Interview hosted by photographer, visual artist, painter, and movie maker Joakim Lloyd Raboff.
In order to hear the full interview visit this TerraNet podcast on SoundCloud.
The automotive industry is in the midst of massive transformation with its change to electrical and autonomous cars. Not since the replacement of the horse and introduction of the combustion engine, more than 100 years ago, has the car industry been at such an inflection point.
A wholesale shift to autonomous and electric vehicles will not just reshape the entire transportation industry, but also our daily lives. Zero crashes, zero fatalities, and zero emissions were once utopian visions. Presumably, future cars will become smart enough to avoid all collisions, eliminating over 1.35 million traffic fatalities around the world each year.
Artificial intelligence (AI) such as deep neural networks is being applied worldwide in the automotive market to fields like computer vision, natural language processing, sensor fusion, object recognition and autonomous driving projects.
Nihat:
Well, since the beginning of the automotive era in 1886 – that was 134 years ago when Daimler and Benz invented the first automobile – we face crashes, fatalities and emissions caused by these machines.
More and more car manufactures put Advanced Driver Assistance Systems into their new models, which help significantly to improve safety, like Collision Warning, Active Break and Emergency Stop Assist, Adaptive Cruise Control (Mercedes-Benz DISTRONIC), Lane Keep/Change Assist, Blind Spot Assist Active Speed Limiters, Night Vision, and may systems that are more helpful. However, we need to become better on the Pedestrian Detection side.
In order to make our road traffic safer we need to teach cars how to drive autonomously, reliably and safely. Software has the potential to drive safer than human beings do. We are not saying that all accidents are preventable.
While driving millions of miles, a bunch of various vehicle sensors capture the real world to create a high definition map, for both self-driving and navigation. The more data we gather the more we feed our data-hungry learning algorithms that become incrementally better and better. Self-driving cars can give us more quality-time, can make us feel like in a second home.
However, the true potential of self-driving cars will be become visible in a smart combination with other transportation modes: bicycles, taxis, transit, trains, pods, and so on.
Joakim:
The Third Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety was held on 19 and 20 February 2020 in Stockholm, and resulted in the “Stockholm Declaration,” a list of 18 resolutions linking road safety to sustainable development with the aim to achieve global goals by 2030. The agreement is meant to halve the number of traffic deaths by 2030.
The Stockholm Declaration also emphasized the need for new vehicle technologies.
Alongside decrease of velocity, what do you envision as the single most important item needed to be implemented on the technology side in order to achieve this vision?
Nihat:
In the context of COVID-19 Corono Virus deaths I have been looking into road traffic fatalities of the past years. So, I remember these numbers, at least for Germany.
We human beings do make mistakes, and probably always will do. Luckily, we learn by trial and error. We learn faster the stronger the impact of a specific mistake is, right? However, nobody wants these “strong impacts” on our roads. Technology can help us avoid – or at least ease – fatal impacts caused by motorized vehicles. And it’s not just a matter of velocity – otherwise Germany was at the top of the statistics.
Although the number of motor vehicles increased from 250.000 vehicles back in 1970 to almost 2 billion vehicles today (factor 8.000) , in these 50 years the average number of vehicle-related deaths even decreased from 1 death per 300.000 km down to 1 death per 800.000 km.
Roughly, 50% of the road traffic deaths happen to drivers or passengers of 4-wheeled vehicles, motorbikes and bicycles have a share of 18%. Shockingly, almost a third of all road fatalities happen to pedestrians, the most vulnerable road users. This where we have to become better. Here, I think TerraNet’s VoxelFlow can drive a paradigm shift.
Still, it will be a big challenge to halve the traffic deaths by 2030, and for Germany, this would require a yearly decrease by 7%. Unfortunately, the current decline is only about 3%. As professor Christensen said, its still hard to understand the intend of cars, especially the one that don’t communicate car2car, or car2infrastructure.
Joakim:
In the World Economic Forum’s recently published report on “The Future of the Last-Mile Ecosystem,” they anticipated that demand for e-commerce delivery will result in 36% more delivery vehicles in inner cities by 2030. The COVID-19 pandemic has put an incredible strain on global supply chains, from medical supplies to household goods, as spikes in demand stress-test logistics infrastructures. There should an opportunity for autonomous and unmanned delivery vehicles to assist in addressing this demand and help to reduce the risk of spreading infection.
How do you see technology spurring this development and increasing preparedness to accept this or similar extraordinary and abnormal situation as the new normal?
Nihat:
Earlier I was saying that we need to highlight the benefits and disadvantages of different transportation modes. For example, mass transit is not the best transportation in case of a pandemic situation, but cars are, right. Having Smog in the icty
Yes, it’s a fact that more and more people shop online, which of course increases urban traffic caused by traditional delivery trucks. Worldwide we see yearly increases by 8% to 10%. I don’t think we will manage to compensate this steady rise by conventional ground transportation.
Back in 2008 we at Daimler started our biz transformation process from manufacturing and selling cars, vans, busses and trucks to being a mobility company. We started new business units for car sharing (cargo) and mobility services (like moovel) integrating the public transportation sector in order to reduce urban traffic and emissions, and last but not least increase life quality and quality time. With StarShip we invested in urban delivery robots and cargo vans – which reflects an innovative multimodal transportation chain.
But as you said Joakim, it’s time to conquer the urban airspace by developing smart, autonomous, collaborative, collision-free, solar or hydrogen powered cargo drones. These drones could pick-up packages from – or drop them on – moving trucks, relay them airborne to other drones, to autonomous ground robots, parcel locks or distribution centers. This way we could master the last mile delivery, even dropping packages directly on your balcony. Our Daimler project Volocopter successfully made first steps towards manned air taxis. You might know what the meaning of the 3-pointed Mercedes-Benz star: it represents our drive towards universal motorization: dominating the land, sea, and air (three points).
Social distancing works best by letting intelligent robots into our work, home and mobility domain by integrating them seamlessly into all transportation chains.