Saturday, July 17, 2021

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="74" height="16">   2021 TRB Annual Automated Road Transportation Symposium

July 12 -> 15, "..."  Read more  Hmmmm...I haven't been able to find a public source for any of the content from the symposium but there were at least three sessions (of the few that I was able to attend) that were really good.  One was B-101- An inside Look at Policy-Making for Automated Vehicles, moderated by Baruch Feigenbaum of the Reason Foundation.  Pay particular attention to the insights offered by Kevin Biesty of Arizona DoT.  So far, no one in the world has done it better.

A second one was B204-Inclusive by Design: Creating an Equitable and Accessible Automated Future, moderated by Charlotte Frei.

The third was Richard Mudge's   B402- Shark Tank: Everything from Free Freight to AV for Low-Income Travelers to how many AV Firms will Survive?. (Spoil alert... the answer is  [log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="16" height="15"> . Selika Talbot's presentation was absolutely fantastic.  See PodCast/ZoomCast below for a discussion of parts of this session. Fred and I hope to do PodCasts/ZoomCasts with Selika and Kevin in the coming week.

Hopefully TRB will broadly distribute the recorded videos of these and the other sessions.  One caution is that even in this community there is substantial confusion introduced over terminology which ends up having people talk by rather than with each other.  This was an "Automated Road Transportation" symposium.  One aspect of road transportation is the fundamental role of the human driver.  It is very different than that of elevators that go from A to B without any direct human driver/operator intervention.  The customer only tells the elevator what floor to go to.  Everything else in the up/down mobility process is automated within the elevator's Operational Design Domain (which is usually in a shaft, stooping only at designated stopping locations (floors) with centimeter accuracy but only when when sufficient power exists to perform the various operations.  (Note: "Level 5 elevators" (operate under any power-available condition) will "never" exist.).  It is easy for us to see the phenomenal difference in the societal value that can be achieved in elevators that deliver safe, shared-ride, on-demand 24/7 mobility, indiscriminately to essentially everyone.  Unfortunately, precious little of that broad societal value can be achieved unless the elevator's safe operation can be achieved without a human operator/driver. 

This is a bang-bang situation.  Either you have it or you don't.  Coming close doesn't cut it.

It doesn't mean that human operated elevators don't deliver value to individual owners.  My neighbor across the street has a dumbwaiter in her house that she and her husband control manually to move things including themselves up and down in their house.  Works great.  Real value. They both remain capable of performing the manual operations for themselves and if they charge themselves for the labor, they gain that charge so the transaction nets to zero labor cost.  charge themselves .  While some benefits (comfort & convenience) might be gained by them by automating some of the operating functions, full automation would be silly unless at least some number of neighbors would improve their quality-of-life if only they could easily go up and down in their house.  That latent demand for improved quality-of-life does exist in tall buildings.  It's been consumed in a large part because elevators became operatorless and not just operator assisted.  Shared and not quite door2door shortcomings are endured.  24/7, on-demand, affordable (especially for the rent payer on the "14th" floor.  So much so that they just pick up the tab for the elevators that deliver accessibility to/from the "14th floor") are the fundamental mobility attributes that totally dominate the competition for mobility afforded by the stairwell.  Without the elimination of the operator/driver, the 24/7, on-demand, affordable trifecta is not deliverable to anybody. 

Way too often during the Symposium automation that explicitly requires the continued presence of a driver and is only at best a comfort & convenience feature  as ascribed benefits that accrue only for systems that achieve safe driverless operation.  There is no getting away from it, automation that assist drivers is radically different than automation that replaces drivers.    Hopefully next year we can have 2 AV conferences.  One that focuses on automation to assist human drivers and one that focuses on technology and deployments that replaces the driver. 

As far as connectivity goes, we need to realize that it is a nice2have, not a need2have.  Since it can only deliver value among pairs of adopters, it struggles getting started by itself when it needs to find a partner.  Unfortunately, road vehicles have performed well for more than 100 years without much connectivity and automation at this point is saying: you aren't much help and we can't afford to carry you along.  Alain

Sunday, July 11, 2021

Friday, July 2, 2021

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="174" height="24">  Sociology not technology will decide the electric car race

J. Thornhill,  June 24,  "Brimming with epic successes and spectacular failures, the early history of the motor car industry offers clues about its future, too. As so often during technological revolutions, initial bursts of fast and furious experimentation by wild-eyed pioneers are followed by waves of industry consolidation by more sober corporate types.

So it was in the US from the 1890s, when scores of obsessive entrepreneurs launched the modern auto industry. Over the next few decades they founded hundreds of companies manufacturing thousands of different models. In the words of one historian, these dedicated enthusiasts competed in a “drastically Darwinian” world and seemed to prefer “to go broke making automobiles than get rich doing anything else”, a tune which resonates again today.

But the development of capital-intensive mass manufacturing methods, the Great Depression and the second world war thinned out the competition. By 1950, the industry was dominated by just three giant corporations: General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, which between them accounted for about three-quarters of global production.

Today, the car industry is opening up once again to new entrants amid another technological convulsion as electric and connected vehicles — and maybe eventually autonomous cars — replace combustion engine motors driven by humans. As this revolution unfolds, we are seeing another burst of creative competition as entrepreneurial start-ups and tech companies flood into the market. ...

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="156" height="24">  Are self-driving cars safe? Highway regulator orders industry to cough up the data

“Nobody should push back on this,” Princeton’s Kornhauser said. “We don’t know what we don’t know, we don’t know what works and doesn’t work, and this allows us to begin to know that.”..."  Read more  Hmmmm... I couldn't have said it better myself. 😁 Alain

• Safe-driving Cars (Automation of Collision Avoidance on cars that we drive all the time.  Societal benefit is improved Safety),
  
• Self-Driving Cars (Automation of Steering and Braking functions some of the time, in some places, but always requiring driver supervision. Societal benefit is Comfort & Convenience (and NOT any substantive Safety improvements), and
  
• Driverless Cars able to go from some origins to some destinations at some times without a driver or attendant on board.  Societal benefit is delivering affordable high-quality mobility for almost anyone (and some/many things), from those origin-destination-time combinations.  (period!  Again, safety is a floor, not a substantive value proposition.)

Elon delivers, every day, "self-driving Tesla" with his autoPilot and FSD features.  They deliver very good "Comfort & Convenience" to Tesla owners as long as the driver continues to do their part... always supervise the Tesla's automation.  Cadillac also does it with its SuperCruise, Subaru with its EyeSight,  Mercedes with its 997 package, and ...

Automakers, Mad Men and modern day commercials seem to make it a habit to oversell and over promise.  I admit, Elon may well be at the asymptotic limit of that distribution, but everyone knows that he's way out there.   We consider him entertainment, just as we consider all the money we loose on Fan Duel and in Vegas to be an entertainment expense.  Caveat emptor

M. Sena, June 2021, "...Mobility-as-a-service would provide the business model to tie everything together, perhaps as an extension of your phone/broadband subscription. Private car ownership would soon be a relic of a bygone age.

This is an interesting narrative, but is not a correct one. Even before COVID-19 changed how people have been living outside of China since Friday, the 13th of March 2020, the picture of everything happening in high density cities was a rumor that companies like WEWORK spread to build their houses of cards. ...

One effect of changes that have occurred in where people live and work in and around big cities is a phenomenon that was already well underway before the pandemic but has sped up: the demise of inner city buses. I wrote about this in the December 2018 issue of THE DISPATCHER, Is It Time to Throw the Bus Under the Bus?. I wrote:
We need to start thinking outside the bus. If a city is serious about providing a useful bus service, it needs to run them everywhere and often, including at night. It must, therefore, get rid of cars driving and parking on its streets. ..

One effect of changes that have occurred in where people live and work in and around big cities is a phenomenon that was already well underway before the pandemic but has sped up: the demise of inner city buses. I wrote about this in the December 2018 issue of THE DISPATCHER, Is It Time to Throw the Bus Under the Bus?. I wrote:
We need to start thinking outside the bus. If a city is serious about providing a useful bus service, it needs to run them everywhere and often, including at night. It must, therefore, get rid of cars driving and parking on its streets. ... What cities are doing today all over the world is neither providing an adequate service to their citizens nor using the money allocated for transport in a cost-effective way...

Bite the bullet and get private cars off the big city streets
The reasons that people who live in cities began to buy cars was that they needed them to get to their jobs, the ones that began moving out of the cities in the ‘60s to ‘campuses’ where there were no transit links. Then they needed them to drop off their children to day care centers since both parents worked. Then they needed them to drop off their older children...

As I said, it is not buses that will meet the need. Neither is it roads filled with taxis. There are taxis offering rides in Trenton and Scranton, but they are not replacing buses because they are too expensive and are often unavailable when demand for them is highest. The Uber/Lyft model can be better at meeting demand, but they are still too costly..."

Read more  Hmmmm...   Enjoy the whole issue.  It is enormously well written! Also listen/watch the SDC Pod/Zoom Cast 216- below with Michael.  Alain

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="50" height="39">  The Costly Pursuit of Self-Driving Cars Continues On. And On. And On.

C. Metz, May 24, "...  So what went wrong? Some researchers would say nothing — that’s how science works. You can’t entirely predict what will happen in an experiment. ... It's not an experiment if you can predict the outcome.  Why bother doing it??? 

More importantly, Mother Nature is involved and you don't know what she is going to throw at you.  Which is why simulations are not the complete answer...  They'll only regurgitate what you told them to do (which is somewhat useful because they implicate together the things that you thought you knew, giving you new insights.).  The challenge is, She's not involved in the simulation but She is every time you do it...  But that's life and that's what makes it exiting and worth living....  The self-driving car project just happened to be one of the most hyped technology experiments of this century, occurring on streets all over the country and run by some of its highest-profile companies....

Self-driving tech is not yet nimble enough to reliably handle the variety of situations human drivers encounter each day. It can usually handle suburban Phoenix, but it can’t duplicate the human chutzpah needed for merging into the Lincoln Tunnel in New York or dashing for an offramp on Highway 101 in Los Angele  ... True!   But getting it to work in the Nevada desert and then Pheonix is an enormous accomplishment.  Frank didn't just roll out of the womb and make it in New York. He also went through "..the blues..." where he could actually sing and be appreciated in the "..small towns..." before he made it in NYC.  It took GM about '12 seconds' to realize that the required human chutzpah was way to much to get started and they were outathere.   

“If you look at almost every industry that is trying to solve really, really difficult technical challenges, the folks that tend to be involved are a little bit crazy and little bit optimistic,” he said. “You need to have that optimism to get up every day and bang your head against the wall to try to solve a problem that has never been solved, and it’s not guaranteed that it ever will be solved.”  ... Absolutely true. By definition! (I also like to say that you need to be fundamentally stupid; else, you would have known how hard it was going to be and you would have just played golf or video games in your parent's basement...)

“These cars will be able to operate on a limited set of streets under a limited set of weather conditions at certain speeds,” said Jody Kelman, an executive at Lyft. “We will very safely be able to deploy these cars, but they won’t be able to go that many places.” ... Yup!! There is absolutely nothing bad about that.   Go someplace else.   It doesn't need to be much tougher that "Chandler". It doesn't really need to be any "bigger" than "Chandler".

Waymo needs what Chandler doesn't have.. Customers ... Definition: folks whose quality-of-life can be substantially improved by what Waymo's Technology can readily deliver today. )

That's the market side of this initiative that Silicon Valley seems to have forgotten.  Cool Technology doesn't happen, just because it is Technology.  Technology happens because it is Cool.  Cool is the value proposition, not Technology: else we'd have Segways and people wearing GoogleGlass all over the place. 

Assisted Driving (what I call Self-drivingCars, or, sorry, SAE Level 1 and Level 2, or Tesla AutoPilot) are Cool (That technology delivers Comfort and Convenience to those that can afford and wish to buy cars).  The buyer/customer just relies, for the most part, that engineers are making sure that the Technology works.  Customers demand that the Technology adds to what they already enjoy (Cool).  Their attention span is really short.  The "lipstick" wears off quickly.

For Driverless... not so much Cool in Chandler.  Maybe as a fling, or a tale, but actually, the negatives, largely outweigh the positives, think GoogleGlass.  Few move or stay in Chandler unless you have a car (~70% Households have 2 or more cars). 'everyone' has their own car.  So while the Waymo technology might work in Chandler, it doesn't have enough Waymophiles (customers for whom Waymo substantially improves what they already have for themselves) to make it a Go. 

However, take "Trenton".  70 % of the households have one or zero cars.  Many more Trentonians have the opportunity to appreciate the incremental value that Waymo will bring to their lives.  They will more easily become Waymophiles if Waymo delivers in Trenton what Waymo has well demonstrated the "Cool" that it can deliver in Chandler.  Even if Waymo shuts down until the few roads that it uses are plowed the few times it snows in Trenton.  Trenton is Waymos's (Ford/Argo & GM/Cruise as well) "New York".

In short... While Chandler is an ideal place for Waymo to start getting its Technology working, Trenton is a great place for them to deliver societal value, which is supposed to be the fundamental mission of these Google "X.Projects" ... ..."
...X’s primary output is breakthrough technologies that have the potential to transform people’s lives and become large, sustainable businesses."

It is time that Waymo begins to take what they've accomplished and actually begin to deliver primary output.  "Read more  Hmmmm...  Excellent.  Comments in line above.  Also Listen/Watch PodCast above.  Alain