Q: What areas of the country do you anticipate will have the most difficulty transitioning from manual to autonomous vehicles?
By Dan Dempsey, senior director of automotive business development, ACEINNA
Urban areas will see the most rapid autonomous vehicle deployment, followed by suburban, and then rural areas. The cold north central and north eastern U.S. will probably be the last to see widespread use due to the demanding winter weather conditions.
Some of the most technically challenging parts of the country to develop safe and reliable autonomous vehicle are in dense urban areas, like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. However, it is in these large cities that demand for autonomous solutions will be the greatest. In these areas, car ownership is often a nuisance due to lack of off-street parking. Daily commutes are often on foot, train, or only short car rides. These areas are ideally suited for autonomous ride-share use, as they’ve had large taxi operations for decades with rapid growth in Uber and Lyft usage in the last 5 years. The market is already present and the only requirement is to solve the technical challenges and deploy the autonomous fleets.
Suburban and rural areas in the colder, snowy northern parts of the country will likely see the slowest adoption due to convenience factors and weather limitations. Although, the road-induced technical challenges are diminished significantly compared to urban areas due to the wider, less congested roadways in suburban areas; these markets require a car almost every time a person leaves the house. Additionally, the extreme winters in the northern areas can render sensors like lidar ineffective and disable a large robo-taxi fleet. This is one reason why Waymo and Uber chose Arizona and other sunshine states to perform the vast majority of their millions of miles of public road testing.
By Niall Berkery, SVP IS, AImotive
Regardless of the business model they are deployed in, it is low density rural areas that seem to present the highest challenge for the proliferation of autonomous technology. Both robo-taxi service providers and the autonomous capabilities of production vehicles face an uphill battle in rural municipalities. The financial viability of deploying robo-taxis for passenger use in smaller rural towns and their surrounding areas will be challenging. These areas lack the population density needed to get the high utilization rate that is required to run such a fleet economically. On the other hand, personal autonomous vehicles could be of great use to people with decreased mobility. This is especially true for such areas, which are lacking in public transport and taxi services. Nevertheless, the older, less tech-savvy demographic typical in rural areas may be less trusting of this new technology. This could limit its utilization regardless of its inherent advantages. Because this demographic may take longer to become comfortable with autonomous vehicles they will most likely first appear on country roads in more commercial use. Using self-driving vehicles for handling delivery services in sparsely populated areas would be a lot more cost-effective than a delivery truck driven by a human. So, we will probably see these on country roads way before autonomous vehicles that shuttle passengers around.
By Hannes Estl, sector general manager of ADAS, Automotive Systems, Texas Instruments
There’s no way to know for sure, but something interesting to consider is that small towns have some distinct advantages over big cities when it comes to autonomous vehicles. While big cities may be perceived as being more progressive with technology, it’s actually smaller towns that may move quicker to allow autonomous vehicles on the streets.
There are a few reasons for this. One is the nature of bureaucracy, bigger cities have more red tape for passing laws and redeveloping infrastructure. Another is the logistics of real estate, bigger cities have more ground to cover and more streets trafficked by more people, while smaller towns provide a good environment for testing, and, if successful, could be simpler to implement. As one example, Frisco, Texas, a Dallas suburb, now allows Level 4 autonomous vans to shuttle people around a defined area. One has to wonder if this is indicative of the future with smaller towns taking the lead.