Self driving cars: a disruption in the making?

An interesting graphic comparing the expected penetration of self driving cars, at the autonomy level 3/4/5 with the speed of adoption. As shown on the right, the expectation is a very fast adoption of level 5 automation although this won’t happen till the fourth decade of this century. Credit: Silicon Valley Mobility, LLC

Self driving cars are the talk of the day with more and more articles looking at the time when we can read our newspaper (assuming there will still be a newspaper -paper- to read) as our car drives us to the office.

So far self driving cars are a matter of curiosity and debate. Technology is basically here, as proven by a number of self driving cars that are around, but it is still too expensive and a few observers doubt this is the right technology. Research groups are exploring alternatives that might result in more affordable cars, like using artificial intelligence for ambient awareness -which includes image recognition- rather than LIDAR that remains quite expensive. Most recently I saw an industrial doctoral theses, in the framework of the EIT Digital Industrial Doctoral School, with a company proposing to leverage crowdsourcing images to develop 3D models that can be used by self driving cars (the advantage being of a continuous update of the ambient a car will be driving in ).

More and more cars are now equipped with an increasing number of features that eventually will make a fully autonomous self driving car: cruise control, lane control, self parking…

As predicted by Silicon Valley Mobility we can expect a growing deployment, market adoption, of assisted driving in cars (level 3 – you can text and watch a movie but still be prepared to take over) from now on, to reach full penetration around 2035/2040. In the next decade we will start seeing level 4 cars (the human driver is no longer needed in most situations and if need arise the car will come to a stop if a situation is beyond its capability). Notably about the same time that we are expected a full penetration of level 3 on cars being sold we can also expect a level 4 full penetration. As a matter of fact most of the leve 3 cars will be software upgraded to level 4.  Clearly this means that level 4 will see a faster penetration time than level 3, which is to be expected since in most cases it will be a retrofit on level 3 cars upgrading them to level 4.

Level 5 cars (fully autonomous, forget the presence of a human driver) will start to be deployed in 2035 but are expected to win the market in about 10 years. Their deployment will be much faster than the level 3 and 4.  This is the point where observers are expecting a market/industry disruption with a shift from the perception of the car as a personal good to own to a car as a service that can be called upon as needed.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.