Cleaner, Smarter Vehicles

This is car country, whichever way you look at it.  There are about five million cars registered in this country. The car is responsible for about 80% of the vehicle kilometres travelled on our roads, and again as much for the person-kilometres travelled.  In fact, the very way this country is organised spatially has been influenced by the car, just think of the ribbon development along the main N-roads, the vast expanses of suburbia, the office parks along the major highways.  For many, the car is an essential tool in one’s life, used to get to work, to taxi the kids around, to shop for groceries, to drive to the coast, and much more.  Similarly in freight, the lorry is the transport mode of choice, representing about 75% of total ton-kilometres.   

While the car has played a remarkable role in our evolution sociologically speaking (by vastly increasing our personal mobility and hence our autonomy as individuals, our freedom to pursue education, career, leisure activities, etc), today the car’s reputation is, in no uncertain terms, miserable.  Held responsible for most of modern society’s ills, including environmental degradation, chronic health problems, stress, urban decay, congestion (immobility), it seems almost fitting that the industry finds itself in near collapse.  Not surprisingly, the call for modal shift is louder than ever—leave the car at home and walk, cycle or take the tram.  But what if technology could come to the rescue, leading to the emergence of a truly clean and much smarter vehicle?  In fact, as argued in a recent WIRED feature article(1), the current crisis in the automotive industry may end up being just the right medicine.  

The remarkable thing about the car industry is how little it has actually changed since the 1950s and 60s.  Sure, the machines look different and they’re vastly more efficient, but essentially we’re still talking about mainly steel constructions, that run on fossil fuels, and that are entirely reliant on the alertness of their drivers to avoid carnage.  The main difference is that today there are many more of them running about, with the result that we’re only seeing the negative side—the pollution, the congestion, the danger, the noise.  The hierarchically organised automotive industry also has changed little.  WIRED quotes Henry Chesbrough, executive director at UC Berkeley's Center for Open Innovation; "It's as if the computer industry were still dominated by Wang and Data General and DEC, and they were still selling minicomputers."  What the industry needs is a solid dose of disruptive innovation, similar to what happened to the computer industry when the PC, with its more open and collaborative business model, emerged.   In the words of Mr Mann; “opening the gates to outsiders unleashed a flood of innovation that gave rise to firms like Microsoft, Dell, and Oracle. It destroyed many of the old computer giants—but guaranteed a generation of American leadership in a critical sector of the world economy. It is late in the day, but the same could still happen in the car industry...”  Indeed, perhaps Shai Agassi’s Better Place could end up as the Microsoft of the automotive sector.

So what can be expected in the coming decade or two? There are at least two broad categories of evolution that can be detected today.  Vehicles are becoming both smarter and cleaner.