Smart city research and how cars will fit in
Roads are lagging behind cars in adopting smart technology. Everyone will benefit when they catch up.
It’s time for the city to catch up. For years, car makers have been kitting out the latest models with ever more intelligent driving assistance systems. But the urban areas where so many people live, work and drive aren’t up to scratch.
It’s become common for car makers to incorporate car-to-X technology (where the car communicates directly with other vehicles, or with trac lights and road signs), and now 5G connectivity is becoming standard. Audi, for example, has a trac light information system available in production cars you can buy now, to help you deal more eciently and economically with changes from red or green. But with smart trac lights installed in very few cities, its contribution is minimal.
Similarly the new Mercedes S-Class is prepared for Level 3 autonomous driving, where the car can boss certain critical functions. But technological and legislative lag from city and highways authorities means most of that tech can’t be deployed, aside from a remote valet parking system. And even then, it’s only available in prepared and connected locations such as a multi-storey car park at Stuttgart airport.
JLR is one of the companies aiming to do something about this by investing in and partnering with groups conducing smart city research. The Future Mobility Campus Ireland (FMCI) in Shannon has seven miles of live roadways with a carto-X-equipped trac light junction, 5G cellular network towers and a parking area designed to stress test autonomous parking and charging. The FMCI’s location has benefits of its own; the air trac control tower at neighbouring Shannon airport helps with drone tests – great for your Amazon delivery of 2030.
FCMI testing teams have access to 280 miles of connected motorways. ‘The test bed provides an opportunity to test in the real world and help answer some of the questions posed by the future of mobility in a collaborative and ecient way,’ says FMCI boss Russell Vickers. JLR’s involvement means it can step up its connected and autonomous vehicle development; for years it’s been trialling various technologies at the MIRA proving ground and in Milton Keynes with UK AutoDrive, but there is more technological capacity at the FMCI site.
The Midlands Future Mobility (MFM) project has been working on something similar, liaising with partners including Siemens Mobility to prepare roads, including busy Coventry,
Birmingham and Warwick. MFM predicts that the autonomous vehicle economy will be worth more than £62bn by 2030, and is keen to encourage a new wave of investment in the West Midlands – still home to JLR and Aston Martin, but not a centre of car making on the vast scale it once enjoyed.
‘We’re creating an environment to encourage them to set up in the West Midlands for economic reasons,’ says Chris Lane, head of transport innovation at Transport for West Midlands, ‘but also so we can understand the technology and what we need to do as a region to better prepare for it.’
As well as major highways and urban centres, MFM is incorporating rural roads. Here, the priority is research and trials into more tangible technologies first (especially car-to-X) rather than autonomy.
Around the world, the pace of development is slow, but there are examples of real progress. Daimler and Bosch, working with the city authorities of San José in California, announced a new automated taxi service after the city invited tech firms and automotive suppliers to use its roads for testing. S-Class models fitted with autonomous driving technology now drive a fixed route within the city.
‘The project ties in with San José’s extensive smart city objectives,’ says Dolan Beckel, director of civic innovation. ‘It’ll also help us develop guidelines for dealing with new technologies and prepare for the trac system of the future.’
Dr Uwe Keller, head of autonomous driving at Mercedes, adds: ‘It’s not just the automated vehicles that have to prove their mettle. We also need proof that they can fit in as a piece of the urban mobility puzzle.’