I dialled into the "Future of Cars Summit". Here's what they're saying.
Ok, he wasn’t there…
Many of us attend public transport conferences, but how many of us go to car summits?
On Friday, the Future of Cars Summit was held on Zoom. So I dialled in and kept it running in the background for the day.
Here are my notes on what the car industry’s currently thinking.
Uncertainty
Having spent much of my time recently talking to people in the bus and rail industries about the Bus Strategy and the Williams Review, I would say the mood of the public transport sector is one of uncertainty.
Interestingly, that is also true of the car sector.
More than half the conference was spent talking about electrification, but there are huge questions about how that is going to be achieved.
The business case for more expensive electric vehicles doesn't yet stack up (to make the electric vehicle market 'work’ there needs to be a second-hand market, but that doesn’t exist yet) and there are huge uncertainties about charging. Are electric vehicles going to be charged in filling stations or at home? Both require massive infrastructure investment, but they require very different technical solutions.
One of the sessions was headed ‘How are we going to charge 10m vehicles?’ and no-one had an answer.
"Partnership"
One thing that struck me was that their industry is, in some ways, becoming more like ours.
Up until now, there has been an assumption from the car industry that their needs will be provided for without them needing to really ask for it.
Yes, the motoring lobby has campaigned for more and faster roads, but basic roads infrastructure was always going to be there.
But suddenly, the car industry is in the position where they know the future is electric but the charging points simply don't exist yet.
There was talk of an investment gap of several £billion and the need to lobby for more Government funding. There was talk of the need to engage local authorities in partnership and to push for changes to the planning system to enable more charging infrastructure.
In fact, their agenda sounds more like our agenda than I expected. The car lobby is definitely a competitor for scarce local authority energy and funds - but it also means that local authorities and Government can make strategic decisions between modes, as the car sector properly needs something in return.
Electrification
The industry is aware that it has a 'trust deficit with consumers. That's relevant because of the carbon footprint of electric vehicles. The industry is delighted that a fully electric car powered entirely by sustainable electricity has a carbon footprint 50% lower than an internal combustion engine car. On the other hand, they know from their research that many consumers think it is much lower than this; with many consumers not realising that an electric car powered on fully sustainable electricity still has half the carbon footprint of their existing car. There was some discussion about whether the manufacturers would (should?) be honest about the carbon footprint of electric cars.
On electrification, there were some interesting ideas. For example, car batteries could become a huge, national battery. Let’s imagine that it’s very windy in the North Sea and huge amounts more electricity is being generated than the grid requires. Every car user could be sent a notification asking them to go to their nearest petrol station where they will get a free doughnut if they charge their car now. That means that when the wind dies down, every car will already be charged and the capacity will be there to get through the electricity lull.
Driverless cars
This was a British conference and had it been American, there’d probably have been more confidence in the autonomous future. One speaker described Elon Musk’s vision for a fully autonomous vehicle that you can rent out to other people when you’re not using it as ‘simply bonkers’. However, it was noted that the idea that you could rent out your autonomous vehicle was seen as a key part of the justification for the increased price.
This was one of the areas where the perception gap between the public and reality was spoken about. Research shows that a substantial proportion of the public believe that autonomous vehicles already exist. When the public are asked what they want from autonomous, they want to be able to do secondary tasks while driving, such as sleeping or using a mobile phone. This requires at least Level 3 automation, which is the level in which a driver can put their car into an autonomous mode when travelling on a single road without changing lanes. Level 4 and 5 go beyond this, to enable a fully autonomous journey. No vehicles currently offer this. Some have autopilot features that mean the car will ‘drive’ but the driver still needs to be concentrating too.
There was talk of the Government’s repeated rhetoric that they want the UK to be ‘world leading’ on autonomous, but that this just isn’t matched by investment.
Interestingly, there was discussion about how the regulators are holding back on licencing further use of autonomous vehicles because they are simply not safe yet; despite pressure to go further from both manufacturers and the Government. It’ll be interesting to see if the standards of safety that are required from Network Rail are also required of autonomous vehicle manufacturers. As a potential consumer, I would expect no less!
One of the reasons that autonomous vehicles have so far underwhelmed is that, as one speaker put it, 80% of the technology is very easy, 10% is hard but 10% is really hard. The really hard includes things like “what to do if a family of ducks crosses the road?”. That’s easy for a human, but very hard for a car that’s never seen ducks.
It was pointed out that most of the cars that aren’t being trained in China are being trained in the USA, where driving conditions are advantageous. With wide roads and jay-walking laws, it’s comparatively easy to get the cars driving but it doesn’t prepare them for a European city. Incidentally, it also doesn’t always prepare them for the USA. One speaker had undertaken detailed research into the Uber self-driving car crash in Arizona when a pedestrian was killed. They found that the car was programmed to believe that a pedestrian could only be found at a pedestrian crossing. So when a strangely shaped object was seen (the pedestrian was pushing a bike), the car was unable to recognise it as a potential pedestrian.
In the end, it was concluded that maybe the future of autonomous vehicles is about specific routes, not total transformation. This sounds a bit like James Palmer’s plan for the Cambridgeshire Automated Metro: I’m talking to James on The Freewheeling Podcast in a few weeks.
The effect on public transport
One of the potential models for autonomous vehicles is the ‘bonkers’ Elon Musk idea that you rent your car out for the >90% of the time you’re not using it. As one speaker pointed out, this could worsen traffic congestion by adding ‘zero occupancy vehicles’ to the road; as your empty car drives to meet its next client.
Even without autonomous vehicles, there were some warning signs for public transport. Unsurprisingly, the speaker from Zipcar said that they’ve picked up new customers in the last year from public transport as a result of the Government’s guidance not to use buses and trains.
There was also a report on the results of a trial of car-sharing in Glasgow, and the result was that it didn’t take any cars off the road as the users were almost exclusively public transport users, not existing car users sharing a car.
The speaker from the AA reported a backlog of 26,000 young people waiting to take driving tests in the AA driving school.
Conclusion
Overall my take was that the car industry is in a position of huge uncertainty and confusion. The old normal has gone but no-one has any real idea what the future looks like. Car-sharing has had a short-term boost from the pandemic which is bad for public transport but, equally, the car industry now needs intensive support from Government for the first time - both in cash terms and policy terms.
I would say this, wouldn’t I, but given that support is needed, now is the time to push for road pricing as part of the deal.
