Europe Gears Up to Drive Driverless

Smart Highways

A member of the corporate board for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says that autonomous vehicles will make an “incredible” difference to cities around the world.

Miller Crockart is a director of German modeling firm PTV who sits on the board with representatives from Ford, Google, Uber, Volvo, Nissan, Exxon Mobile, and Michelin. The board works on transportation issues with officials from leading industrial governments.

Based in Karlsruhe, Germany, PTV provides software for urban mobility, logistics and traffic engineering. Karlsruhe has been called the European Silicon Valley.

In an interview with British magazine Smart Highways, he explained how the board looked at the demand on cities if autonomous vehicles were introduced:

“We looked at a medium-sized town and asked what would happen if we replaced all the trips that were taken with shared autonomous vehicles and high-capacity public transport and the numbers that we were coming out with were incredible,” he said.

“If we looked at a 24 hour period we could undertake all the trips with only 10 per cent of the vehicles and even in the peak hours we would only need 35 per cent of the vehicles currently on the road to facilitate all those trips so that sets a macroscopic perspective on what the future can hold.

“Of course there’s a transitionary period to get to that and that’s where everyone has to start planning for that so every city in the world should have to look at its demand plans and its investment plans, things are going to radically alter with these disruptive technologies coming through.

“We’ve built 30 year models based on the combustion engine and Mr. and Mrs. Smith driving their vehicle, well that’s not going to be the way it is in 30 years’ time – it’s not. Uber, the Lyfts, they’re already here, autonomous vehicles, they’re here – I sat in one the other day and the manufacturers are full steam ahead, that won’t change.

“The transitionary period might take a lot longer because there’s regulation, that needs to be put in place, there’s the liability issue but we’re talking about that at the OECD level so when you’re talking about it, it’s not that far away from saying “plug it in, here it goes”.

FACT, NOT BUZZWORDS

“What I’ve found here is there are companies – there’s one just across the road, I’m looking at the building now, FZI - which is a research institute which is doing some incredible things with autonomous vehicles,” he says. “They’re even building some of the moon landing equipment, but you would never know that.  I’ve sat here for four years and you slowly learn that there are these little nuggets of gold just sitting around my building alone. There’s Init doing all the stuff for commuter technology, you’ve got Bosch here, and you’ve got a lot of small start-ups that have all created hugely popular technologies but there is this culture in Europe where it’s almost frowned upon to eulogize yourself, sometimes in Europe it’s construed as arrogant where in other countries it’s construed as good marketing and that’s a frustration for me.

“I hear a lot of noises coming out of Silicon Valley that they have the latest and greatest solution for everything and we’ve been doing it for the last 30 years! People talk about smart cities or data analytics, well we’ve been doing data analytics for the last 30 years and we have a hugely strong pedigree in that topic – we know what data can be used, what quality there should be, how to fuse different sources, how to clean it and extrapolate it with simulation and prediction. The challenge for us from a marketing perspective is to stand up now for the silicon valley of Europe which is here. We’ll be more vocal but we’ll do it on fact rather than the latest buzzwords.”