Buckle up for the future of transport
Hyperloops, flying cars and self-driving vehicles are moving from the drawing board to reality, writes Tom Pullar-Strecker.
The transport revolutions of the past – railways, petrol cars and air travel – have shaped our cities and driven some of the most sudden and dramatic changes in society. So it’s no wonder transport is one of the first things we consider when we think about future technology.
In a few years, people have gone from debating whether electric cars will take off at all, to arguing about whether and when they will be self-driving.
Meanwhile, the leading edge of transport research and development has skipped ahead a mile. Last month, Uber began laying the groundwork for a fleet of autonomous electronic helicopters or drones that would ferry commuters between the rooftops of skyscrapers, bypassing congested city streets.
The company aims to have a commercial service operating in Dallas and Dubai by 2023.
One vehicle that could perhaps do the job is being trialled in – who would have guessed it – New Zealand.
United States company Kitty Hawk, funded by Google cofounder Larry Page, has been testing a self-driving ‘‘flying car’’ called Cora, which can take off and land vertically, in Canterbury since October.
Spokeswoman Anna Kominik said it had settled on New Zealand for the trials after a global search for a jurisdiction that was ‘‘safe, had aviation experience and was a good place to do business’’.
Kitty Hawk is headed by former Google X scientist Sebastian Thrun, who led the development of Google’s selfdriving car and its Google Glass augmented-reality spectacles.
Its website explains Cora ‘‘rises like a helicopter and flies like a plane, eliminating the need for a runway and creating the possibility of taking off from places like rooftops’’.
Kitty Hawk assumes Cora will be used for an Uber-like ‘‘ride-sharing’’ flying-electric-car service, rather than being a modern take on the exclusive corporate helicopter. It won’t be available for sale to individuals, and is instead ‘‘about giving everyone a fast and easy way to get around that doesn’t come at the expense of the planet’’.
However, Kitty Hawk is also trialling a one-person vertical take-off ‘‘personal aircraft’’ called the Flyer, designed to fly up to 10km on a single electric charge.
Compared with drone taxis and hyperloops, self-driving cars might sound positively pedestrian. But Christchurch consultant Roger Dennis is one of a growing number of professional future-watchers who argue they are an advance we can definitely count on.
Dennis forecasts self-driving trucks and cars will first prove their safety in the confines of mines, university campuses, ports and hospitals before being gradually allowed on to public roads by regulators.
Tragedies such as the death in March of a pedestrian in Arizona, who was hit by an Uber vehicle travelling in autonomous mode, will prove only an unfortunate ‘‘blip’’, he believes. ‘‘Driverless trucks have been used in mines for a number of years and, when they remove the human driver, accidents go down and productivity goes up. Human-driven cars kill more people every year than autonomous cars ever will.’’
Self-driving cars may not be given licence to roam all of New Zealand’s eclectic mix of public roads in one swoop. Regulators may instead open up the road network in phases.
‘‘A logical approach would be to say, ‘We think these roads are suitable for autonomous vehicles and there’s another set of roads where it won’t work’. Then, as artificial intelligence improves, you will see more and more roads become certified.’’
The New Zealand Transport Agency is starting to prepare for the arrival of autonomous vehicles (AVs), says one of its managers, Martin McMullan.
Trans-Tasman body Austroads, on which the agency has a board seat, produced a report last year on changes that might be required to the road network. It stressed the benefits of making intersection designs and machine-readable signs ‘‘consistent’’, so they could be reliably interpreted by software.
‘‘Feedback suggests that many AVs will be designed to operate on our road networks as they currently are’’, but existing infrastructure was ‘‘problematic’’ for some manufacturers, the report concluded.
‘‘Roadworks are a key aspect noted to be of particular concern to AV manufacturers and system suppliers. It is necessary to ensure that roadworks become well-planned events.’’
Colin Gavaghan, director of the New Zealand Law Foundation Centre for Law and Policy in Emerging Technologies at Otago University, says it’s only ‘‘human’’ for AV accidents to weigh heavily on our minds.
‘‘I’d wager that one pedestrian death from a driverless car would stand out in people’s minds more than all of the 300-odd road deaths in New Zealand last year combined.’’
People imagine they are safer when in control of a vehicle, and ‘‘no amount of actuarial data can budge that belief’’, he says.
‘‘That said, I’m not sure that we should be settling for ‘a bit better than the status quo’ if it’s reasonable to expect driverless cars to be much safer. I have a vision of a future where car deaths are as rare as air traffic deaths today, and we should be demanding that level of safety.’’
Research firm Bloomberg argues the world is unlikely to run out of lithium before the electric vehicle (EV) revolution is complete, even if it remains an essential ingredient in batteries.
Although not superabundant, lithium is not a ‘‘rare earth’’ metal, with discovered global recoverable reserves estimated at somewhere between 10 million and 40m tonnes and rising – potentially enough to power more than 10b electric cars, according to Bloomberg.
Neither would New Zealand be likely to run out of electricity, according to Electricity Authority chief executive Carl Hansen. ‘‘Electrifying all light vehicles would increase electricity demand by approximately 15 per cent, but this will likely occur over several decades,’’ he says.
‘‘We’re confident that the industry can cope with building generation in a timely way to meet the demand increases.’’
Electricity prices might not even need to go up. ‘‘Over this time period there’s a high chance that electricity prices will decline in real terms due to the declining costs of technology such as small-scale solar generation.’’
The same is true for transmission costs. ‘‘It is possible the average cost of delivering electricity could decline due to higher use of existing network assets, especially during off-peak hours.
‘‘Electric vehicles offer a fantastic opportunity for New Zealand to reduce its transportrelated carbon emissions.’’
There is less agreement on when EVs and AVs may take over. Right now, the switch to conventional self-driven electric vehicles has only just begun.
At the end of May, there were 5984 EVs registered in New Zealand, not including plug-in hybrids, according to the Transport Ministry. That’s up from just 735 two years before