Robotaxis, sensors and shuttles, oh my! Despite some of the negative news reports of where robotaxis have failed, the technology has actually advanced incredibly over the past 10 years. In today’s episode, Dr. James Jeffs, Senior Technology analyst at IDTechEx, talks about the evolution of robotaxis, the technology that powers them and how they will impact our transportation infrastructure overall. Also, addressing all the considerations around servicing vehicles en route still need to be figured out (i.e., if there’s a tire blowout, fueling, etc.), also how the role of the driver will change, not be eliminated.
https://ridecell.com/
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Robotaxis, sensors and shuttles, oh my! Despite some of the negative news reports of where robotaxis have failed, the technology has actually advanced incredibly over the past 10 years. In today’s episode, Dr. James Jeffs, Senior Technology analyst at IDTechEx, talks about the evolution of robotaxis, the technology that powers them and how they will impact our transportation infrastructure overall. Also, addressing all the considerations around servicing vehicles en route still need to be figured out (i.e., if there’s a tire blowout, fueling, etc.), also how the role of the driver will change, not be eliminated.
https://ridecell.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/ridecell/
https://twitter.com/ridecell
Angela Simoes:
You are listening to the Mile Marker Podcast where we explore trends and innovations and fleet automation and shared mobility, helping fleet based businesses make better informed decisions and achieve full digital transformation.
Hello and welcome to the Mile Marker Podcast. I am your host, Angela Simoes. Today I'm here with Dr. James Jeffs, who is a senior technology analyst at IDTechEx, where he focuses on autonomous vehicles research across a range of sectors including environmental mapping technologies. Previously James worked at WMG, University of Warwick, specializing in modeling thermal management analysis and functional testing of control software. James recently co-authored an IDTechEx report on autonomous cars, robotaxis and sensors. That leads us to our topic today, the evolution of robotaxis. Welcome, James.
James Jeffs:
Thanks, Angela.
Angela Simoes:
James, tell us a bit about your background and the research you have recently completed.
James Jeffs:
Of course. Like you say, I am a senior technology analyst at IDTechEx where we write market forecasts and market reports on emerging technologies, and I cover autonomous technologies and a bit of electric. Reports that I've written are the autonomous cars report that we're going to talk about today. It's actually my second iteration of that report, so I'm quite familiar with that topic now. But I've also looked at things like autonomous trucks, buses, roboshuttles and sensors for autonomy as well, like semiconductor technology, radar, LiDAR, cameras.
Angela Simoes:
So the whole picture, really. You have a really great purview of how everything is fitting together and not just for passenger vehicles, but like you mentioned, trucking and robotaxis. It sounds like you have a great, broad view of things.
James Jeffs:
Quite a few different vehicles now, and it's really interesting to see the different approaches across different industries. Everybody's targets tend to vary slightly. Like when you look at full size buses, they're not talking about taking the driver out, they're talking about repurposing the driver and still having staff on, but then you look at something like railway shuttles and railway taxis and they're going to be completely unstaffed, completely unmanned.
Angela Simoes:
And so let's talk about robotaxis. They certainly have come a long way. There still seems to be some misconceptions around whether it's the technology itself and the success rates, because of course in the media you really only see the bad stuff, when it crashes or when it hits somebody or it stalls in the middle of a intersection and causes a traffic jam. But give us an idea of really how robotaxis have evolved over the past few years and where they are now.
James Jeffs:
Yes, they really have come quite a long way and I'm hoping that those instances in the media are going to continue to get further apart and be more exceptional and bigger stories. I hope soon it will be a surprise when a robotaxi has a problem rather than it's expected or it's annoying or look how poor they're performing. Certainly they've come a long way since we started looking at them and looking at their performance. We look back to testing data all the way in 2015, and since then we see exponential improvement in how far robotaxis can go between needing human intervention, and more importantly how far they go between collisions, which is still quite rare, especially with people on board. But when you look at the performance and the collision rate of robotaxis versus human drivers in San Francisco, it still is worse than a human driver, as you'd expect. But we're seeing continuous improvements and hopefully we're going to get to the point in the next few years where robotaxi performance and robotaxi crash rate is better than that of a human driver.
Angela Simoes:
But also when you look at cumulative miles driven, the success rate or successful miles driven versus where there was an issue, the success rate is still much higher than when there were crashes or anything like that. If you look at the big picture, there's a lot more success happening than there are bad things, right?
James Jeffs:
Oh, definitely. Lots of testing has been done in California. We're talking tens of millions of miles cumulatively now across the railway taxi players with Waymo and Cruise really leading that. Waymo alone last year did about nearly 3 million miles of testing with their fleet of 700 vehicles. Lots of vehicles on the road, lots of miles covered, and the number of problems or number of miles between problems keeps going up. It started with just they could manage a few hundred miles between what we call disengagement. A disengagement is where the human safety driver behind the wheel that's monitoring the system feels that the system can no longer handle the situation and needs to step in. Back in 2015, it was a few hundred miles between disengagements. Start of the 2020s it was more like a few thousand to tens of thousand between disengagements.
Now Cruise is leading. Last year they had something like 90,000 miles per disengagement. They go a long, long way before the human safety driver feels that they need to do something, that it's encountered a situation it can't cope with. To put that in perspective, the average American drives something like 10 to 15,000 miles per year.
Angela Simoes:
Oh, wow.
James Jeffs:
We're talking about six years worth of driving for the average person, six to nine years worth of driving for the average person before robotaxis encounter something they can't deal with. They really do go a long way. Another important thing is all the disengagements are recorded. You can go to California DMV website and read every single time there was a disengagement. The driver writes down a quick note about what happened. If you look at Cruise, they had nine disengagements and four of them were caused by human drivers in other cars. A human driver was getting too close or a human driver cut in front of the Cruise or behaved erratically. Once you take those out of the equation-
Angela Simoes:
Quite low.
James Jeffs:
You've nearly doubled. You're nearly getting on for 200,000 miles per disengagement, and that's getting close to human crash rate. On average, IDTechEx estimates American drivers will have a collision approximately once every 200,000 miles. The disengagement rate is getting really, really close to the crash rate now. We're starting to see definitely the potential for autonomous cars to be safer than human driven cars. I would estimate either this year or next year we're going to see a disengagement rate lower than human crash rate.
Angela Simoes:
Wow.
James Jeffs:
Obviously that comes with caveats that we don't know that the disengagement would lead to a crash. It's not guaranteed. Also, that's testing in a very specific area. That testing is mostly happening in San Francisco. Doesn't mean that you could have those cars go out onto the freeway or into New York and have the same performance, whereas a human driver is fairly reliable no matter what environment you put them in. It's really hard to compare. Another thing you have to take account of is that 200,000 miles between crashes for a human driver is a national average, so that includes freeway miles, whereas Cruise is operating mainly in San Francisco and obviously San Francisco, you'd expect there to be fewer miles between collisions for a human driver just because of slower speeds, more challenges. Since 2015, lots of improvement, really exciting, and we're definitely starting to see the potential for overtaking human safety.
Angela Simoes:
Well, and the improvement from 2015 to now,, 2023 may sound like a long time, but really that's a very short amount of time to see that kind of improvement. It's been rapidly evolving.
James Jeffs:
It's the rapidness of it in the way it's come about as well. That the improvement has been, that number, that miles per disengagement, doubles every year roughly what we've seen, which means that they started a tiny fraction of human performance. But once you double every year, we're now at the point where we're around half to a quarter of human performance. Next year would be just about that year after twice as far. The year after that, four times. If we can keep that exponential growth in performance, you end up significantly safer than a human, theoretically, in a few years time. But that's going to be reliant on more miles and more testing. I guess one way to compare it is that they've done about 10 million miles of on road testing now, whereas human learner drivers will learn how to drive a car pretty quickly.
Angela Simoes:
But I think another factor in this autonomous vehicles or robotaxis becoming safer is the ability for the vehicles to talk to each other and talk to infrastructure. My vehicle has some ADAS features like lane assist and things like that. You can clearly see that if my car was able to talk to the other cars on the road, it's very clear that of course they would all keep a good distance from each other, it would be a much safer driving environment. Maybe not going as fast as I would like, but it certainly would be a safer environment. I think when that starts to come about as well, and I think we're seeing a little bit of that happening over the last couple of years, the connected cars, and I don't want to digress and get onto another topic, but that's starting to evolve a little bit more as well. I think that's a big factor in improving the safety of robotaxis as well.
James Jeffs:
Definitely. But I think the connected side of things and the safety that's going to come with V2X and connected cars will be sort of a second era or a second generation of autonomous technologies. I think the first has been getting the sensors on the vehicle to do the right thing and then getting the car to drive itself. I think you can have the car driving itself pretty safely in a geofenced area that's well known without the connected technologies. And then the connector technologies will come further down the line and it'll help us get to the industry's goal of zero road fatalities. It's definitely a big part in zero road fatalities. If you know the position of every smartphone, if that can be communicated to the car, then you've got a much better idea of where all the pedestrians are and where the risks are. Like you say, with other vehicles and things like early warning for ambulances and police.
I think one of the big challenges is its been going on for a little while that people have been doing connected vehicle research and trials and it's really struggling to get off the ground. I think that it's going to take some way of monetizing and generating revenue for manufacturers and for services to really spark more interest and get deployment of connected services and connected vehicles. I think it's going to be that the services will come first, drive the technology, and then we'll see the safety features come along once we've kind of got the technology deployed and we've got the infrastructure as well, the connected vehicle infrastructure, whether it be 5G or wifi or whatever they decide to go with. I was going to say one other point on that as well.
Oh yeah. I think there's going to need to be, especially for the safety stuff, there's sort of a minimum deployment or minimum threshold you need for it to actually work. There's no point having one connected car with safety features. If it's just BMWs that can only talk to other BMWs, that's not going to make too much of a dent. But once you've got 30 or 40% of vehicles on the road that are connected, I think that's when the kind of snowballing progress can happen and we start to see big improvements in safety.
Angela Simoes:
You mentioned two things that I want to make sure that we address. You mentioned that some of those driving statistics also involves highway miles, and then there's the business aspect because you mentioned about connected services really only going to take off when manufacturers can figure out how to monetize some of those services. Let's talk about highway miles first because my question is, so far robotaxis really have just been in urban settings, correct?
James Jeffs:
Mm-hm.
Angela Simoes:
How do you view robotaxis in the bigger picture, whether it's in 3 years, 10 years, 15 years? It's a little hard to forecast that far out, but there's a potential for robotaxis to have a bigger impact on transportation overall. What are your thoughts on that? Where do you see robotaxis kind of evolving into the broader transportation landscape?
James Jeffs:
I think they'll be mostly confined to cities. I'm not sure what their autonomous inter-city transport will look like at this stage, but I just think about Uber and how Uber's used and Lyft, where people will happily use them to move around San Francisco, move around London. I think it's very rare that you'd get an Uber between big cities. It'll get very expensive and I don't think it... Uber spread city by city. I see robotaxis doing exactly the same thing. Well, they've recently, Waymo and Cruise, have got more permission to operate in San Francisco, with Waymo targeting Los Angeles and then Nevada, and Motional's already in Nevada. I think we'll see a buildup of lists of cities that they can operate in, but I don't think they'll be venturing out of the cities for a very long time. I'm not sure-
Angela Simoes:
Why is-
James Jeffs:
... what the highway miles will look like for them. In theory, a highway is easier in some ways. There's no pedestrians, there's no cyclists, there's no traffic lights, everyone's moving quickly, but everyone's moving in the same direction and there shouldn't be much convergence speed between vehicles. It should be doable. I think the problem is that you have to charge a lot to send a robotaxi down a highway. You'd have to charge a really high fare for it because you want the robotaxi to remain close to customers. You don't want to be driving out 50 miles and then it has to either find customers there or drive itself back to base. That's a fareless revenueless 50 miles that it could end up doing.
Angela Simoes:
That's a good point. I have had conversations in the past with some executives where imagining what the future could look like. Commuting, for example. I live about 45 minutes from San Francisco, and the idea of commuting into San Francisco every day just is a horrible thought. However, if there was a commuter roboshuttle of sorts that was outfitted with a desk and maybe a coffee machine or something that these sort of commuter shuttles could evolve and make commuting less of a hassle, and then you're not so worried about living further out from where you're working. Those are kinds of things that I was like, that might not actually be a bad idea. Or you're going on vacation and instead of driving down to LA you hire a roboshuttle again or some sort of autonomous pod to take your family and you can leave at night, sleep all the way there, and then when you wake up, you're at your destination.
These are sort of pie in the sky scenarios, but when we look at how robotaxis are evolving and getting better, you start to think in 10 years maybe those scenarios may not be pie in the sky anymore. I don't know. Do you think that's something that's actually viable? Again, from a business standpoint, it could be quite expensive, but the technology would be there, I think.
James Jeffs:
I think we are showing that we can successfully build autonomous systems to do car-size things in robotaxis, and we're also showing that we can do truck-size things with the logistics testing that's happening across the Sunbelt region. I think we're showing that we can build an autonomous system that you could put on any vehicle and then make the vehicle how you want it to be in terms of its utility, whether you make it like a roboshuttles, halfway between a robotaxi and a bus, or whether you make a bus or a robotaxi.
I think the thing with roboshuttles that I've seen so far is they've really struggled to show their purpose and their value proposition. You see companies like Navi and EasyMile and Zoox with their very, very subtle design. The issue is they're trying to do autonomy and an e-vehicle at the same time, which makes testing them really difficult. Because if you start with a car and put some sensors on it, most governmental bodies are happy that it's a car, it's safe to use at whatever speed-
Angela Simoes:
They're familiar.
James Jeffs:
... human there to take control of the system. But you start to remove the steering wheel and pedals, that a human can't intervene as easily, and governmental bodies get really worried about how you're going to test it and what you're going to do. You find that a lot of the testing of those vehicles happens on the outskirts of cities and they're only allowed to go one kilometer forwards and backwards, and it's just they're really sandbagged in terms of what they can do, and therefore it's really hard to actually prove they've got value. I think until we're more comfortable and we can show that we can start testing them properly, put them in cities, put them at full speed, it's going to be hard to show how useful they can be. But the idea is really good.
Like you said, you could do things like platooning, so you could have these railroad shuttles go round, pick up, I don't know, 5, 10 commuters that have all got a little desk in there and then platoon several of them into the city and start saving energy and things like that. I've seen good examples of that or good examples of these kind of systems working. In Hamburg, Volkswagen have a test program they called MOIA where they've got, I think it's around 500 vans currently driven by human drivers, but their mini buses, they've got something like nine seats and they operate a ride pooling service.
It looks like Uber on your phone, you say, "I want to go from point A to point B, and then the system sort of dynamically route one of the buses that's partially full, to you, and it creates its own mini bus route on the fly, which means you get a very quick service, but very cheap service because you are sharing it with other people. That's kind of where I see roboshuttles going. And then that will offer huge benefits for the commuter problem that you mentioned, getting from a suburb into a main city. Because chances are you're not the only one. If you can dynamically pull some autonomous services to get a group of you into the city, reduce personal costs and things like that, that could be really effective.
That's where I see sort of roboshuttles going in the suburban commuter problem and how that kind of fills the gap. But I guess the industry really long-term is looking at air mobility for those kind of problems. Electric-y little crafts that can... There's going to be lots and lots of e-little ports in a city and they'll be automated and you can book it like you would book a taxi and get short green flights from suburbs into cities. I think that's the industry's vision, but that's even more complicated.
Angela Simoes:
And personally more scary. I really don't know that I would get into an autonomous air vehicle of any sort at this point. They'd have to fly very low to the ground for me to not be completely scared. But talking about where you see them going, of course business opportunities. Here at Mile Marker Podcast and at RightSo, we talk about fleets. What are your thoughts on what are some of the business opportunities or what do you think will emerge in this area? And you kind of already hinted at that, where roboshuttles might be going, but as OEMs and perhaps even dealerships and other companies are looking at increasing the use of their vehicle assets instead of having all these vehicles just sitting on the lots, where do you see some business opportunities for all those different companies and where this might be going?
James Jeffs:
In terms of the public transport side of things, I think we'll have to split this into commercial vehicles and public transport because there'll be different answers for both of those. Then I guess even when you get down to personal, so the robotaxis, all the development is happening by a few companies. There's really only, between the US and China, maybe five companies really leading it and they're building up their own fleets and their own services. I think Waymo's one of the most interesting because it's owned by Alphabet, which is Google. If you want to use Waymo's service in Arizona, it comes up as an option on Google Maps. That's really interesting, but does it imply that Google is planning to keep the fleet to itself? So it will develop them and they'll be the fleet owners, the fleet managers. It makes sense, all the software's there and they've got the ability to distribute it and sell the service.
Same for Cruise. It looks like they're using their own vehicles at the minute. Well, they're using GM vehicles at the minute and they're planning to make a bespoke GM origin vehicle. Will they be the fleet owners again? Are they going to make all the vehicles and they'll be the fleet managers and the vehicle will be a resource to them? I think that's one of the big things that I'm waiting to be answered in terms of robotaxis is, is GM planning on selling these to a fleet owner who's going to distribute the autonomous services? Because obviously you don't need, with Uber and with traditional taxis, you have a human as essentially the fleet owner or the operator. They buy their own yellow cab or they'll drive for a yellow cab company or whatever it is, or they'll buy their own car and make it an Uber.
But when you don't need a driver, it does make who owns the fleet a bit more up in the air. If the OEMs have the ability to completely control the fleet and completely monetize it, I'm not sure if they would bother selling the vehicles or just keep it for themselves. But then you do have the likes of Lyft and Uber making partnerships with GM and Waymo, so we'll have to see how that relationship unfolds. But then you've got people like Elon Musk saying a long time ago, the idea was that when you had a fully autonomous Model S, you'd be able to set it to be a robotaxi during the day when you're not using it, so it would go off and make you revenue. That's that kind of very personal fleet management aspect of it as well.
I think it's when you get into commercial vehicles that the fleet side becomes a lot more interesting, especially trucks. It looks like none of the trucking people are planning on running fleets themselves. Essentially you'd have to turn yourself into a logistics company, which I don't think they want to do. I think they want to sell their software. Well, I think the startups want to develop the software and then get an agreement to deploy it on an OEM vehicle-
Angela Simoes:
So licensing.
James Jeffs:
... or freight liner or someone's going to pay them, I don't know, 10,000 per vehicle or whatever to put their kit on and use their mapping. Then obviously Damer won't sell it to a logistics company. I see that side of it, the commercial side, being a lot more about fleet management and deployment. Then when you go down that route and you've got a logistics company that has a hundred autonomous vehicles, that's when I think there's opportunities for someone who's good at fleet management to come in and do autonomous fleet management.
I'm sure there're going to be some differences in managing human driven fleets and managing autonomous fleets with the uptime and the requirements and things like that. One thing, organizing for it to be refueled becomes different because you need to organize for someone to be there when the truck arrives to refuel it, for instance. There's all those considerations between ice, fuel, gas powered or fuel powered versus EV trucks because you still can have an autonomous vehicle that's gas powered technically, I guess, but then to your point, you have to have someone there that's ready to fuel it. Those kinds of logistics, until we have become in 50 years a fully autonomous society.
James Jeffs:
I guess there could be an on-call person that just stays in the truck so the truck can still drive 24-7, but you have someone sleeping in the back, and if it gets into trouble, it can pull over and get the driver to regain control, and then you've got someone to fill up. I think one of the biggest concerns or biggest challenges I think for autonomous trucking is what happens if you are 200 miles between cities in Texas and you get a blowout, who's going to fix it? That truck could be down for a day. There's things like that to consider as well.
But then you've got busing where all the bus companies I've talked to and everyone working on autonomous buses that I've spoken to have all said that they plan to keep a staff member on the bus. For buses, the driver isn't just a driver, they're sort of hospitality in some way. They're making sure everyone is safe and comfortable. They're there to deter unrest, deter crime, in a way, deter fighting and muggings that could happen on a vehicle like that if it was completely unprotected. They're there to take money. The bus companies imagine the driver is going to be able to better fulfill these responsibilities while the bus drives itself. That's the long-term aim, that the driver will become more of a steward or a captain or something like that, the bus rather than just the driver.
Angela Simoes:
That's a great example of how the role of the quote unquote driver will change as opposed to be eliminated. I think that's a great example.
James Jeffs:
That's something that can be reassuring for the driver industry-
Angela Simoes:
Exactly.
James Jeffs:
There's a lot of people worried that autonomy will replace their jobs, but it might just be that autonomy changes their jobs.
Angela Simoes:
I think that there clearly is a lot of fear that between AI and autonomy and all these technological advances that so many jobs are going to be eliminated. But to your point, it's just that they're changing a bit in scope. We're coming up on the end, but we can't have this conversation without touching on government regulation and policy. We sort of hinted at it earlier, and I know that's not really something that you focus on, but I'm sure that you monitor everything that's happening, especially the recent developments in San Francisco and California giving Cruise and Waymo the ability to charge for autonomous taxi rides. What are your thoughts on what's currently happening on that front, not just San Francisco, but government regulation in general, both here in the US and in other countries? If you've seen anything interesting happening in other countries.
James Jeffs:
So obviously the recent news last week is very exciting for the industry. It opens up for Cruise a lot. For Waymo, they were more restricted than Cruise. They basically couldn't charge for driverless rides in San Francisco before that change. Cruise has had permission to charge for fares driverlessly in a very restricted area between, I think it was, 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM, so basically overnight for just over a year now. I don't think California Public Utilities Commission or CPUC would take this decision lightly. I think what they've seen from Cruise over the past year and all the testing from Waymo, there's 3 million miles for them to look at for Waymo last year to see how well we're doing. I think they will have considered that closely and feel that it's now safe and they're ready and they're going to be no more dangerous or acceptably more dangerous than human drivers to deploy wider in San Francisco.
And I know LA was mentioned as well in the report. I can't remember exactly what's going to happen in LA, but I imagine that LA is going to be next in California, definitely for Waymo. Across the US I think there's going to be, we'll see a growth now in the number of cities that have commercial deployments starting from about now. We've had Phoenix with Waymo for a few years. Now we've got San Francisco and Las Vegas has a Motional one. We'll have Los Angeles added soon. I think there's a lot of work and testing going on in New York. I think these big densely populated hubs will start coming online two or three per year at the minute, and then it'll really kick off at some point in the next.
I would guess that before five years we'll start to see really big growth, like we saw from Uber at the start of the 2010s. We saw them start in San Francisco, spread city by city and then sort of explode in the mid 2010s worldwide. It's not going to be that quick because obviously there's a lot more to worry about with autonomous cars than human ones driven by Uber, but it'll be that similar spread. That's what happened, happening in the US, and certainly for this time being it is going to be state by state because I just don't see any federal movement or top government movement to have a US-wide policy on this.
Angela Simoes:
Makes sense.
James Jeffs:
You can see in the US that the push is coming from the companies, which is really interesting. It's pioneering companies in Silicon Valley that are really pushing for the laws to be changed. You see it from Waymo and Cruise, but you also see it from companies like Nuro who are doing the curbside delivery. They've got a similar problem to the roboshuttles that the pods that they want to put on the road legally aren't cars, so you can't have them on the road. They need rules changed to say that, okay, if it's not carrying passengers, it doesn't need seat belts. If it's whatever, it doesn't need pedals and a steering wheel. At the minute you couldn't get it qualified or homologated for road safety use. You've got that issue to overcome for wider deployment. But they are getting states to start changing their rules and say, "Okay, it doesn't have passengers, it doesn't need a seat belt, you can do this kind of testing."
Europe is really different. Europe, I don't see any companies... I couldn't tell you who the biggest... There's a couple of companies doing autonomous testing, but I don't see anyone really pushing it to the same regard as the US. I would point to Mobileye and say that they're testing in a few cities, but I really see Europe coming from the regulating side and really trying hard to figure out what the rules should be on autonomous vehicles, how they should be used and how safe they should be, and how we can measure that safety. I see Europe trying to get all that in place before they...
Angela Simoes:
Start the testing?
James Jeffs:
Before they do the testing. I see the US is kind of, the companies are putting the cars that's on the road and then figuring out how we can measure and how we can prove. Europe wants to do it the other way round. They want to get all that, let's figure out how to measure and certify and then we'll put them on the road.
Angela Simoes:
So we're kind of the guinea pigs over here, then Europe [inaudible 00:34:08].
James Jeffs:
I would say the pioneers. No, I would say you're the pioneers rather than the Guinea pigs. I'd say Europe is being overly conservative. I don't know, maybe Europe is paying close attention to the US. I think Europe has been working on this problem for a long time before the US. Well, before companies like Cruise and Waymo showed how good they can be. Europe's been thinking about this for 10, 15 years now and doing research and having PhD students look at this and universities try and figure out ways to do this.
Then China's a bit more unknown. It looks like the deployment is happening city by city again, with individual cities kind of regulating in the same way states are regulating in the US. But my feeling on China is that at some point the Chinese government will make bigger actions and make it easier for wider spread deployment. When China does decide to act, it usually acts quickly and broadly. If you look at how they deployed electric vehicles and how they deployed electric buses, the government can make things happen rather quickly. I think we'll see a similar city by city for the next few years, but I think at some point there'll just be like a switch flicked and then all of China is allowed autonomous cars. I think it could go that way.
Angela Simoes:
It certainly is, regardless of what country we're talking about, this is where we're going, autonomy, robotaxis, that sort of thing. We're at the end of our episode, it's a fun question. So 30, 50 years into the future, transportation as a whole, not just robotaxis. What do you think our transportation landscape will look like? Are we looking like the Jetsons or is it some sort of hybrid between what we have now and the Jetsons? But it seems really like someday, maybe it's a hundred years from now, I don't know, but I feel like one day we will wake up and feel like George Jetson.
James Jeffs:
I think in 30 years we could see signs of that. I think in 30 years we will have electric e-veto, which would be Jetson-like transport. We'll have human carrying drones flying about. I don't want to say that everyone's going to be taking them to work. I think they could be reserved for the wealthy, they could be tourist attractions, and then on the ground it'll be a lot more automated. I think in city centers we could start seeing driver free zones, so you just wouldn't be able to take your car into some parts of the city. I think for San Francisco, Los Angeles, you could end up with bigger driver free zones and use more park and ride services.
I don't know how you would go about that, but I think there'll be, like there's pressure now within cities to reduce internal combustion engines, you've got ultra low emission zones in London and congestion charges trying to deter people from bringing internal combustion and cars in general in cities. I think in 50 years we might see, sorry, in 30 years we might see almost outlawing of human driving, which is a shame because I like driving. We'll have to see where that goes.
Angela Simoes:
Well, hey, perhaps another business opportunity. If you like to drive, there will be tracks or other facilities where you can put your helmet on and have at it to get your driving fix.
James Jeffs:
I guess more toll roads, maybe. Toll roads for human drivers.
Angela Simoes:
Well, this has been a really fun conversation. It certainly gets the wheels turning, no pun intended, of where things are going and what things could look like. It's very exciting. Of course, despite some of the hiccups that happen, things are advancing so quickly that by the time my daughter is able to drive, I think we'll start to see, as you mentioned, not necessarily full Jetson, but it's looking that way. But thank you so much for your time, James. This has been really fun. We'll put a link to your report in the show notes so that people can easily find the report and take a look at it. It's quite extensive and so I hope people will take a look. But this has been great and we look forward to speaking with you again at some point.
James Jeffs:
It's been really nice conversation and thank you for having me. I really look forward to coming back another time.
Angela Simoes:
Thanks for listening to the Mile Marker podcast. If you liked what you heard today, give us a like, share this episode on social media and even take a minute to give us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe to our channel so you can join us for future episodes full of insights and ideas to keep the mobility industry moving forward.