Autonomous vehicle predictions are premature: Toyota
The advent of autonomous vehicles may not be all doom and gloom for the automotive industry as some have predicted, senior enterprise architect at Toyota Australia‘s Information Systems Division David Johnston-Bell has said.
Speaking at Informatica’s Data Disruption Summit on Wednesday, Johnston-Bell said there are reports suggesting that autonomous vehicles could significantly reduce personal car ownership — possibly by 80 to 90 percent.
Even Jacinta Hargan, director of the Future Transport Program at Transport for NSW, said the state government’s future transport technology roadmap is based on four potential “futures”, one of which centres on the idea that people will share ownership of connected and autonomous vehicles, and another where vehicle ownership is no longer important.
While projections are “useful for scenario planning”, they can be quite premature, Johnston-Bell told ZDNet.
“I think it’s great that we can say, ‘what can happen in the world if 90 percent of the cars disappear?’ What do [auto companies] have to do in that scenario?” he said.
“What about the other scenarios, where people say public transport is not going to increase … where people don’t want to live in high-density houses in the inner city, they want to have their single house in the outskirts? They need to have a form of mobility, so where’s that going to come from?
“There are a range of options on the table, so I think [the prediction of] the death of the car is probably premature.”
Johnston-Bell said such projections don’t take into account a variety of circumstances, such as parents who have to shuttle their children around, or people who live far from cities where public transport is unreliable and infrequent.
Cars are also seen as “extensions of people’s personalities”, he said, and people might not be ready to overcome the idea of owning personal cars.
Johnston-Bell did acknowledge that there might be a “generational change” as people in their 20s or younger are more comfortable with the idea of “renting” rather than “owning” products and services such as with Netflix, Spotify, and Uber.
The problem, however, is that there comes a point where “renting” cars or using services such as Uber becomes more expensive than owning a personal car, Johnston-Bell told ZDNet.
Statistics also show that car sales are increasing, not decreasing, he pointed out: ACA Research found that year-on-year car sales increased by 4.4 percent in Australia as of June this year.
A study from Roy Morgan also indicated that as of September, 2.46 million Australians are intending to purchase a new car within the next four years — an increase of 53,000 from July, and only marginally lower than the 15-year high recorded in February 2017.
Meanwhile, the number of Australians looking to purchase a new car in the next 12 months increased by 9.2 percent quarter on quarter to 679,000 during the July-to-September quarter, according to Roy Morgan.
Johnston-Bell said there are far too many issues that need to be addressed before autonomous vehicles hit the road in any noticeable capacity, one of the most important being liability during car accidents.
In September, the Australian House of Representatives Industry, Innovations, Science and Resources Committee similarly said that issues around legal liability and insurance need to be addressed before Australians will be comfortable with “automated vehicles”.
“The central question revolves around where legal responsibility lies should a vehicle operating with at least some automation be involved in an accident. Currently, even the most advanced vehicles have an identifiable driver who is responsible for control of the vehicle. However, ambiguity arises when the vehicle is not being — and in higher-level vehicles, cannot be — controlled by a person within it,” the committee said in its Social Issues Relating to Land-Based Automated Vehicles in Australia report.
