Enabling a Self-Driving Future
(This post was originally posted on June 10, 2017.)
Mobility is spelled with a big M these days, and stands for all things connected to self-driving cars (or autonomous vehicles, robotic cars, etc.). It is to be the next great thing, the next platform that changes the way we live, work, and play. The big consulting firms and independent research groups have written reports that promise trillions of dollars of economic opportunities, worker productivity, and new business models. In addition to the trillions of dollars, it could help reduce climate change, reduce our need for land for parking and highways, and save 10,000s lives per year. President Obama has even touted the future is driven by robots and AI.
This bright future has led Silicon Valley and Wall Street to make huge bets. Table stakes to get into this game is measured in billions. The venture capital community has put up its billions to create the new technologies to achieve this vision. Wall Street has bid up the valuations of Uber, Lyft, and Tesla to levels way beyond what can be justified on current cash flows. Large companies like Intel, Alphabet, and Apple are betting $10s of billions on acquisitions and internal development to supply the equipment and infrastructure to support this Mobility platform. In short, the capital to develop the technology is being committed, and it seems a fair bet that the technology needed to run self-driving cars will become reality.
I, too, am a believer. It’s not just the bets that all these companies are making. It’s the fact that I also waste nearly 8 work weeks of my life every year behind the wheel of a car. What I wouldn’t do or spend to get that time back for more productive, meaningful, or just plain enjoyable time. I want this future; I want it selfishly for me. But I also want it for all of us, because I believe that all of those saved hours and natural resources will help us live better, healthier, and more productive lives. The Mobility Platform has the potential to be as life changing as the PC and Internet revolutions.
So why does it feel like we are in a hype cycle …
I think it is because we need more than just the technology that Silicon Valley can delivery. I think that this hype cycle might be different from other technology hype cycles because of the need of parallel development in our physical infrastructure. We need trillions of dollars of new road infrastructure. This expense is on top of the backlog of $2 trillion needed to fix our crumbling roads and bridges. Even if a Level 5 Connected Vehicle can be delivered by 2020, and even if 5G communications (the wireless communication needed to run the Internet of Things at speeds that can handle driving a Level 5 Connected Vehicle barreling down the road at 70 miles an hour) can be enabled by 2020, we still need the roads to enable the vision. My sense is that the technology will be ready long before the physical infrastructure will be built that is needed to complete this vision.
The road repairs and new infrastructure will require spending more than 10X than the US spent on the Apollo program (The US spent >$200 B in 2017 dollars in the Apollo program). How can we possibly align the technology roadmap and its timeline with the physical infrastructure roadmap & timeline? More specifically how do we mobilize the political will to collect & spend the trillions of dollars needed for this Mobility Platform? The requirements to upgrade our infrastructure to enable self-driving vehicles appears to be a serious roadblock to our self-driving future. And this process is fundamentally a political one, not a technology one.
It takes years to fund, design, and build major road projects. My sense is that we need to start this process today if we are to enjoy the societal benefits of Mobility in the future.