Tag: automated vehicles

• Uber to invest $200 million in Toronto

  Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was in Toronto today, where he announced that the company plans to invest more than $200 million over the next five years to expand the autonomous vehicle research lab that it already has here in the city. 

  The Toronto outpost of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) – which is its only international outpost – is led by renowned University of Toronto professor, Raquel Urtasun. She is also the cofounder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and splits her time between Uber and UofT.

  With this investment, Uber also expects to open its first engineering facility in Canada and grow its local headcount to 500, up from the 200 or so it has today. Some of these hires will be local. Some will be international. And some will be transplants from Uber’s other offices.

  Also notable about the announcement is that Khosrowshahi mentioned that he thinks fully autonomous vehicles roaming the streets of our cities is a good 10 years away. But I wonder if that isn’t political PR speak intended not to spook its drivers. So are we closer to the mid-2020′s?

  Either way, as a proud Torontonian and UofT alumnus, I was happy to see this announcement. I think it’s far more exciting than the Apple event that took place earlier this week.

  2018.09.14

• Everything you ever wanted to know about automated vehicles

  Last fall, David Ticoll (who is a research fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto) published a thorough discussion paper called Driving Changes: Automated Vehicles in Toronto. 

  If you’re interested in driverless cars, and I know that a lot of you are, then it’s definitely worth a weekend read. It’s fairly long. He gets into the various automation levels, the transition period, the implications for policy makers, the benefits, and so on.

  Here’s a quick snippet on the topic of benefits:

  “This report provides bottom-up analysis based on Toronto-specific data. The result is a conservative estimate that were AVs to be at a 90% adoption rate in Toronto today, the result would be annual savings of $6 billion, or 4% of the City’s $150 billion gross
  domestic product. This includes $1.2 billion from reduced collisions, $2.7 billion out of congestion costs, $1.6 billion from insurance, and $0.5 billion from parking fees and fines. AVs will provide other quantifiable social and economic benefits that range from fewer deaths and hospitalizations thanks to lower particle emissions, to productivity gains in many business sectors.”

  But of course there’s the question of: when will this happen? Below is a chart from the paper that was assembled using various consultant/analyst predictions. Based on this, we’re still over a decade away from the consumer adoption of automated vehicles.

  

  However, these are just estimates and history has shown us that the adoption rate for new technologies has been increasing over time. Below is a chart by Michael Felton, which is also from the paper, that shows this phenomenon. Take a look at the telephone in comparison to the internet.

  

  Maybe I’m being overly optimistic (it wouldn’t be the first time), but consumer-facing driverless cars, at least to me, feel pretty close to the horizon.

  2016.03.22