Commuter of the Future: Autonomous, On-Demand Pods...
THIS GUY WANTS US TO COMMUTE IN AUTONOMOUS, ON-DEMAND
PODS
MARGARET RHODES 11.02.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM.
WHEN TOMMASO GECCHELIN envisions the future of urban
transportation, he, like many people, imagines a system of driverless electric
cars. But in Gecchelin’s vision, the system is modular. Its boxy vehicles are
flat-sided, identically sized, and can link up and disconnect on the fly. He
calls the concept “Next,” and foresees it providing both on-demand rides and
shared public transportation, like a futuristic cross between Uber and the city
bus. Imagine a Next pod pulling up to your house in the morning, before
scooping up your neighbor, and then, once it’s on a main road heading for
downtown, affixing itself to another couple pods. Everyone goes to work,
together.
Next also calls for a third feature: privately-owned
pods, owned and operated by businesses, that riders can summon to indulge in
on-the-go services like grocery pick-up or coffee delivery. This, combined with
its personal- and public-transportation features, makes Next a veritable sundae
of Silicon Valley-flavored lifestyle goals. On-demand rides and services?
Check. Electric vehicles? Check. Autonomous electric vehicles? Yes, of course.
Gecchelin, an Italian engineer and industrial designer,
came up with the idea for Next while working for another design studio on a
“bus of the future” style project. Once, while interviewing bus riders in
Venice, Gecchelin talked to a woman who said that, in her ideal future, public
transportation would be more than a way of getting from place to place.
Gecchelin was inspired.
“The future of transportation is life in motion,” says
Gecchelin. To explain this idea, he draws on the ever-popular analogy of the
iPhone and the App Store: If he can provide the right hardware, third parties
can use it as a framework for developing new businesses and services. Imagine a
company that retrieves your checked luggage, then delivers it straight to the
Next pod you’ve hitched a ride home on from the airport. Or a business that
lets you summon a bathroom on-the-go. What if Starbucks could deliver coffee to
your car? These ideas were too futuristic for the firm he was working for at
the time, so he struck out on his own and founded Next.
For now, Next is just a concept. Gecchelin says he has
“the virtual part—the blueprints, the engineering,” and that the modules he’s
designing can be built with off-the-shelf parts and powered by existing
software. The modules, he says, will behave like Google’s self-driving cars,
and make similar use of sensors and LIDAR. Gecchelin won’t disclose names, but
says Next is in talks with a “major German player” for the hardware, and that a
few German cities, and one Lithuanian one, are potential civic partners. And
he’s ambitious. Gecchelin estimates Next will be up and running by 2020.
But Costa Samaras, a Carnegie Mellon engineering
professor and co-author of Autonomous Vehicle Technology: A Guide for
Policymakers, says 15 to 30 years out is more realistic. For one thing,
self-driving vehicles are still in the development stage. “What we think of as
a level four autonomous car, one that drives itself even if you’re sleeping in
the back, that is a possible technology but it’s not one that’s without error,”
Samaras says. Autonomous cars are still learning to sense, plan, and act.
Modular autonomous vehicles, like the ones Gecchelin envisions, would need to
be able to do all those things in concert with each other, while also
navigating the obstacles of the road. That’s an entirely new layer of tech
development.
Next would also require new infrastructure. The vehicles
Gecchelin has envisioned are spacious enough to accommodate six seated
passengers and four standing ones—and any vehicle with room for ten people is
going to require a lot of energy. “You’ve gone from a small, electric car to
what’s essentially an airport-style shuttle,” Samaras says. These modules will
need big batteries, and more charging stations. To solve for that, Gecchelin
envisions a system of swappable batteries that pods can deliver to other pods
in transit. Then there’s the issue of coordinating these pods. Think about
optimizing the logistics of the Next network: it’s like mashing up Uber’s
highly evolved map with city bus routes and schedules (which are already never
on time). That’ll require new software.
Then there’s the matter of the people actually riding in
Next’s modules, and what they might be asked to pay for it. Car ownership is
still common in the United States. “We sell 16 million new vehicles and about
40-million used ones every year,” Samaras says. “Is everybody going to need a
self driving vehicle in the beginning? Absolutely not.” But a system like Next,
depending on its price, “could prevent people from buying their first car, if
they live in a city.”
Next may be a highly speculative concept, but Samaras
says a lot of Gecchelin’s ideas make sense. We’re increasingly mobile, and more
and more, we like our services that way, too. We might not all want a
driverless vehicle right now, but then, many of us are already comfortable
abandoning agency as we travel from place to place. (How often do you see, or
even think about, the conductor operating your train or subway car?). All in
all, says Samaras, “the concept is powerful.”
Comments
Post a Comment