AUTONOMOUS CARS WILL TAKE TIME, AUTOMAKERS SAY

In the past year, Norris McDonald interviewed the presidents of five of the automobile manufacturing companies that build cars in Canada. Here is a selection of quotes dealing with the future of mobility, particularly autonomous cars:

Stephen K. Carlisle

President and Managing Director, General Motors of Canada Ltd. It’s something that’s going to evolve over time. It takes time to get the technology worked out and it takes time to get infrastructure in place to enable this change. It’s going to be a fairly long transition and it’s not going to be everything all at once. The way I look at mobility is since we stood up on two legs we have sought to get better and better forms of personal mobility to get from A to B. And a lot of us just love the feeling of acceleration. I hope we don’t lose that as a species.

Diane Craig

President and CEO, Ford Motor Co. of Canada Ltd. Autonomous vehicles? The technology will be ready. In fact, we have a lot of it now: semi-autonomous features. Our blind-spot monitoring, our lane-keeping aids, adaptive cruise control (which is a really great feature) — all those keep people safe. Crappy weather, good weather, it gives you the confidence. This is just the beginning of what the future will look like.

Jerry Chenkin

President and CEO, Honda Canada I don’t believe it’s that close. We have a massive population of vehicles on the road and for those vehicles to develop into the next generation of technologies, it takes time for that to happen. The technologists are moving much faster than the automotive industry can. Because the development cost of vehicles is so expensive, you can’t keep changing the vehicle that often. Then, the other question is: what do customers really want? I love to drive. I can’t imagine being in a vehicle when I’m not in control of the vehicle, So, where’s the fun if somebody’s driving me?

Larry Hutchinson,

President and CEO, Toyota Canada Inc. Lots of companies are investing in smart, intelligent automobiles. But there are a lot of issues that are not technical issues. Technology is moving very quickly and the ability to do that (produce an autonomous car) will happen. (But) there are lots of other issues around that, about control of vehicles and so on. In the shorter term, the technologies that we are bringing to market today, the Toyota Safety Sense — lane assistance, automatic braking — can really help safety. Fully autonomous? Let’s talk again in 10 years.

Reid Bigland

Chairman, President and CEO of FCA Canada I think it’s critically important that we live in the “now.” What will transportation look like in 25 years? Will we have autonomous driving cars? Will we have smart phones that bring autonomous driving vehicles to our house? That could happen. But this is an industry that has gone through a tremendous amount of capital destruction, so before anybody goes off lickety-split, it’s important to live in the now because there’s a lot of capital destruction in getting from A to B, even if B happens, in retrospect, to be a revolutionary shift in the way transportation is handled. I think that could very well happen but it is a long way off.