Consumer Demand Will Bring Partial-Autonomous Driving Tech This Year: Study

Burney Simpson

The coming of driverless vehicles is down to ‘when’ not ‘if’ as auto OEMs rollout vehicles offering a variety of autonomous features in the next 12 months, according to Revolution in the Driver’s Seat: The Road to Autonomous Vehicles, a new report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

This includes such technologies as single-lane autopilot, highway autopilot with lane changing, traffic jam autopilot, autonomous valet parking, and urban autopilot, reports BCG, which has been releasing portions of its research the last few months (See “Self-Driving Features May be Worth $42 Billion by 2025“).

The implementation of this partially-autonomous technology will initially be seen in high-end vehicles due to the cost of developing, testing, building and installing the features.

Many consumers are willing to pay extra for these features that offer greater safety and convenience, according to a BCG survey last September of more than 1,500 U.S. consumers that had recently purchased or planned to soon purchase a car.

Fifty-five percent of U.S. consumers would buy a partially autonomous vehicle, and 44 percent said they would buy a fully-autonomous vehicle. The three top reasons cited for buying a partially-autonomous car are lower insurance premiums, increased safety, and that the vehicle will switch to self-driving mode on the highway, BCG found.

The cost of an autonomous vehicle to the consumer will come down as “component costs are scaled, R&D investments amortized, and assembly costs reduced due to volume increases,” BCG predicts. By 2025, the technology developed for partially-autonomous vehicles will have declined enough that it will be economically feasible to market fully-autonomous vehicles to a majority of consumers.

SENSOR TECHNOLOGY

A number of technology challenges remain before there is widespread development of fully-autonomous vehicles. The major issue now is lowering the costs of and improving the quality of sensor technology, BCG writes.

Sensors assess and react to a vehicle’s environment, receiving and interpreting information from cameras, radar, ultrasound, GPS systems, light detection equipment, and LIDAR. While much of this technology is available from auto-parts suppliers and technology firms, the auto OEMs will hesitate to install it on a mass scale until they see costs come down, especially for LIDAR and GPS, BCG contends.

After partially-autonomous vehicles become more widespread, regulators will seek to quantify their value to determine whether to require fully-autonomous technology from the auto industry, BCG predicts.

Regulators will focus on productivity gains from reduced traffic congestion and savings arising from fewer accidents. BCG believes it will take five years of proven improvements in these areas before governments decide on mandating autonomous technology in vehicles.