion, pollution and safety problems.
It seems very likely that within tightly constrained areas, these cities will replace personal transportation, public transit and private delivery systems with systems similar to the Mercedes-Benz Vision Urbanetic shown at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. They will do so because a city government has the ability to make such drastic changes in order to save lives and reduce pollution, and because there will be no other cost-effective approach to inner-city transportation.
Similarly, we can expect to see the introduction of CASE systems for improved safety and cost efficiency in over-the-road cargo trucks. With agreed specifications among manufacturers and fleet owners for transponder connections among trucks, combined with autonomous driving systems installed in individual trucks, routine operations can be carried out much more safely with reduced operating costs. Equally, under conditions that can lead to loss of control of a big rig, a vehicle stability system can take corrective action better and more quickly than even the most skilled and attentive of drivers.
With regard to electrification and shared transportation, we definitely err if we look at everything only through the lens of what’s happening in the United States. Instead, we should look at China. With gridlock and pollution growing, especially in major population areas and with limited penetration of automobile ownership – and with a centrally planned economy – we can expect China to take the lead in both battery-electric technology and the debut of shared solutions to personal mobility. As that huge market finds its way to cost-effective solutions, expect North America and Europe to take advantage of those technologies.
No, we may never see an entire transportation system based on interconnected vehicles without drivers, shared rather than personally owned and powered by electricity. I know for certain that I won’t live to see anything close to that. I’m also pretty sure that it will never happen in quite the way it’s pictured on the vivid animations that accompany gee-whiz technology presentations. On the other hand, the quest for improved technologies in each of these four areas is already paying off in achievements that we don’t fully appreciate. It will continue to do so for as long as surface transportation is a part of human lives.
AT CES, Sajjad Khan, member of the Divisional Board of Mercedes-Benz Cars, CASE and vice-president Digital Vehicle & Mobility presents “We Drive the Future: Digital Innovation and Mobility.”
Daimler/Bosch pilot service for automated on-demand ride-hailing will begin operation in San José, California, in the second half of 2019.
The new Freightliner Cascadia, the first partially automated series production truck on North American roads, made its world premiere at CES in Las Vegas (see page 14).
Also in Las Vegas, the autonomously driven, electrically powered Mercedes-Benz Vision Urbanetic concept vehicle offered free rides on the Las Vegas Strip (see page 10).