Vision behind the autonomous tech — shaping the industry !

Back when our son was a baby, he had such a trouble travelling in cars or planes. Later on, we realized he is not just sensitive but also nervous. He has outgrown that thing to now daily ride in three different cars throughout the day. Recently, soon after I got him adjusted to the aftercare pick up person, his pickup van service got changed, and I exactly knew why he was paranoid again.

Photo by DON JACKSON-WYATT on Unsplash

As I am writing this, I am sure somewhere parents and entrepreneurs and innovators are coming up with more reliable and affordable means for commute (read autonomous, ride-share, flying cars etc.) Share ride options for kids are becoming so much relief for busy parents, however there still might not be many options to choose from. Additionally, the issue with shuttling kids with stranger drivers is not seen in other places because mostly there are school buses. In California where we live, the choices for aftercare commute seem modern and practical and efficient — ( now you can text your driver, track their ride, know their bio, they are background checked and come with references), but they might just get thrown at you in the middle of the school year, with not much options to go about. That was a realization after 2 years of schooling for my son. The apps and solutions, affordable and reliable still require parent waivers. Plus parents got busier ( including me) is my feeling so the other parties like for e.g. schools have no options either. Last year we had to take kids to field trips, this year, there will be shuttle rides arranged for all the field trips, which works for me, because of the time commitment that is no longer needed. However, with all that setting, it still makes us uncomfortable from time to time.

This year, given that it is also a year of automobile autonomy taking shape, l thought it could be interesting to forecast how these vehicles will come to us.

Given the investments and push in self driving vehicle technology, it’s not far that the school buses in dedicated lanes and fixed routes with the driver assist can come to us as a paid service -Whats the benefit you ask ? I like to think that decision could be somewhat on us and it will depend on what that situation will offer. For e.g.

a)If city chooses a self driving vehicle fleet option because of insane value, discounts and safety claims

b) More amenities and more sensor tech and precision claims are made delivering more reliability than current system — imagine driver assist autonomous fleet is complimented free with the fleet management solutions ?

c) There is incentive offered to areas where there is no school drop off today and this offer might free up so much time in the mornings from parent’s schedule.

d) the situation where the new data has found out that school drop offs are getting more stressful because of all the autonomous vehicles on the road and only way to address that is to be one of them.

And there will be other reasons why we would adapt it or like our field trips, we will have no options but only waivers to sign !

Imagine that there will be similar compelling experiments that would be happening with the help of government and urban planners in other areas and applications. How will it be shaped and come to us ? What factors will play a critical role ? And what should we care about ?

A car company making fleet of human assisted robot vehicles that make critical driving decisions would definitely be considering some of the following leadership and go to market strategies:

1. Market definition, need to find the segment that is not only significant in size but also easy and reasonable to adapt to — e.g. safer for all kinds of traffic conditions in that context, can pass regulations, built for production and can last and scale to latch on to next iteration.
2. Units and stages of production — how would you and where would you locate the production of the autonomous stack ? — special expertise are needed on the software side and mostly companies have approached silicon valley for such a talent. The challenge would be to mass produce with the hardware and software located in different places of the world, think European and Japanese car manufacturers having research operations in remote places than their plants.
3. Next big good location for technology — while both the established software companies and the startups can adopt to it, it’s hard for the research and demographic specific partner based solutions to change places and evolve in new locations every now and then. So if for e.g. Tel Aviv becomes the next machine learning, robotics skills hub, it would be difficult to take advantage of that unless today we build the location and demographics data agnostic solutions and software. Some visionaries may have to think about the international standards for urban planning to make that happen.
4. Go to market for pure software providers — what is the release strategy and integration strategy for these partners and how that will affect us ? Will there be vendor marketplaces or a specific company will dominate the future of integrations and solutions providers for autonomous vehicle tech ?
5. Partnerships and inter-disciplines — First time in many years scientist and engineers would have an opportunity to add a value from their interdisciplinary specialties — robotics, IoT, data, machine vision, AI, mobility and required others.
6. Specific problems we are solving — Unlike traditional vehicles, now the software would be customized not only depending upon the model and make but also the demographics, upto the precise area and the tasks the vehicle is meant for. So if visionaries in this space care and focus on specific problem, that would be great.
7. Re establish a brand — choose a problem you care about — I like to give an example of world’s smartest and richest man and his strategy — Mr.Bill Gates, after having so much money and power to go at any problem, he chose the feasible and the most impactful areas like Polio and HIV and malaria and children mortality rate — the areas that matter the most and really have the potential to change the world for the better. Does it tell us that this is an opportunity to re-establish a brand e.g. unmanned vehicle usages in the areas dangerous for the human operators or using the sensors tech avoid the train accidents. Ideas like that will thrive with a lot of support.
8. Dealing with data — Depending on the purpose of vehicle It will matter to a) what behaviors we perfect for ? b) what capabilities and the data should go on vehicle and come out of vehicle ? c) What part of data stays on car and what goes to cloud could be lead by the insurance providers, compute and storage capacity, data retention plans and customer consent.

9. The cost of the tech, mainly hardware sensors — this will include sensor cost the shipping and handling and replacement and testing even if the sensors are individually made and tested by the manufacturers on their end. If offered customization, then this cost will increase manifold.

10. Re-branding options — Now the car manufacturers would have brand new re-branding options — some car companies might say, we only specialize on track performance by using autonomy to avoid accidents, our tech is so reliable that our race cars can now be insured on the track as well. The other autonomous vehicle company may confine themselves to self driving RVs and trucks on the specialized roads where all the vehicles would be following certain precise and safe driving conditions.

Ultimately, you and me might not get to ride these vehicles soon but these things are on real roads and collecting real miles on it, the bar is high and the challenge is difficult but for all good reasons it should happen one day, for all the bad reasons, it will fail. So if the reasons are good for humanity and involves right partnerships with the vision of solving the most hard problems for the insane driving professions or alike, then we will see the impact in positive ways. The next revolution might not come to affect us in daily lives, but regardless if engineered and positioned right, it has a potential to reshape the urbanization for better — stay tuned !

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