PassW0rd – 13th June 2018 (What’s Driving Me?)

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Speaker C: Hello, I’m Peter Warren. Welcome to Password, Resonance FM’s monthly probe into the world of technology. This month, what’s driving the transport revolution? We’re talking self-driving, electric, and even flying cars. An end to traffic jams, smog-related diseases, and parking nightmares. We’re welcoming smart cities that make mobility simple, effortless, and fun. At least that’s what some of the experts in this month’s show are expecting, but not the transport writer and former candidate for London Mayor Christian Woolmar. He can be quite scathing.

Speaker D: You’ve just been taken in by the hype from the tech industry and from the auto manufacturers. There is absolutely absolutely no solid evidence that we will suddenly transfer to autonomous cars, that we will be happy to do that, and that we will be happy to go along with the model which they’re putting out, which is that it will all be shared-use autonomous electric cars. Each of those revolutions is questionable and I think possibly unfeasible.

Speaker C: Why? I mean, everybody’s saying that by the end of the next decade that we will all be in not only autonomous cars, but as you’ve said, shared cars.

Speaker D: Not everybody is saying that at all. A few futurologists have put out some nonsensical claims that we will be driving in these autonomous pods. But any sensible analysis, and there is increasingly some sensible analysis, although there’s still, it’s still dominated by hype on the web. And indeed even in the printed media. The fact is that, let’s look at each of these, you know, quickly in turn. Electric cars, well, yes, maybe there will be a big increase in electric cars. There’s a problem about the capacity of the battery industry. There’s a problem about people kind of liking it in terms of range. But okay, maybe that might happen. But then we get the idea of autonomous cars. Now, there’s enormous problems in relation to autonomous cars. The technology is nowhere there. Most Driverless cars still have a driver at the moment. Those drivers still take over controls quite a lot. There’s a lot of debate in the industry about what sort of technological path they should go down and how they deal with that. But then there’s a lot of practical problems. You know, what do you do if you’re in a driverless car and somebody steps in front of it? The car has to stop. But that means that you are never therefore safe from people who are want to rob or pillage, basically? What happens if two driverless cars meet on a single-lane highway? All sorts of issues that haven’t been actually addressed. And then there’s the idea of shared use. Well, the only reason that the tech manufacturers and the auto manufacturers have gone down this path of saying we must have shared use cars is because they realize that if we just had driverless cars adding to the number of cars on the road at the moment. It would increase congestion. So they then have to go down this path and say, oh well, you won’t own your car. But there’s no evidence to suggest that people don’t want to own their car, that they don’t want to keep their golf clubs, their car seats, the fact that they can get in the car straight away. There’s absolutely no evidence that, you know, Zipcar or whatever is you know, taking over the world. Yes, there’s a niche market for that, but nothing like a universal desire to not have your own individual car.

Speaker C: Why do you think then that there is such a debate going on about all of this?

Speaker D: I think first of all, the tech manufacturers have a lot of footloose capital. They don’t quite know what to do with it. So they think, oh, we might as well invest it in this notion because actually there is no business model. And so they’re able to do that because that there’s actually no way of making money out of it, but they have so much money they don’t know what to do with. In terms of auto manufacturers, they are absolutely panicking over the fact that they don’t want to miss out if this is really the next big thing. But they basically, on the whole, link up with tech companies and are spending an awful lot of money on it. But again, there is no clear business model or way out. And I suppose in terms of the media hype, it’s just It’s more exciting than thinking we’re going to be driving in kind of our own cars for the next 50 years.

Speaker C: Okay, well, let’s examine this then in the way that it’s been put forward. First of all, they’re saying that the electric car comes, then they’re saying that the autonomous car comes, then they’re saying that the shared vehicle comes, and then they’re saying that really there’s a possibility that the shared vehicles will mutate into these great big long convoys of vehicles, which sounds very much to me like something called a train. That’s the model that you’re arguing against. That’s the thing that you’re saying isn’t going to happen.

Speaker D: Yes, I do not see a roadmap towards that. I don’t see how that will come about. I don’t see that there is a public demand for it. I don’t see who’s going to pay for this. I mean, at the moment, there is no such thing as a driverless car, number one. And number two, there is absolutely no notion of what a driverless car would cost. I mean, some of the equipment, particularly the laser equipment is pretty expensive at the moment. And yes, there will be reductions if there’s economies of scale, but we don’t have any idea of whether a reasonable price is achievable for a driverless car. And then there’s all sorts of side issues, like current experience with driverless cars shows them driving around somewhat like Stepford Wives kind of wander around the supermarket. It’s kind of slow and they’re very careful and You know, they stop all the time if there’s any risk. Are we really going to drive like that? I mean, it’s kind of Noddyland. Can they really get over those technological problems? I’ll tell you this, the people I’ve spoken to in the industry, when you actually drill down, they do admit that this is far more difficult than they thought. And they say getting beyond Level 2 is really difficult. And then there is the issue at Level 3 where the car takes over for a lot of time that the drivers then go to sleep or ignore it. That’s a really big issue. You’re going to de-skill drivers with this Level 3. That means, you know, you increase the amount of danger, not decrease it. That then means some of the developers of this have said, oh, we’ve got to skip Level 3, we’re going to go straight to Level 4, which is essentially the car drives itself all the time, although it still has the pedals and steering wheel, whatever. And that’s terribly difficult technically.

Speaker C: Someone will just say to you, well, this must have been like the transition from the horse to the car.

Speaker D: Well, actually, you know, when I was a kid, and I’m in my 60s, there were still horses on the road. The milk was delivered by a milkman who had a horse. So it does show how long that transfer process took. And incidentally, Harrods used to deliver in an electric van. You know, it shows how long, A, these technologies have been around, and how long it it takes to change technology. Just because you have a new technology does not mean it’s going to win out. It does not mean it’s going to become the dominant technology, or that it should become the dominant technology.

Speaker C: Okay, so perhaps battery vehicles are not exactly new, but they’re growing in popularity. 2% of new cars sold are all-electric. They don’t pump out noxious gases, and they don’t contribute to noise pollution, as they’re almost totally silent. But that can cause problems. Do electric cars have to be silent and deadly? This problem is being tackled at the highest level, according to Chris Hanson-Abbott of Brigade Electronics in North Kent, the inventor of the vehicle reversing alarm. That’s proved to be such a vital safety feature that Hanson-Abbott was honoured with an OBE 4 years ago and has now entered the motor industry hall of fame. He’s in top-level talks about vehicle alarms for electronic vehicles.

Speaker E: Well, you can’t stop road noise. That’s virtually impossible because safety, of course, is vital. So tires have to be non-skid as far as possible, and so they have treads, and that creates its own noise. But Below 20 miles an hour and at low speeds, vehicles become virtually noiseless apart from the sound of the combustion engine. Take away the combustion engine and they are noiseless.

Speaker F: By 2020, it’s predicted that there will be 2,250,000 people in the UK with sight loss.

Speaker C: So we are talking about significant numbers now.

Speaker E: Yeah, but that’s nothing compared with the youngsters.

Speaker C: Youngsters and people with hearing problems.

Speaker E: Yes, correct. And actually a working group of the United Nations, of which I’m one of the original members, and the working group is still alive and now in its 9th year of working. The working group is totally international, based at the UN, and it has been trying to arrive at a general technical regulation for the type of sound and the amount of sound, the frequency of the sound, all sorts of things, which is the optimal level, quality, nature, and every different variable in sound patterns. Been trying to arrive at an internationally agreed specification. The working group is almost there, which after 9 years you think is an awful long time to try to agree something so one might think, elementary. Every nation, every motor producer on the planet is involved, and so they all got to put in their two penneth, and it’s all got to be considered, debated, but we’re almost there. Well, this year, during this year, there will be on the market added sounders as near as possible in accordance with the consensus, which is fairly far advanced now as to what type of sound it should be.

Speaker F: What sound are we talking about here, Chris? What is it like? What is the sound that we’re likely to be able to hear when we hear an electric vehicle coming towards us, or actually don’t hear an electric vehicle coming towards us?

Speaker E: You may have heard some of the reversing alarms, the more modern ones, which use broadband sound. Broadband sound, otherwise known as white sound, scientifically known as multi-frequency sound, primarily using that overlaid with 2 or 3 tones at varying frequencies in order to give a little bit of substance to it. And even how many tones and what tones they should be have been debated and debated and debated. So, but the actual sound you will hear is a bit like falling water. Now, the sound of falling water is broadband sound. That sound is multi-frequency. That means it contains frequencies as low as 500 Hz and up to way beyond the audible hearing range of the human ear, around about 20 or 30 kHz. So it goes from very low up to infinitely high. And that, A, is considered by nearly everybody, I think, very easy on the ear. So it’s going to cause minimal environmental objections. And B, a priceless safety factor is that whenever you hear multi-frequency sound, whenever you hear it, you can instantly identify the source direction of that sound.

Speaker C: Noises might save us from accidents, although with Chris Hanson Abbott’s solution, you might think you’re being alerted to a sudden downpour, not a self-driving vehicle. I’m told that the inventor of the Tesla electric supercar, Elon Musk, attended an early meeting at Lotus, which was developing the initial Tesla, when he had the issue pointed out to him. It was suggested that they should make The super-quiet Tesla sound like a V12 Ferrari, which provoked Musk to exclaim that no one had ever told Henry Ford that his Model T car should be made to sound like a horse. In the transport world of the future, we are going to have a blend of electric vehicles and cycles. Cycling is good for you, but it needs to be safe too. And accidents are continuing to happen, and accidents are continuing to happen with electronic vehicles. So who will be blamed? Who will be liable? For these questions, we need a lawyer, and one who is also a top science commentator. Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School in the United States. And the author of The Ethics of Invention.

Speaker A: So I know that there are many projections that say things like that. We have built a whole set of subordinate industries ranging from just the part manufacturers, because the parts themselves will be either fewer in number or very different, and therefore entire pieces of the manufacturing industry will disappear. And then all these supporting social infrastructures like insurance So individual liability is not going to disappear as long as we have vehicles in which there still is a person who’s responsible for watching out. You know, some of my very high-level technical colleagues at places like MIT say that at least for the moment they’re not even recommending that self-driving car manufacturers develop a completely person-free interface. And we have one or two, I mean two or three accidents already, including fatal ones, in which we’ve already seen that manufacturers are not particularly keen to absolve the driver in the car of responsibility when the detection systems have actually not performed in the way that one hopes they would have performed. So this accident, the pedestrian accident in Arizona, where the woman was I think walking her bike across the road. This part of your question, did the car, quote, see it, unquote, and then a subordinate question, well, should the driver have been not distracted and actually have been watching? And that same kind of thing has arisen over the case of the car that crashed into a truck because it couldn’t see the reflected light off of the white surface of the van. And again, the fact that the driver in the car was not paying attention has already become a subject of legal debate about whose responsibility was it. So I think this, quote, “revolution,” unquote, would have to advance quite a bit further before we are at the stage where we’re just literally relying on these things to be cruising about in robotic fashion with no person at the helm. And even then, of course, you would have some kind of control system, right? I mean, that is, there would have to be the equivalent of the traffic light system or something where you could push the liability back ultimately to some human agency. I don’t think, in short, that the entire liability insurance picture will disappear. I am prepared to believe that it will change enormously. Around the turn of the previous century, we got the idea of no-fault insurance. Which takes a lot of the pressure off of the court system by saying that if a trouble of thus-and-such kind happens, then we automatically pay off the cost. We don’t pay additional stuff because this is just part of the risks of doing business. So it’s not that insurance disappears, it’s that the very intricate links between how insurance premiums are related to the statistics of payouts. I mean, I’m sure those kinds of things will change radically.

Speaker C: I mean, that’s fascinating that you say that, isn’t it? Because one of the things that happens because of this new technology, or because of technology generally, is we become reliant and dependent on it. And they’re also now finding out that If people are meant to take responsibility back from an autonomous vehicle, that there is a lag time, that almost suggests that this might not be such a great idea, doesn’t it?

Speaker A: Well, I do think that the confusion you’re talking about will change, but already exists to some extent. I mean, you know, one has to keep in mind just how interlinked we are with complex systems. If one looks at liability law, I mean, people who teach private liability law often go back to medieval examples and say there was a time when if a sort of agricultural accident happened, people actually held the instrument responsible. You know, so these kinds of examples exist in historical times where people had to adjust what they felt the right moral dispensation was. Because a thing and a person together were responsible for something, and then do you hold the thing responsible or the person responsible? Our cars already are partially automated, as of course you know. So are our airplanes. I mean, most landings and takeoffs these days are not done by the pilot alone. And of course, there have been some of these notorious cases that have become public. Like the two pilots, the system was so automated that they actually overshot the airport that they were supposed to be landing in. They were playing computer games in the, in the cockpit. So we have little precursors already in, you know, little soap bubbles that we can look at and kind of see how the colors are likely to be refracted. I mean, in part what we’re talking about is ourselves making designs, right? I mean, we can design a system to be automated thus far.

Speaker C: Well, the autonomous cars, because at some point somebody must say, hang on a moment, you are the person who’s in that car. If you do have an override, then that must mean that you have responsibility. If they’re not there, then you can easily say, yeah, I don’t have responsibility because I can’t do anything about it. But if we’re in this situation of this shared responsibility between a machine and person, that seems to create quite a considerable area of confusion.

Speaker A: My suspicion is that as these technologies develop, there will be subsystems emerging. That is, people will find that, you know, automation works to this degree if you have an extremely fixed route in a city that is very grid-like. And, you know, I’m thinking of some German cities. I mean, I’ve spent considerable amounts of time in Germany and also, of course, live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is an old urban formation by American standards. And I’ve also spent a lot of time in London. And, you know, you can live in Berlin and basically not have to have a car at all. I mean, the autonomous vehicle in a city like Berlin doesn’t, you know, you even wonder why anyone would want it because de facto you have these autonomous vehicles, they’re called buses, and you have one within easy walking distance wherever you’re living in the inner city. And there will be a schedule and you can plan your Saturday shopping and know exactly to the minute when you have to leave home and get on that bus and when you can catch the return bus coming back. It’s much harder to do that here in Cambridge. I mean, I have a bus route not far from my home, but I can go and stand there for 15 minutes when it’s supposed to be coming every 7 minutes. And now I could download an app if I used it often enough to track where my bus is, but that’s not going to make it come on time. It just tells me, you know, when I’m standing there frustrated, when the next one’s going to come, and you may have nothing for 15 or 20 minutes on a route that should be serviced every 7 or 10 minutes, and then suddenly 2 buses will come back to back. So, you know, there’s that sort of problematic, I think, that needs to be ironed out, that the mere change of who is at the controls of that vehicle is not going to do for you. It’s going to to take a lot more adjustments.

Speaker C: Sheila Jasnov with an international environment perspective on liability. In London, barrister Alexander Glassbrook has been researching this question for his book, The Law of Driverless Cars. It’s a subject he personally finds very important.

Speaker G: Well, it comes from a number of sources, really. First of all, I’m a barrister practicing in several fields, you know, counter-fraud work, serious personal injury, which almost always involve cases arising from road transport, from car accidents, or from sometimes staged car accidents. Secondly, I’m a cyclist, a driver, a pedestrian in a very busy city in London, and I cycle to work daily, so I’m one of those people who sees behaviour on the roads daily. And finally, I have a family history in the motor industry. My grandpa worked in the motor factories in Birmingham. I come from having a number of interests in this. And finally, the technology interest. We’re at an extraordinary stage of artificial intelligence and computing technology actually rising to the challenges of artificial intelligence, and all those things come together in driverless cars.

Speaker C: Do you think that we are at such an exciting stage? There are many people who are saying AI is actually not as good as it’s cracked up to be, and in fact only last week we found the unfortunate case of a driverless car, a Tesla, crashing into a police car.

Speaker G: Interestingly, I think the crash into the police car probably didn’t illustrate the major problem. The major problem seems to be the inability to spot what’s been called not the everyday event, but the once every 10,000 or 100,000 miles event. I mean, a colleague at the Bar, Lucy McCormick, has talked about the example of kangaroos in Australia being difficult to spot, or the plastic bag blowing across the road, or the tumbleweed, or the bicycle that isn’t is being cycled but is being walked across the road by a pedestrian. It’s all of those unusual events, or unusual particularly from the AI’s perspective, that seem to be presenting the problem. There are two views, really. I mean, either neural learning develops to the stage that it can spot these occurrences and react appropriately, or we simply find that there’s a limit to AI, that it never understands intuitively in those ways, in which case I suppose we end up with cars that are never fully autonomous but are a collection of technologies that are mainly AI, but at the very highest end are driver assistance technologies.

Speaker C: Now, you’ve written a book about the legal ramifications of this. Surely one of the wonderful things is going to be that with driverless cars we won’t need insurance any longer because all of the liability must go to the manufacturers of the cars and the makers of the software?

Speaker G: Well, where the liability goes might be an open question, although, as you say, the manufacturers of the hardware or the software are one likely source. I think you’re right to say that the system that we’ve got at the moment, which is in this country, we have compulsory third-party insurance for driving. And the reason that it’s compulsory is that the legislature got to the stage that it thought that driving was such a risky activity to give to human drivers that there had to be a compulsory system of insurance. I think you’re right to say that if full autonomy in driving does arrive, then that logically disappears. You don’t have risky humans. Behind the wheel anymore. You have perfect machines. But there’s a very heavy assumption there. In fact, two assumptions. First of all, that machines would be perfect, which I think is a highly controversial assertion. And secondly, that humans are riskier than machines.

Speaker C: So what do you think then the legal ramifications are? What are the issues that you were very interested interested in writing about in your book?

Speaker G: Well, there’s been a lot of concentration particularly on the liability issue. Whose fault is it when an automated car crashes and the driver isn’t in control at all? In fact, I think that if one approaches this by thinking through the everyday problems, some rather different everyday questions arise. It’s not to say that liability won’t be a question, but there are some rather more immediate ones. If you have heavily automated vehicles driving in a city, then one of the bodies that’s going to have to be very careful of its duties is the Highways Authority, because automated cars are probably going to drive much the same route every day, along the same areas even of the carriageway. And if that happens, you’ll get something that’s probably quite familiar to a number of inner-city cyclists like me, that certain areas of the road become a lot more worn more quickly than others. And the example I think of is bus stops. You tend to get dips in the road at bus stops more quickly than elsewhere. So that’s just an example of one everyday question. A pothole question, if you like, that’s going to crop up possibly much more than the liability issue.

Speaker C: So what you’re basically saying there is that the revolution, if there is a revolution, is actually going to be that other people or other things are affected than hitherto have been affected.

Speaker G: Yes, I think that’s a good way of putting it. Cars are absolutely everywhere. Quite a good way to test the question how many aspects of life are going to be affected by autonomous vehicles is to just look around yourself and see where are the cars, especially in urban areas. You’ll see a car pretty quickly. You will probably see cars all around you. They affect a great many aspects of life. They affect the space in which we live. They affect the space that we have to build houses as distinct from roads. They affect how much of that road space is allowed for pavements, for play areas, for all sorts of things. And so when you’re talking about autonomous vehicles, I think an interesting and possibly a practical way to look at the question is to ask yourself, well, What changes if vehicle ownership changes? Well, a number of things change then. If fewer people own cars, then potentially our public space changes. There doesn’t need to be as much public space given to car parking. Cars could become less visible. Road use could change. How that road use changes precisely is unpredictable because we really need to be thinking not just of one stage ahead, but probably 4 or 5 or 6. But my view is that while there’s been a great deal of talk about questions like who is at fault if a car crashes, there are probably a great many more immediate and possibly more interesting questions for people day by day. For example, as I said, the public space. Now, there are complications to this. Again, that don’t arise necessarily from the automated driving technology. One of the perhaps more disappointing aspects of the transport revolution that we’re going through is that battery technology has not proceeded at the same pace that artificial intelligence seems to have progressed. And so we’re not yet at the stage it seems, where electric cars have the range that most people would want in order to give up their reliance upon fossil fuel-driven cars. And there are some vehicles, you know, such as heavy goods vehicles, that batteries, it seems, will not yet power for the distances they need to travel. So again, in terms of environment, we’ve got questions like, well, Will automated vehicles really take off? Because will people be prepared to buy into a technology that’s still based on a dirty fuel system?

Speaker C: So people walking with bicycles, kangaroos, tumbleweeds— this all starts to sound highly implausible. Let’s not forget that a driverless bus has been ferrying people around the Greenwich Peninsula since April 2017. That we already have a strip of motorway in Milton Keynes designated for use by driverless cars, and that Google founder Larry Page has now unveiled a flying car called the Kitty Hawk Flyer that looks like a pairing between a drone and a canoe and won’t even need a road. Are we in danger of closing the stable door long after the riderless horse has bolted? Walter Hermann Brenner is a a Swiss academic, professor of information management and executive director of the Institute for Computer Science of the University of St. Gallen. He’s had a go at driving an autonomous car on the Autobahn near Munich, and he believes driverless cars will lead to fewer deaths and injuries in road accidents, not more.

Speaker B: I think we have to see it from other way. I mean, what we already can see in data from insurances is that if you have assistance systems, like for example the emergency braking assistant, number of accidents decreases. So if you have in the car what we call digital copilot, that means the sensor systems which analyze the environment several times a second, at the end, numbers of accidents will decrease. So in the long run, we will have a dramatic decrease of people killed and hurt in traffic accidents. And I think this is a very strong reason to go into automation of the driving process. Of course, accidents will happen. I mean, there are other things which occur which you cannot foresee. But at the end, data show the number of accidents goes down, and that’s alone a very strong reason.

Speaker C: Those persistent critics of autonomous driving are saying that actually what will happen is that accidents will increase in the short term, mainly because of the interaction between people and robot cars, and that because you’re going to have a world that is somewhat unpredictable, that there will be more accidents, that bad-tempered drivers will be angry with the technology, so they’ll want to try to compete with it, they’ll try to overtake, and, and they will produce the unpredictability, which will be a greater unpredictability to autonomous vehicles have to deal with. Do you think that that’s likely?

Speaker B: I mean, first, I think this scenario of mixed traffic that means that we have autonomous cars and traditional cars, is a realistic one, but not in the next 5 to 10 years, only in test environments or in testing. In the first step, we will see that autonomous cars and classic cars are driving on separate lanes to decrease complexity. So for several years ahead, mixed traffic on a large scale is not probable. If we have in 10, 15 years more autonomous cars in mixed traffic, then we might get in those competitive or the competition scenarios. That can happen and probably will happen. But at this point of time, sensor systems and analysis of environment will be on a much higher level So those cars are, if you allow me to use this word, more intelligent and will be capable of better reacting on special or strange situations.

Speaker C: Now let’s also then look at this other development that you can see happening. I suppose we could call augmented driving, where people are using robot systems to actually aid their driving, to, as you said, automatic braking systems. There is another issue with that which some researchers has shown within the last month or so, which is that people become dependent on robot systems. And apparently, if they are using a robot system, for example, which is allowing some quite significant degree of autonomous driving, their reaction times are very poor when they take over the autonomous system again.

Speaker B: Let me make a comment on this. First, I mean, augmented driving, as you call it, I use the word automatic driving, is reality today. We have a lot of those assistance systems, and you are right, drivers are more and more relying on those systems. They learn to use it and they rely on them. I mean, if you look at GPS 30 years ago or even 25 years ago, Nobody thought that nobody needs a map anymore in a car and that you don’t have to plan a trip to another town 2 days or 1 day in advance to make sure that you arrive at your final destination. Today you just type in the street, the number, and the town, and then the GPS brings you to this final destination. So we are relying on this technology as well. We have learned to use it and we do it. I think the same will happen to augmented driving or automatic driving. People will learn how to use the system. They will take advantage of it. I already talked about the emergency braking assistant. We have other systems like the, the side lane assistant, or we have the adaptive cruise controls. The other thing which you mentioned is the more you automate the driving process, of course, on level 3, which is not legal today, I have to say, then you can, for example, if you use a traffic jam assistant or a motorway assistant, you can drive longer automated. And then you have to take back control if the car warns you. And there you have a time horizon of, about 8 to 10 seconds until you have to take back control. And I’m quite sure that people will learn to take back control in this 8 to 10 seconds. That’s a learning process, that’s a development process. And I’m quite sure that the legislation authorities and car industry will react if those 8 to 10 seconds are not realistic. I mean, This has to be tested, and then we will see how much time you need to take back control. I mean, I have made trials on the German motorway close to Munich with such an automated car on Level 3. And for me, it was fun. It was relaxing. And I was able to take back control even in less than those 8 seconds. There was a warning light, blue light. And when this blue light appeared, then I had to take back control., and this was no problem at all. And this test happened through big traffic around Munich Airport.

Speaker C: But there is this issue of reliance, isn’t there? Only 2 days ago, somebody in Belfast, following a GPS system, drove onto the 4th green of a golf course in the middle of the night. And there was another example of someone on a building site in Germany who drove up a flight of stairs and then stopped in an unfinished building. There have been notable or numerous cases of people slavishly following their satnavs to wherever they’re told, even though the satnav is quite evidently making a mistake. So we do have an issue with all of this.

Speaker B: Of course we have an issue or a challenge with this. I mean, just to comment a little bit on those GPS stories, I mean, I don’t I think you have to take those examples which have been in press. I mean, all of us know this situation when you drive often that the GPS sometimes misleads you. This is something which happens. Even if I’m driving, sometimes we end up, I call it, strange situation. And of course, this is a challenge for people who engineer those vehicles. If you go on Level 5, that means real autonomous car, then you have to have a level of security which is much higher than today. And as I already said, there’s a long journey until we end up with this level of security. But the automated systems which are available will be improved step by step, and industry and drivers will learn how to use them. And then they have of the positive benefits earlier. And you must see about 90% of traffic accidents are due to human errors. And if we only can reduce this number by 20, 30, 40%, a lot of benefit for society is created.

Speaker C: Professor Dr. Walter Brenner, you’re listening to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. After this, you can hear A World in London with DJ Ritu. Dr. Merson Morsensinia of the technology company Aeris believes we’re missing the point. His company is working on the principle that car ownership and all the liabilities that go with it is a thing of the past. In the future, according to Aeris, there will be car sharing, and the data about that car sharing behavior will be used to monetize a service. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, data is the new oil. Dr. Morsenini has developed a new platform for collecting and analyzing data from vehicles, or original equipment manufacturers as he refers to them. I must warn you, he’s unfortunately very fond of three-letter acronyms.

Speaker F: So you need to have a means by which you can actually track the, the asset, the vehicle, The OEM needs to take ownership. And more and more we see the OEMs are seeing having a platform like AMP as strategic. They want to have it in-house rather than go to third parties and get platforms. That’s why OEMs are talking to us about taking the platform in-house. When we’re talking about OEMs, we’re talking about car manufacturers? Car manufacturers. Original equipment manufacturers. So what we’re saying then is that the car manufacturers are looking to get this detailed information on how cars are being used, but surely that’s of no use to the car manufacturer because they’ve sold the car to whoever’s running the fleets. It’s of value to the fleet. Or are the car manufacturers saying, we’ll provide you with this information, or we’ll provide you with this resource? Well, exactly that. At the moment Because the car manufacturers, or after a few years back, because the car manufacturers could provide this information, we ended up in a situation where we saw the emergence of a lot of telematics service providers that would install a retrofit device in the vehicle and extract such information where it was possible from the term is OBD2 port, or onboard diagnostic port. From vehicles that were manufactured after 2004, where they become mandatory to have an OBD2 port in the, in the vehicle. And, and that we saw the flourishing of the aftermarket solutions where, you know, hundreds of these companies emerged, and they would provide that value to the fleet company. However, car manufacturers have seen the value that can be got from that data More and more, they’re trying to create those services and sell them to the fleets and to the fleet drivers, the end users, as additional services. One other thing that the telematics aftermarket services struggle to provide is things around faults and diagnostics relating to the vehicle. The OEMs, through the technology that they deploy in, in the vehicle, and today there is huge amount of electronics and computer power within that vehicle. And as we go towards electric vehicle, that’s even going to mushroom even further. That allows the car manufacturer to understand the health of that vehicle and over the air to be able to, to address that fault wherever it’s possible, if the fault is not mechanical. Recently we’ve heard about the recall of hundreds of thousands of vehicles by some of the well-known brands. And in future, we’re going to see less and less of those because it could be done over the air, and it would be a removal of a significant cost from the OEMs when we get to that point. And that would be value that they can get out of that solution as well. So there, there are really 3 types of data that we like to refer to as an American company. We like to call it under the hood data, the driver data, and then the passenger data. So the connected vehicle can provide data that enables services to be created relating to all those three layers. So you’re collecting information about how many people are in the car, where they’re sitting, perhaps even their ages? We are not collecting that data as ARIS. We’re relying on the sensors and electronics that are deployed within the vehicle to make that data available to the platform. And then you can do the analysis on that data. Okay, now one of the other things you’re talking about is retrofitting legacy vehicles. What does that mean? What that really means is that you can create a very fast telematic and mobility solution using the AMP platform by taking a vehicle that is not a connected vehicle. It doesn’t have the kind of manufacturing time, the gadgets that are needed to collect that data from the vehicle and transmit it wasn’t embedded at manufacturing time within the vehicle, and integrate off-the-shelf gadgets within your fleet and send that data to the platform and get benefits of some of the services that that data will allow you to have. It’s not going to be 100% the same as what the manufacturer will provide, because manufacturer has got a lot more depth of data within the vehicle that they can extract. But in terms of location, the speed that the vehicle is going, the potholes that is going over, in terms of time of day that is being driven, you know, the weather conditions that the vehicle has been driven. You can extract all sorts of information around that. In terms of geofencing, I’ve got a friend who wants to be told anytime his sons drive the vehicle after 9 o’clock in the evening. By retrofitting a box in the vehicle, he now has that information. He knows exactly what time the vehicle has been driven. He can put an alert that says, “If it’s after 9 o’clock, send me an email. Let me know.” And the next step of that is actually after 9 o’clock, I want the vehicle to be immobilized. So, you know, your imagination is what’s going to dictate the limitation of the services.

Speaker C: When cars, autonomous or not, collect data on us, there’s a problem of security and retention of that data. Would the car automatically beam information to the police that shows I’m speeding or driving erratically? Will the sat-nav tell your wife you were visiting your mistress while she was away at her yoga retreat? And come to that, was she really at the yoga retreat? Privacy issues, issues of cybersecurity and surveillance all seem to be part of the package with this model of the transport revolution. Luckily, we now have the General Data Protection Directive, or GDPR, and its British equivalent to help us protect and secure our vital motoring statistics. And cutting through all these difficult dilemmas, there are some people who are absolutely dedicated to the future of electric vehicles. They can’t stop talking about them. One of them is the actor and TV presenter Robert Llewellyn, who played Kryten the robot in the cult TV comedy Red Dwarf He’s even created a whole YouTube channel called Fully Charged, and he’s been driving electric cars for more than 8 years.

Speaker H: The driving force behind it is kind of bigger than just cars, so the whole idea of, you know, being able to generate and store energy in your house is as much a part of it as the actual cars are. So, you know, that is becoming far more common. There are Literally hundreds of thousands, if not close to a million homes in the UK have solar panels on the roof. Well, the next step, as everyone who’s got solar panels on the roof is, I want to use that electricity at night when I’m at home. So you get a battery in your house, which is what I’ve done. But then the next step is you can charge your car from that solar energy and use the energy in the car to run your house at night. And those steps are making electric cars far more part of your life than just a car that’s parked outside that you drive and you buy petrol for it.

Speaker C: That’s the thing that you’ve got to sell, isn’t it? It’s a really attractive idea for people. People love the idea because they hate going to petrol stations. Everybody would like the idea of using that free power from their roof, but that’s going to mean that they’re going to need big batteries to hold that power. There’s also going to be cables going over the pavement, aren’t there?

Speaker H: There certainly are some people who have nowhere off the street to park the car that do charge it and have cables going across the street, but they have to have legally now have to have a cable cover so you don’t trip people up. There are numerous alternatives to that, one of them being using lampposts. There is a company that installs a charge point in the base of a lamppost which you just plug your car into. There are now about to be launched systems that when you go up to the charging point, there’s nothing in there, you can’t see anything. There’s actually a little square in the pavement and you press your button on your app and a little, a little post comes out of the ground and that’s where you plug your car into. So there’s going to be alternatives that develop for people who have nowhere off the street to park. But it’s actually over 60% of UK households have somewhere off the street to park a car.

Speaker C: You’re going to have to have locks, aren’t you? Things like that. Because you’ll get some wag who’ll come along and disconnect your car just for a joke.

Speaker H: As soon as the car is locked, the cable is locked into the car and at the other end, so you can’t unplug it unless you have the key. And somebody said, well, they could just come up and cut it. You know, a vandal could. If they do, they will probably die. So I say, knock yourself out, mate, try and cut the wire.

Speaker C: Okay, so why are you such a passionate advocate on this?

Speaker H: Actually, I have to go back to about 2001. I was working in Los Angeles, and the air quality in Los Angeles at that time was abysmal. It’s a combination of the geographic nature of the place, of the temperatures— it’s very hot— there’s 3.5 million cars in one city, they’re all incredibly inefficient, And you then went, ah, that’s the driving force behind why people in California were pushing for zero-emission vehicles. It was really very much to do with local air quality, which is something we’ve now realized we are suffering from in this country, you know, and electric cars completely would remove that. And the fact that places like London are, you know, adopting electric taxis, electric buses, electric delivery vehicles, electric bikes, there’s a movement behind that. They’re a more efficient machine.

Speaker C: That brings me on to my next question though. Electric cars are anonymous, aren’t they? The Mr. Toads of this world, the high-octane Jeremy Clarksons, hate them. They think they don’t have the glamour of the petrol car.

Speaker H: I think actually even their attitudes are slightly changing, but I think, and I think also if you’ve got the desire, if you Google Rimac, R-I-M-A-C, C2, you will see a car that you would expect to see on Top Gear or on the Grand Tour. It’s a pure electric car. It goes faster than any petrol car that’s ever been made. Its top speed is higher, it goes further on one charge than any of those supercars go on one tank of petrol. So the technology is changing, you know, we’re talking ludicrously expensive supercar, but the Rimac is an extraordinary machine. It is terrifyingly fast and it’s electric. Most of those sort of journalistic attitudes to electric cars are about 8 to 10 years old and things have really changed and moved on.

Speaker C: They don’t have any glamour, do they? They are anonymous. Pointless, even if they are fast, it doesn’t matter, they’re just like sort of big electric tubes that you’re firing at high top speed.

Speaker H: Did you see at the Royal Wedding when the happily married couple drove off in an E-Type Jaguar at the end? That’s an electric E-Type Jaguar that Jaguar built.

Speaker C: I see, so is that what the E-Type stands for in Jaguar?

Speaker H: Well, it does now, you know, I think the world is changing very rapidly. I think the notion of when you get out of a car what will people think of you is slightly tragic. So, you know, if you’re a middle-aged man with a big gut and a bald patch on the top of your head, you get out of a ludicrous, in very large inverted commas, sexy car, do people think you’re cool? No, they think you’re a bit of a pillock.

Speaker C: One of the things about being rich is that you have to use up resources, don’t you? I mean, that’s the point of being rich. You’ve got more money, you can pay for more stuff, so that’s why you burn up more fuel, because that’s what being rich is. Is that changing, do you think?

Speaker H: If that is the case, wouldn’t it be amazing if when you’re rich you think, I know what I’m going to do, I’m going to actually help the rest of the world and do something useful with it? Some very rich people do do that. I mean, you know, it’s not— I don’t think it’s universal. And also, I think now there are status— the Rimac is a classic status symbol car. You’ve got to be a multi-millionaire. They’re €1.5 million to buy, so they’re not cheap. You know, if you buy one of those, you’re going to be cooler than the guy who turns up at the party in a Ferrari because everyone’s going to go, oh my God, that’s the Rimac, that’s amazing. You because it’s faster than the Ferrari, it makes the Ferrari look like a runabout. So I think, I don’t know that that’s really an argument that’s going to hold up. I think we’re going to see all top-end vehicles, rich people’s cars, will be electric very much sooner than normal people because there’s a lot of companies, Jaguar have just released the I-PACE, I’ve just been driving it, it’s an amazing car, but it’s a £60,000 car, you know, so it’s not a cheap car. Wealthy people are going to buy that and that will be a status symbol, I think.

Speaker C: But that’s another big problem, isn’t it? Because as you point out, your €1.2 million car, it’s got a wonderful battery. But that’s the point that everybody in— the man in the pub, it’s normally the man in the pub, by the way— goes on about these batteries. They don’t last for any time at all. You’re permanently worried about the battery. You’re permanently worried about where you’re going to get a charge from. For the man or the woman in the street, that’s a big worry.

Speaker H: Yeah, well, it’s a worry based on articles in certain newspapers. It’s not based on any fact. So there are now numerous, and I’m talking like dozens of electric cars that have done over quarter of a million miles, 250,000 miles on their original battery pack. They’ve had the battery packs tested by independent people and their battery packs have lost maybe 10% of their original capacity.

Speaker C: They only last for 110 miles or something.

Speaker H: We trialled a Nissan Leaf You know, it’s a very difficult argument to make, but how often do people drive over 100 miles in a day? Very, very rarely. Statistically, very rarely. The average mileage per day is about 29 miles in the UK. So you only charge the car once or twice a week. You know, there are times when you need to go further, and then you charge on a, you know, at a rapid charger on a motorway. But also, most new electric cars that are coming out— and these are normal man and woman in the street or pub or even café or coffee bar— the cars that they can afford will do over 150 miles on one charge. So that’s already changed. The 100-mile range thing is from about 2012. So, you know, they have changed. The latest electric cars mostly are now getting up towards 200 miles on one charge.

Speaker C: There’s one gentleman I know who’s a great opponent of electronic cars. Let’s call him endearingly Cockney Paul. He says, fine, you know, I don’t have the time to sit spend 2 hours at a service station waiting for it to charge. You say rapid charging. How long is a rapid charge?

Speaker H: About 25 to 30 minutes. So he can spend 2 hours there if he wants, but he may as well— as long as he unplugs the car and lets someone else use it. I mean, you know, it is— and that is going to change even more rapidly. So in probably 4 years’ time, you’ll be able to charge a car, add a couple of hundred miles range to it in 15 minutes. So that technology is jumping forwards. There are huge projects being built now— I mean, we’re not talking theoretically in the future— being built now where massive battery banks are being put in at chargers. So there’s multiple rapid chargers that charge at way higher speeds than they do now, that will charge cars in 15-20 minutes to add 200 miles extra range. And the strain on the grid will be reduced because the batteries are charging the cars rather than the grid. So, you know, it’s fine. I encourage people to be cynical and sneering about electric cars. Because they then have to go to a garage and spend an enormous amount of money on an imported fuel. And it cost me about 1.5 to 2 pence a mile to drive my car, as opposed to 15 to 50 pence a mile, depending on the vehicle you’ve got. There’s no need to make an argument to support electric cars. They make the argument themselves.

Speaker C: That was Robert Llewellyn, and that was Password, brought to you by me, Peter Warren, produced by Blue Buffery, and written by Jane Wyatt. Password is a Future Intelligence production, and if you would like to find out more about the ramifications of technology on society, then go to our websites: www.futureintelligence.co.uk and www.csri.info. In the next month’s programme, we return once more to the debate over driverless cars and electric transport. Transport, and interview the politicians and the people behind the smart city and ask, where does humanity come into this? And where do we go to get a say in the development of this future world? So for this month, that’s all for now. Thanks for listening and goodbye.

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