DRIVERLESS CARS ON THE HORIZON ...but India far from ready to embrace this techonological innovation
It was Google that first flagged off self-driving cars. Tesla Motors, GM and Ford soon followed, and now with two bold moves, Uber, the ondemand car pioneer, is fuelling the race to the finish line.
On August 18, it announced a $300 million deal with Swedish car maker Volvo to develop fully driverless, or autonomous, cars by 2021; and also the acquisition of Otto, a San Francisco-based start-up focused on self-driving trucks.
"We have been piloting a programme where friends and family of our Advanced Technology Centre team can request a self-driving car through the Uber app. It's still early days, but we are planning to expand this pilot to the Pittsburgh community," a Uber spokesperson told IANS from San Francisco. Uber will allow people in Pittsburgh to hail modified versions of Volvo sport utility vehicles (SUV) to get around the city.
In May, the self-driving car community was left in shock when Joshua Brown, 40, of Ohio was killed when his Tesla Model S electric sedan crashed into a tractor-trailer while on auto-pilot mode. Despite the tragedy, the backers of self-driving cars still see a great opportunity in an age when 'Time' is a most precious commodity and people are spending too much of it driving vehicles on increasingly congested roads, or looking for parking.
According to experts, passenger vehicles travel a total of 10 trillion miles annually, at an average speed of 40 km per hour. They also estimate that, assuming conservative occupancy, people are spending 600 billion hours in vehicles.
"Most of the autonomous vehicle service providers and manufacturers are trying to free up this time," Thomas George, Senior Vice President and Head of CyberMedia Research (CMR), a Gurgaon-based market research firm, told IANS.
George, however, is clear that it will be quite a while before we see the phenomenon in India. "It will take another generation to make an autonomous vehicle transportation network feasible and widely adopted among the low-automated geographical regions like India, while the US and China could see better adoption within 15-20 years," George told IANS.
To make autonomous vehicles a success, the associated laws, regulations, traffic systems, infrastructure, emergency response systems, data and information handling will also need to undergo a change at a faster pace.
"The scenario does look feasible but the human touch is hard to remove, especially in a country like India where this would also entail managing the issues of a large workforce (drivers, mechanics, etc.) who will need reskilling/fitment in other jobs as we look forward to such scientific marvels in our digital economy," said Gaurav Sharma, Research Manager (Enterprise and IPDS) at the International Data Corporation (IDC).