Category: Blog Post

When Americans talk about robots taking their jobs, they’re often thinking of factory work. Lately, however, the conversation has a new spin. “Autonomous trucks are taking drivers’ jobs,” so the claim goes.

It’s important to note that while this concern is being presented as a problem that’s already rearing its head, autonomous trucks aren’t taking drivers’ jobs — yet. That said, there is some truth to it: if we’re looking several years down the line, the concern is real, and we need to develop a plan.

1.7 million Americans are employed as truck drivers — making it one of the most common professions in the nation. But lately, truck driving jobs aren’t easy to fill. The American Trucking Association (ATA) estimates a shortage of about 40,000 drivers that could grow to about 240,000 by 2022.

The reason for the shortage is not entirely clear — trucking companies say that they’re having trouble replacing older workers entering retirement with young recruits, who seem less interested in the profession than previous generations — but we can all agree that driving a truck for a living is a tough job. The hours are long, and drivers spend the vast majority of their time alone. Not to mention the declining pay: in 1980, the average trucker in America was making an annual salary (adjusted for inflation) of more than $110,000. Today, truckers make an average salary of about $40,000 a year, all while putting in longer hours and sometimes having to overwork themselves as they compete with other drivers for the most profitable routes.

But the driver shortage isn’t expected to last long, and yes, that is the likely result of autonomous truck technology. A report from the International Transport Forum says that 70% of truck driving jobs could be eliminated by 2030 because of self-driving trucks. A White House report, issued on December 16 of last year, estimates job losses between 80% to 100%. As with many issues surrounding AVs, there’s no consensus on issues of timing. For instance, a Goldman Sachs analysis, cited by Business Insider, suggests that AV adoption will be slow for several decades and significant driver losses due to technology are perhaps 25 years off, which is clearly at odds with the ITF report.

How, you ask, is this shift going to change the industry and the truck driving profession?

In the future, truckers could work more like airline pilots, maneuvering big rigs onto the highway and then flipping on the autopilot for most of the trip, taking over again only when they have to get off the main route. But that doesn’t exactly explain the job loss. After all, there is still be a driver in the cab.

The explanation has to do, in large part, with the birth of a new technique — truck platooning —- which has already been proven to reduce fuel consumption dramatically in many studies. In fact, it’s expected to be the first “market-ready” connected-vehicle technique. The reason for its efficiency: aerodynamics. Following one another more closely than can be done safely by human drivers, wind resistance is reduced, making trucks more efficient.

A common scenario — involving trucking fleets and independent truckers alike — is that trucks would merge onto the highway and meet up at a station (think of the weighing stations that already exist). At this point, a lead truck is selected — note that this truck is expected to have a driver in it for the foreseeable future — and is “wirelessly connected” to a platoon of several other trucks, which are all automated and set up to receive precise instructions from their connected leader. Now, the platoon is ready to barrel down the highway – spaced by mere feet – to the next station, where trucks can be removed and added from the chain based on delivery points.

All of a sudden, what used to be a truck caravan starts to look more like a digital train, requiring only one driver, maneuvering in a reserved lane, which could be thought of as a railroad track. Point is, autonomous trucks will not be operating on the roads of today; they will be operating on the roads of tomorrow and, indeed, those roads look very different.

The workforce will look different too: there will be fewer drivers, but they will need to be technically savvy, able to troubleshoot the connected system that will make the platoons possible. And remember, the trucks that are following the leader are expected to be driverless before long. If all goes to plan, even the lead truck may be driverless after several decades of perfecting the process.

For technology enthusiasts, that all sounds exciting. But we must remember, when talking about job loss, we are ultimately talking about human beings, people whose dignity and well-being are at stake. So we need to be thinking ahead.

It’s easy to point out problems we may face in the future. What’s not as easy —- but incredibly important —- is beginning a dialogue about what can actually be done to offset the issues we can foresee.

There was an interesting op-ed in the LA Times recently that took this problem head-on. In it, several solutions were offered. For instance, we could already be thinking about adopting retraining programs for affected drivers. These programs have worked with some success when dealing with offshoring in other industries. We could also reconsider unemployment insurance. Laid-off drivers could receive adjustment assistance just like factory workers who lost jobs because of imports. And hey, we could get creative with how we fund these programs. As autonomous vehicle companies press Congress to enact laws that create a nationwide green light and a favorable regulatory framework for these vehicles, in exchange Congress could levy a tax on each driverless mile to finance the retraining, adjustment assistance, and/or unemployment insurance.

My point is not to advocate for or against these solutions, but simply to say that we could — and we should — be thinking ahead. While autonomous vehicle technology has the potential to do great things — increase safety, help the environment, and even mitigate driver shortages — it’s like any other major technological advancement, it comes with changes built-in, and not all change is easy.

The good news is that we can see what’s coming, and we have plenty of time to properly prepare for the future. It’s clear that autonomous vehicles will be a boon to industry across the world, but we can also take steps to make sure it’s not a body blow to the American workforce at the same time.

Rob Fischer is President of GTiMA and a senior advisor to Mandli Communications’ strategy team. GTiMA and Mandli Communications are both proud partners of the Wisconsin Autonomous Vehicle Proving Ground.

Follow Rob on Twitter (@Robfischeris) and Linkedin.

In today’s political climate, it’s shocking when an important bill passes in the House with a unanimous voice vote. Especially when it comes to federal regulations. But it just happened, and it’s a big deal for autonomous vehicle enthusiasts.

The Safely Ensuring Lives Future Deployment and Research in Vehicle Evolution (SELF DRIVE) Act isn’t a law yet — it still has to make it through the Senate and, after that, the joint Congressional reconciliation process. But the Senate Commerce Committee is currently working on a similar legislative package, and previously-debated measures on the Senate floor have shown that they’re ready to pass some AV legislation. One thing’s for sure: this Congress desperately wants to find some legislation they can actually pass, and the AV bill’s broad bipartisan support makes it very likely to wind up on the President’s desk for a signature.

So what does this bill do exactly?

The quick take: Katie McAuliffe, a contributor to TheHill, put it succinctly: “The act correctly delineates the purview of federal versus state regulation for autonomous vehicles. In short, federal regulatory bodies have authority when it comes to the car, while states have authority when it comes to the driver.” That’s it in a nutshell. But let’s look a little more closely at what the newly-defined federal and state roles are and what comes next.

The new federal role: Assuming all goes as expected and a version of this bill becomes the law of the land, say goodbye to the patchwork of different state regulations for autonomous vehicle testing and manufacturing. NHTSA will be in charge of setting safety, performance, equipment and design standards for AVs, and automakers will be able to deploy up to 100,000 test vehicles apiece (read: vehicles that don’t meet federal safety standards), but only if they submit comprehensive safety assessment certifications to NHTSA and get its approval. Manufacturers will also have to develop cybersecurity measures and privacy protections.

The new state role: States will still have a lot of issues to figure out: pretty much everything that has a “human element”. The state responsibilities will include licensing, registration, insurance, qualifications for operation, law enforcement, crash investigation, congestion management and emissions inspections. They’ll also have oversight over sale, purchase, and repair of AVs.

What we’re still waiting for: Sec. Elaine Chao will release revised guidelines on AVs soon, which will update the Obama administration’s now-dated guidelines. NHTSA will also need to release AV-specific safety standards — but the position of NHTSA chief has yet to be filled by the Trump administration. (NHTSA does have acting administrators and an acting executive director in the meantime).

Some concerns remain: Axios points out that the vehicle doesn’t address autonomous trucks specifically, and could have the side effect of hastening their deployment, but that the Senate is considering holding a hearing on that issue specifically. Also noted by Axios was the lack of clarity in the government’s role enforcing standards for cybersecurity, which the House bill asks manufacturers to address — but judging by a set of bipartisan principles for AV legislation released by U.S. Senators Thune (R-SD), Peters (D-MI) and Nelson (D-FL), which names cybersecurity as one of the chief areas of concern for both parties, it seems likely that specific language will be added as the Senate takes over the effort.

And, finally, Axios raises the concern that as the 2018 midterms approach, the bipartisan spirit surrounding this measure might dissolve. While that does have a familiar ring to it, there are plenty of examples throughout recent electoral history where Congress managed to advance non-controversial legislation while it fell into gridlock on other issues. Both parties seem to be anxious to get these regulations into place, and neither party stands to gain anything but the ire of the public by choosing to slow it down. The fact that this passed the House with a unanimous voice vote speaks volumes, and it appears that the safe bet is that these proposed regulatory powers will become law before any national election approaches.

Rob Fischer is President of GTiMA and a senior advisor to Mandli Communications’ strategy team. GTiMA and Mandli Communications are both proud partners of the Wisconsin Autonomous Vehicle Proving Ground.

Follow Rob on Twitter (@Robfischeris) and Linkedin.

Heath Davis-Gardner is a professional writer and editor who currently serves as Strategic Communications Specialist at Mandli Communications.

Those of us with the Wisconsin AV Proving Grounds regularly find ourselves questioning claims and allaying fears in the same breath. The following article captures this well and is re-posted with permission from Robert Poole, Searle Freedom Trust Transportation Fellow and Director of Transportation Policy, Reason Foundation. (Original Post)

Many Autonomous Vehicle Assumptions Need to be Questioned

As a transportation professional, I’m a bit overwhelmed by proliferating articles and technical papers dealing with autonomous vehicles. And I’m increasingly distressed by the growing disparity between what appears in the popular media and what’s in the technical literature, because the former is what seems to motivate legislators and planners. So here are five challenges to the mass-media version of our AV future.

AVs will save millions of lives. Certainly, we all hope this will prove to be the case. But it’s not as simple as many people seem to think. As Washington Post reporters Michael Laris and Ashley Halsey III explained in a long feature article (Oct. 18, 2016), how will we know how much safer AVs are? Only about half of all crashes are reported to police (as opposed to insurance companies), and some people avoid doing the latter to avoid a possible premium increase. The former head of the National Transportation Safety Board, Mark Rosekind, said that widespread use of AVs should not proceed until they were demonstrated be “much safer” than conventional vehicles, but without comprehensive data on actual accident rates, it’s difficult to make such a comparison. Also, researcher Tom Dingus of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute points out that alert, attentive, sober drivers are very low risk. It’s drunk drivers plus very young and very old drivers that drive up the averages. In addition, the most promising form of vehicle automation relies on machine learning—but even the experts in that field have no idea what or how the machine actually learns. Matthieu Roy of the National Center for Scientific Research in France says that, “You would never put [a machine learning] algorithm into an airplane because you cannot prove [to regulators] the system is correct.”

AVs Will All Be Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). A January 3, 2017, Wall Street Journal news article called “Wiring Streets for Driverless Cars” presented this conventional wisdom, which is being promoted by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration with its Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) efforts. Reporter Paul Page touted new digital signs on a freeway near Washington, DC “as a first step toward what highway planners say is a future in which self-driving cars will travel on technology-aided roads lined with fiber optics, cameras, and connected signaling devices.” But unlike lower-brow media, Page went on to note that many billions of dollars would be needed to wire more than 4 million miles of paved roads and 250,000 intersections. If AVs depend on that kind of infrastructure investment, don’t bet on an AV future. Fortunately, most AV researchers don’t think anything like that is necessary. AVs, especially those with full (Level 5) autonomy, will need to be self-sufficient even in alleys, on gravel roads, and on countryside dirt roads.

Full, Level 5 Autonomy Will Be Here within a Decade. In addition to academic researchers such as UC Berkeley’s Steven Shladover who projects Level 5 (all types of roadway, all weather conditions, no driver needed ever) as a 2075 phenomenon, a number of technology-literate commentators have begun throwing out caution flags. For example, telematics blogger Michael L. Sena headlined a recent issue of his The Dispatcher: “SAE Level 5 Driverless Cars Are Not Just Around the Corner.” He took issue with recent reports claiming that Transport as a Service (requiring Level 5) will be ubiquitous by 2030 nationwide. He also cited a thoughtful analysis by The Economist, headlined “Forget hype about autonomous vehicles being around the corner—real driverless cars will take a good deal longer to arrive.” Wired’s Aarian Marshall had a piece in February explaining “Why Self-Driving Cars *Can’t Even* with Construction Zones,” discussing very real problems with machine learning. He also noted an announcement by Nissan that its current plans don’t include Level 5; instead, they assume a human occupant who can take over control when the AI cannot cope, and the human can contact a Nissan call center for help.

Fleets Are the Future, Not Owned AVs. A recent “analysis” by Governing magazine, summarized in the August issue, sounds the alarm that cities’ budgets are seriously at risk from the impacts of the transition to AVs. For the largest 25 cities, the magazine’s team collected data on parking revenues, fines and citations, traffic camera fines, gas taxes, vehicle licensing fees, etc. Many of these cities each year generate several hundred dollars per capita from these vehicular revenues, much of which could disappear in the AV future, warns the article. Except—much of the impact stems from the assumption that shared fleets of robo-taxis replace individually owned cars, thereby eliminating most urban parking requirements (and hence parking revenue). Another built-in assumption is that most or all AVs will be electric, which is hardly a given. Robotaxis and individually owned AVs that can go elsewhere after dropping the owner off require Level 5 automation, which is hardly a near-term phenomenon. So city officials should not begin losing sleep over plummeting parking revenues.

AVs Will Reduce Congestion. As I’ve pointed out in previous issues, the majority view among AV researchers is that the transition to AVs will increase vehicle miles of travel (VMT), for a variety of reasons including bringing personal vehicle autonomy to millions who are unable to drive today, as well as reducing the time cost of commuting. But a related idea remains—that due to reduced distance between AVs on roadways, existing roads will be able to handle greater volume with less congestion. But even popular media are starting to consult experts who disagree. Business Insider recently interviewed Lew Fulton, co-director of UC Davis’ Institute of Transportation Studies. He expressed particular concern about zero-occupant (Level 5) vehicles being a new source of increased congestion. Such vehicles, programmed to run errands, deliver packages, etc. will lead to far more cars on the road. Fulton calls them “zombie cars.”

Before leaving these points, I want to recommend a more thoughtful article. Despite its misleading title, “The Road Ahead for Connected Vehicles” (when the article actually discusses AVs, not CAVs), is a sober discussion by industry experts—established auto industry people, high-tech AV pioneers, and consultants. It’s a product of Wharton’s Program on Vehicle and Mobility Innovation, which has absorbed the former MIT International Motor Vehicle Program. If you have time to read just one article to get a more balanced view of this challenging area, this one is hard to beat. (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/road-ahead-connected-vehicles)

There’s been a lot of commentary in the media lately about the fix this Congress is in: they haven’t managed to pass any bills of substance, and time is running out before they take a long recess.

Well, there’s good news, and it’s gone relatively unreported. There are over a dozen bills moving through the House and Senate, winning bipartisan support and looking like shoo-ins for passage into law.

What do these bills all have in common? They all have to do with autonomous vehicles.

Maybe part of the reason they’re not getting much coverage is the sheer number of them. What reasonable person has time to sit down and read 13 bills?

So let’s make it easier on everyone and review exactly what each of these bills is meant to do.

-The Partial Autonomous Vehicle Exemptions (PAVE) Act will increase the number of FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards) exemptions the Secretary of Transportation is allowed to grant to a company — going from 2,500 to 100,000. These exemptions only are available to companies undergoing field evaluation or development “of a new motor vehicle safety feature providing a safety level at least equal to the safety level of the standard.” This means manufacturers and other companies will be able to test 100,000 vehicles per year that, for example, don’t have a steering wheel or pedals — because the safety promised by AVs is above and beyond current motor vehicles.

-The Renewing Opportunities for Autonomous Vehicle Development (ROAD) Act will expand renewals for the aforementioned exemptions to last five years and authorizes the Secretary of Transportation to extend exemption renewals upon request.

-The Disability Mobility Advisory Council Act directs the DOT Secretary to create a Disability Mobility Advisory Council, which will submit recommendations to Congress and the DOT Secretary about ways in which the federal government can advance mobility access to disabled communities. The council will be composed of representatives from the disability community as well as academics and members of the private sector.

-The Improving Mobility Access for Underserved Populations and Senior Citizens Advisory Council Act is similar to the above bill, with a council that will provide recommendations on how AVs can enhance mobility for seniors and populations underserved by traditional public transportation.

-The Highly Autonomous Vehicle Cybersecurity Advisory Council Act directs the DOT secretary to — you guessed it — create a third council, this one to advise Congress and Transportation on cybersecurity performance metrics for AV deployment, testing, and software updates. One of the areas in which the council will issue recommendations is “supply chain risk management”, so expect some prominent private-sector heavyweights on this council.

-The MORE (Maximizing Opportunities for Research and Enhancement of) AVs Act will allow manufacturers to introduce non-FMVSS compliant vehicles into interstate commerce, provided they agree not to sell the vehicle when testing is complete. It would additionally expand the law to allow equipment manufacturers and distributors to do the same. What does this translate to? It means that AV testing won’t be limited to the state where the test vehicles are made. In other words, we hope to see Tesla, GM, and whoever else is interested in a good test track here at the Wisconsin Automated Vehicle Proving Grounds.

-The INFORM (Increasing Information and Notification to Foster Openness Regarding Autonomous Vehicles to States) Act directs NHTSA to have procedures in place for ensuring that states are informed when NHTSA or DOT issue exemptions for highly autonomous vehicles that will be deployed or tested in their state. In other words, no surprises. It also formally defines AVs to allow for smoother rulemaking going forward.

-The DECAL (Designating Each Car’s Automation Level) Act requires manufacturers to place “highly visible” stickers on vehicles for sale that indicate the vehicle’s level of automation. (Only levels 3, 4 and 5 are required to bear these stickers).

-The EXEMPT (Expanding Exemptions to Enable More Public Trust) Act expands the DOT Secretary’s authority to issue FMVSS exemptions for AVs that would either A) promote public adoption and acceptance, or B) increase mobility for people with disabilities. However, manufacturers must prove to the DOT that the vehicle is as safe or safer than vehicles that comply with existing FMVSS.

-The MEMO (Managing Government Efforts to Minimize Obstruction) Act sets clear boundaries between NHTSA and the Federal Trade Commission, essentially to keep them out of one another’s lane regarding AV cybersecurity. The bill would direct the heads of NHTSA and the FTC to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that would ward off overlap and duplication in their security oversight capacities.

-The SHARES (Sharing Autonomous Vehicle Records with Everyone for Safety) Act would establish another council — yep, a fourth — that will develop a framework and practices for developers of Ads to share event, incident and crash data without risking that information being disseminated publicly or having to worry about proprietary information being leaked. If enacted, the council would be required to submit recommendations to the DOT Secretary and Congress within two years.

-The AV PROMPT (Pre-Market Approval Reduces Opportunities for More People to Travel Safely) Act would prohibit the DOT secretary from establishing a pre-market approval or pre-certification process: in other words, USDOT would not have to assess the safety of any given vehicle before it is manufactured and/or sold.

-The GUARD (Guarding Automakers Against Unfair Advantages) Act is designed to prevent leaks of proprietary information. This bill would require NHTSA, by law, to to keep secret any information about collisions, cybersecurity or vehicle design provided to them by manufacturers. This ensures OEMs and Tier 1s will be able to do all the testing they want without bad press coming (for example) from one failed test out of hundreds.

One more. Ready? It’s a good one.

-The LEAD’R (Let NHTSA Enforce Autonomous Vehicle Driving Regulations) Act would “establish NHTSA as the sole regulatory authority” for regulating AVs and expressly prohibits other government entities from prescribing motor vehicle safety standards for AVs. However, it would allow states and their political subdivisions to prescribe safety standards for AVs and AV components that the state purchases for its own use.

Whew. That’s a lot to chew on, right?

Clearly, the legal landscape for AVs is on its way out of is coming into view for lawmakers and federal government officials. While we may not necessarily think every one of these bills is essential, we applaud Congress for actually working together toward something constructive. And we’re excited about the prospects for more testing and for allowing vehicles to go interstate for testing.

Wisconsin features some of the craziest weather swings in the nation, as well as a company that’s been in the LiDAR/geospatial mapping business for quite some time now along with great test tracks for the Proving Ground. We hope faraway manufacturers take note and decide to take their 100,000 prototypes for a spin on our courses. Especially as the winter rolls around, we expect manufacturers will want to take a look at how their prototypes perform in our snowy and icy season.

So come on down, Tier 1s and OEMs! The federal government wants you to test, and we have just the right lab in which you can carry out your previously-forbidden experiments.

(For those interested in ensuring elements of these bills are passed, or for people with concerns about one or two of these points, we strongly suggest contacting your Senators and Congressmen to give your take on this legislation.)

Rob Fischer is President of GTiMA and a senior advisor to Mandli Communications’ strategy team. GTiMA and Mandli Communications are both proud partners of the Wisconsin Autonomous Vehicle Proving Ground.

Follow Rob on Twitter (@Robfischeris) and Linkedin.

Heath Davis-Gardner is a professional writer and editor who currently serves as Strategic Communications Specialist at Mandli Communications.

Autonomous vehicles promise such a degree of improved safety that we sometimes picture them as all-powerful, faultless machines. To a large extent, they will need to be. But how can we be sure they’re safe even in the most risky situations?

Consider the signalized intersection. Since their appearance at the end of the 19th century, traffic lights have been the primary mode of granting access to road intersections. However, traffic statistics show that, despite their claim to only a tiny percentage of road area, intersections are where 25% to 45% of all traffic collisions occur. Why is this?

When you think about it, it starts to become obvious. Intersections bring together cars traveling in all directions and then asks them to proceed through in groups timed by traffic signals. If any one car makes a false start, or speeds through the intersection and collides with a car in front of them, the entire exchange is compromised. And since cars are coming from all directions at various speeds, the risk of an accident that causes injury and/or major damage to vehicles goes way up, too.

So how will autonomous vehicles navigate the signalized intersection?

Therein lies the debate: will AVs independently “sense” their way through intersections using onboard sensors capable of discerning, for instance, the color of traffic lights, all while communicating with other vehicles (V2V) — or will AVs be “escorted” through intersections via connected infrastructure (V2I)?

As it turns out, the case for the V2V argument is in question. For starters, we would need to trust that every manufacturer has built in precise, latency-proof communications units that ensure constant communication with every other car. Statistically, the odds of that happening aren’t good, and it seems like too big of a risk when all it takes is the failure of one sensor on one car to cause an accident.

Furthermore, according to a paper by the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, “a vehicle approaching an intersection can quickly find itself in a situation where a collision is unavoidable, even when it has acted optimally.” In other words, even if no car overtly malfunctions, you can hardly call the intersection safe. As the JAIR paper notes, an intersection has very specific points of potential collision – hotspots that only one car at a time can occupy. That’s engineer-speak for “two cars occupying one hotspot will cause an accident.”

And this is why there’s a strong case for the V2I argument (where AVs get escorted through the intersection). The paper goes on to argue that an intersection needs its own “cooperative vehicle intersection control system (CVICS)” – hardware and software located at every interchange, which keeps an eye on all the points of potential collision and guides AVs through based on its safety-first algorithm.

Remember that acronym, CVICS, because it’s going to be a huge factor in the success of autonomous vehicles. It is absolutely essential for the safety of AVs, which can’t reasonably be expected to never run into trouble in a complex intersection, no matter how advanced they become.

Researchers at JAIR aren’t the only researchers arguing that CVIC systems are going to be a necessity for autonomous vehicles. There seems to be a consensus forming around the idea, to the point where researchers are now trying to determine the best algorithms for intersection control. MIT recently reported research on a “slot-based system”, similar to airplane-boarding procedures, designed for slow guidance through intersections in groups. They were essentially building on an IEEE research paper that offered a detailed algorithm for intersection control units to deploy.

The results from IEEE’s testing of their algorithm is worth a look. Not only was the flow through the intersection optimized for safety as expected, researchers also noticed some other improvements: vehicle stop delay time was reduced by an astonishing 99%, improving average travel time (under the presumption that a commute will involve several encounters with CVICS) by 33% or more. Carbon dioxide emissions were reduced by 44%, correlating directly with fuel savings of 44%. Basically, the researchers found that CVIC systems not only ensured safety, but made the process of getting through an intersection much faster. What’s not to like?

We remain optimistic about the safety benefits offered by autonomous vehicles. But the research is out there, and it’s compelling. Rather than risk public distrust in autonomous vehicles following a few crash-causing anomalies in intersections, it makes sense to deploy CVIC systems with proven algorithms to make intersections foolproof.

Just as we will eventually cede the wheel to our AVs, we will also need them to cede the wheel to CVICS from time to time and, in principle, the statistics showing such a disproportionate number of accidents occurring in intersections will shrink down to zero. We know that in the future our cars will be smart, but their interoperability with safety-oriented systems like CVICS will allow them to be brilliant.

Rob Fischer is President of GTiMA and a senior advisor to Mandli Communications’ strategy team. GTiMA and Mandli Communications are both proud partners of the Wisconsin Autonomous Vehicle Proving Ground.

Follow Rob on Twitter (@Robfischeris) and Linkedin.

Have you seen this commercial? It starts with a woman in standing in the middle of the street, gazing up at a sky-written marriage proposal. We see that she’s in an urban area. A car comes quickly into the frame and even more quickly stops, as the words “automatic emergency braking” appear on-screen. Then the camera pulls back to show that we’re in a car going quite fast on a desert highway, with a couple watching this demonstration of emergency braking on their smartphone. “Wow, good to know we have automatic brakes,” says the woman. The man, entranced by the video, swerves out of his lane, which is corrected. “We have lane departure assistance, too,” he says with a smile.

There are a lot of problems with this ad, and those of us that are excited about the AV age should be paying attention to it and ads like it. Because the fact is the public does not currently trust these automatic driver assistance systems (ADAS). J.D. Power recently released the results of a new survey that shows “basic semiautonomous features such as adaptive cruise control, autonomous braking and lane-departure assist notched the largest increase in complaints this year.” The analysis argues “these complaints signal an uphill battle … if car buyers aren’t convinced that the basic building blocks of self-driving cars work seamlessly now, they won’t buy a self-driving car in the future.”

That should concern anyone with a stake in the ultimate success of autonomous vehicles. And the public may be correct to not trust them at present — these AAA statistics show that the efficacy of automatic braking systems is iffy at best. Automatic emergency braking, for example, only has a shot at working if the driver is going fairly slowly. There’s little consensus over what sensors should be used for which systems — that conversation is still ongoing — and there are other unknowns when it comes to ADAS that suggest many of these systems are not ready for prime-time.

So why are car companies pushing these systems so quickly? The ad described above shows they’re aware of the limitations of their systems. The car that narrowly misses a pedestrian is going slowly, but we immediately cut to a car that’s going quite fast — a sneaky way to make the AEB system appear useful on the highway, when according to AAA, it’d be somewhere between 9 and 40% effective when traveling at 45 miles per hour.

These companies are caught in an awkward position. They are aware of the need to maintain public trust once it’s time for level 3 and 4 autonomous vehicles. But they also need to continue to turn a profit in the meantime. So we can understand why they’re anxious to get these systems to market, but the systems need more than the small-sample public testing AAA carried out. There is still debate, for example, on whether lidar or radar is more effective for automatic emergency braking. Doesn’t it seem like this should be discerned before cars touting the feature are deployed? Shouldn’t consumers get systems that work as advertised? To ADAS our way to AVs, shouldn’t consumer trust be at least as valuable as a car sale?

We understand the current plight of the OEMs — the genie is out of the bottle, ADAS systems are on the road, and they are features that have been proven to be desirable, at least in theory, to consumers. Nobody wants to get left behind when it comes to new and cool features. This is where the Wisconsin Proving Grounds comes in. By testing ADAS systems at the Proving Grounds, OEMs can simultaneously ensure the safety of their systems and — since they’d be doing so out in the open — gain public trust that is so crucial to their business model, both currently and in the near future.

The time is right. It’s about to get easier to “ADAS our way to AVs” in terms of testing AV systems without needing an entire autonomous prototype. According to recent reporting, the House and the Senate are both advancing legislation to make AV testing easier on manufacturers, following hearings and meetings with over 100 industry stakeholders. There are over a dozen bills advancing through committees right now, but as far as the proving grounds go, we’re thinking this will help speed things along: lawmakers are looking to “raise the federal cap on the number of exemptions that can be granted to driverless carmakers who want to design and test cars without traditional automobile features.” Currently, while all cars are required to have steering wheels and pedals, federal waivers can only be granted a certain number of times per year for testing purposes, which constrains the ability of manufacturers to conduct serious testing. With that regulation eased, we think we’ll see a lot of ADAS action at the proving grounds.

So, our message to auto manufacturers: this is your moment. Public opinion may be turning against some of the early iterations of autonomous features in vehicles, but there’s a clear path toward righting the ship. It’s coming at just the right time, with a confluence of regulations and test site availability opening the doors to a new intensity in regimes for testing ADAS systems. And with a growing public attention to all things AV — which is sure to result from the big legislative push that’s ongoing — it seems pretty clear the public will take notice. When that starts to happen and testing shows, for example, improvements to automatic emergency braking systems, those commercials are going to connect as well as they were meant to in the first place.

Heath Davis-Gardner is a professional writer and editor who currently serves as Strategic Communications Specialist at Mandli Communications.

Blockchains, or more generally, Distributed Ledger Technologies have a huge role to play in the future of mobility. With the advent of connected autonomous vehicles as well as the rise of electric mobility and shared usage models, Distributed Ledger Technologies and the future of mobility is a perfect match.

It is no surprise that the New Mobility ecosystem – automotive players, mobility service providers, insurance companies, telecommunications providers and smart city leaders – are exploring blockchain technologies. Many leading players are starting to embrace the key concepts of blockchains in order to solve real world problems related to identity management for people and machines, data control and integrity, information sharing, as well as trusted connectivity and cyber security.

However, it appears that blockchain technologies have not been able to move beyond proof of concepts. Production deployments have been limited to ‘private” or ‘consortium-based’, rather than public blockchains. There are many reasons that help to explain this statement. For one, the concept of blockchain technologies is still relatively new. Along with this, the notion of distributed peer-to-peer architectures and new business models is challenging conventional thinking. The main reason, however, is much simpler: Blockchain technologies have inherent limitations.

These limitations include lack of real-time validation of transactions, and the scalability issues that are inherent in the architecture. Related to this issue are transaction fees and the concentration of mining power.

The notion of blocks being generated through the consensus process makes real-time validation and scalability hard to achieve. In fact, it is inherent in the architecture. Transactions and the consensus process are sequential. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of unconfirmed transactions in the case of Bitcoin introduce serious limitations for use cases. Furthermore, the concept of mining and the need for stakers to achieve consensus and create blocks introduces transaction costs. As complexity grows an increasing amount of energy and computational power is needed. Bitcoin’s mean transaction fees have already risen above $1. Even worse, transaction costs are difficult to predict and therefore undermine business models in the Internet of Things. In a world of micro-transactions the question arises, “who is going to pay for it?”

Why a Blockchainless Approach Might be the Future

With the IOTA protocol, an interesting new approach to distributed ledger technologies is emerging that does not rely on traditional blockchain approaches. The 4 co-founders behind IOTA – David Sonstebo, Dominik Schiener, Sergey Invancheglo and Serguei Popov – have been part of the “Blockchain 2.0” revolution and made major contributions to the space. For instance, Sergey Invancheglo invented proof of stake. As part of many projects they have experienced the inherent limitations of traditional blockchains and have conceived a new approach to distributed ledgers. The idea of IOTA was born in 2015.

The main innovation behind IOTA is that it is a “Blockchain without the Blocks and the Chain”. The Tangle is a new distributed ledger architecture based on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) that shares the same underlying principles and the key benefits of blockchains, just without their inherent limitations. Let me explain how.

Rather than rely on the creation of blocks that are chained together, in the Tangle, a single transaction references two past transactions.

The process involves 3 simple steps:

1. Signing: The transaction inputs are signed with your private keys.

2. Tip Selection: Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is used to randomly select two tips that represent unconfirmed transactions, which will be referenced by your transaction.

3. Proof of Work: In order to have your transaction accepted by the network, you have to do some proof of work.

Once these 3 steps are completed, the transaction will be broadcasted to the network. Another network participant will come along, choose the transaction in the tip selection process and validate it.

IOTA validates transactions without the need for miners and the associated cost of creating consensus. Instead of relying on a small subset of the network (miners / stakers), IOTA relies on the entire network of active participants to approve and validate transactions. Consensus is no longer decoupled from transactions, but rather an intrinsic part of the process. This allows IOTA to scale without any transactions fees.

The benefits of this approach are apparent. IOTA achieves a step change in performance and scalability, which makes it particularly suitable for the Internet of Things with ultimately billions of connected things. Given that there is no such thing as ‘always on’ connectivity in the real world, the Tangle also supports offline transactions through partitioning. This allows clusters of IoT devices, such as cars and trucks, to branch off and still make transactions using P2P communication protocols.

Since the transaction posting and consensus is parallelized, the network is inherently growing and scaling with the number of transactions. With the more transactions are being made, the Tangle becomes even more secure and efficient.

The creation of IOTA formed the backbone of the Internet of Things and the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Economy: a world where scalability is a must, and where transaction fees are prohibitive to making business models work.

The fact that IOTA does not introduce transaction fees makes it uniquely suited to IoT and M2M where a large number of micro- or even nano-transactions can be expected. The IOTA team envisions a future in which machines trade resources such as computation, electricity, storage, bandwidth, data and much more without the involvement of any third party. IOTA opens the doors to an Internet of Things that is not only secure and scalable, but makes business models in the M2M economy practical. It sets the industry on a path where it can move beyond proof of concepts and instead to real deployments.

If you look up “IOTA” in the dictionary, you will find it is “something very small.”. If you “don’t care one IOTA about something”, it means you don’t even care about it one little bit.

IOTA is a blockchainless approach to distributed ledgers. Should you care about it? Given its huge potential to become the backbone of the Internet of Things, I predict that IOTA will turn into something very big. We should not only care about IOTA. We should all get involved and use this revolutionary technology to shape our collective future.

Click here to view a short introductory video, “Welcome to IOTA Universe”.

Back in December 2000 I had my first meeting in my new role to help SAP develop a future vision and strategy for supply chain management. Together with Albrecht Diener I met Steve David, the then CIO of Procter & Gamble, who introduced us to his vision of a Consumer Driven Supply Network powered by a next generation Auto-ID technology and agent-based optimization.

My next trip was to meet the Director of the MIT Auto-ID Center, Kevin Ashton in Cambridge, MA. Kevin is credited with inventing the term “Internet of Things” back in 1999 and has played a key role in shaping it. Next to the MIT Auto-ID Center, Steve David also introduced us to Stuart Kauffman from the Santa Fe Institute, the godfather of complexity science. Together with brilliant minds like Bill MacReady, Tony Plate, Fred Seibel, Brian Birk and Brian Potter we looked at swarm intelligence and how ants and termites organize themselves, how birds flock and how schools of fish protect themselves from predators. Ever since I was fascinated by the notion of smart, connected things and a future of autonomous, self-organizing systems.

The challenge we faced was that we did not really have the underlying infrastructure to manage such systems. How do you manage a global network of smart, connected objects? How do you give them an identity? How do you steer the behavior of these independent economic agents in a way that leads to a somewhat optimized outcome for the entire system? How do you enable transactions between these smart objects? How do we create a record of transactions in a world of distributed systems? And how do you keep such a system secure? We could not really find a satisfactory answer to these problems at the time.

When I discovered blockchain technologies almost 15 years later, I felt like I finally found this missing piece. Blockchains or more generally distributed ledger technologies promise to deliver the backbone for the Internet of Things. In the not too distant future, we might have fleets of electric robot taxis swarm out like ants to look for passengers. Distributed ledger technologies will play a critical role in this emerging Machine-to-Machine economy.

We have done projects with world leading companies to explore the potential of the technology. The more we learn, the more excited we are about its potential to change the world for the better. We believe that distributed ledger technologies are critical to shaping our collective futures. Thanks to people like Rob Wolcott, Yossi Vardi, Maurizio Rossi and Plamen Russev we have become part of a global ecosystem of innovation. In our many discussions at events such as DLD, KINglobal, webit, 4YFN, Kinnernet, Autonomy and TU Detroit more and more people seem to agree that we need to make sure that technology serves us as humans. We all need to make sure that we create a future where humanity, life and the planet can thrive.

We aim to create a platform to empower more people to understand the technology and its key concepts and implications. In the next weeks and months, we will share more and more of our thinking around blockchains and distributed ledger technologies.

· We will make the technology and its key underlying concepts and implications understandable to a larger audience.

· We will share our passion for a world where people and things have digital identities that can be shared and trusted across a network.

· A world where our data is no longer compromised by storing it in large honey pots of data that attracts hackers.

· We will explore why distributed ledger technologies are critical to securing the Internet of Things. We will explore the role of blockchains in machine learning and artificial intelligence, autonomous robotic systems and the emerging Machine-to-Machine Economy.

· We will examine new business models and how we as humans can thrive in this future.

We want to build a future we all want to live in. I hope you will join us on that journey. We all must play an active role in shaping the future, or somebody else will create it for us. A future we might not like. Let’s create the future we want!

Alexander Renz is Director at the New Mobility Lab, a not-for-profit organization with the charter to raise awareness and scale knowledge related to distributed ledger technologies in the New Mobility ecosystem. New Mobility Lab is a platform for sharing real world experiences and executing pilots and proof of concepts across the public and private sector. To learn more, click here.

When you’re tracking the evolution of autonomous vehicles via Google News alerts, every day starts with something interesting and often exciting. But some of the time, an article is only interesting because of how misleading it is.

There’s a reason for that. As we’ve been reporting for some time now, sometimes a writer or a publication decides to take a sliver of information out of context and turn it into click-bait.

The result, of course, is a scary and/or discouraging headline blowing up your RSS feed. This week’s culprit: “Self-Driving Cars Could Be Terrible for Traffic – Here’s Why.”

This is a rare case. Not only is the argument spurious, the tone actually gets worse after the headline.

Usually, a click-bait headline gives way to an article that begins to pull its punches or makes caveats. But the lead three paragraphs of this particular article take this fascinating progression: “(p1)Self-driving cars might make your future commute a lot more pleasant, but they won’t eliminate traffic” … (p2) Execs like Sergey Brin of Google say they will… (p3) “But experts say the vehicles’ impact on traffic will be minimal or negative.”

So, it’s not really that they’re saying self-driving cars “could be” terrible for traffic. They’re saying they will be.

Of course, as expected, the expert quoted in the following graf says nothing that calls for that sort of language. The expert says “autonomous vehicles won’t fix congestion woes unless a pricing system is put into place” for zero-occupancy vehicles to discourage companies from using AVs as a free alternative to shipping carriers like UPS and the postal service.

Buried deeper in the piece, almost as an afterthought, are examples of states that have already begun putting such pricing systems into place.

It may seem like a small thing. This is just one article, after all, in a sea of articles, if you search “autonomous vehicles and congestion” that all say in one way or another how much AVs will help reduce congestion. ( Here’s one of my recent favorites, from MIT’s Technology Lab, about how just a few AVs on a road among standard-driver cars dramatically reduces congestion.)

But this is how myths are made. The power of the Internet is strong, and the power of the human mind to think it knows something because it read it on the Internet may be even stronger. For the average news consumer who hasn’t been making an effort to stay abreast of every new study and survey that point to the undeniable promise of autonomous vehicles, all it takes is chancing upon this one article, and suddenly they know a new “fact” about AVs.

And they tell their friends. And their friends tell their friends. And so on, and so on.

But as we argued months ago, this is a deeply irresponsible act every time a respectable news outlet plays on the public fears of the unknown to make a spurious argument just to get some traffic for their banner advertisers. To paraphrase Elon Musk in the above-linked piece, every time a journalist writes an anti-AV piece, they’re potentially putting human lives at risk.

Because we shouldn’t lose the big picture here. Yes, states will have to adjust regulations to account for businesses that want to use AVs as free courier services. The switch to autonomous vehicles isn’t going to happen overnight, and it’s not going to be a situation where we just have a new kind of vehicle but we keep all the laws exactly the same. But the idea that states, which often find it extremely hard to tighten the belt enough to find money for road repairs, would simply go along with companies using AVs for free deliveries is absurd. Of course the company would need to pay for using public infrastructure for wide-scale delivery services. It’s hard to think of a state that wouldn’t jump at the chance of opening a revenue stream for transportation in this way.

Here’s the big point this argument gets us to, though – one totally missed by its author. So let’s imagine this future where businesses are having to pay a per-mile tax for unmanned delivery services. First of all, they’re economizing their own use of VMT (vehicle miles traveled) to get the job done for as little as they can have to use the roads, which means the nightmare scenario put forth by this article never comes true (as the expert cited in the article says) and yes, traffic congestion does decrease. The state, meanwhile, is getting some extra money to make road infrastructure repairs and even invest in new pieces of infrastructure. The environment is benefitting from the drop in congestion, and maybe will even more from smart infrastructure the state invests in. And people are still getting their packages on time.

This is the thing with these misleading articles. If you stop to logically step through the scenario they’re positing, and you account for basic common sense they forgot to include, their hollow scare piece turns into another rosy-looking scenario for AVs.

This isn’t just optimism on my part. Here’s a little experiment you can do to see my point in action. Go ahead, search around the internet for the benefits of AVs on any given topic, from safety to land use. Notice the hundreds of immediately available news articles and the plethora of white papers and academic journal articles.

Then Google the exact opposite of what you just saw hundreds of articles about. Example query: “autonomous vehicles will be less safe”. Something we know beyond a shadow of a doubt isn’t true. And yet, there you see all the click-baity counterexamples.

If I’ve written in a colloquial style here, it’s only been because I want to keep your attention. The point is deadly serious. Journalists need to stop worrying so much about getting clicks and start being responsible to their sources as well as their readership by avoiding this sort of crass misappropriation of context.

News outlets, just consider it: it’s completely possible to support your business model without scaring people into clicking headlines. AVs are exciting enough in their own right. We know you’ll catch on soon.

Heath Davis-Gardner is a professional writer and editor who currently serves as Strategic Communications Specialist at Mandli Communications.

Growing up in the 80s without cable TV, a Nintendo or the very idea of the Internet, I did a lot of reading. One of my most treasured books, likely published in the 1970s, was full of scientists’ predictions about the future. I couldn’t wait to see some of this stuff come true: telephones with video screens so you could see the other person, cars that could take off from highways and rise to a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet, movie theaters with remote controls that let the audience vote on what the main character should do next.

It was fun to read, but ultimately gave me little indication of what the future was going to look like. I never dreamed I’d have a pocket computer with a processing power thousands of times greater than my mom’s IBM 286. Or that I’d be able to instantly communicate with anyone in the world with it. Or, for that matter, that cars would eventually be able to drive themselves. Even in the vision of flying cars, there still needed to be a pilot.

Here’s the thing – the future is very difficult to predict. Even very credible people who specialized in artificial intelligence swore that a computer program could never learn to beat a grandmaster at chess. They were proved wrong two decades ago.

Even today, we can’t predict the future with a hundred percent certainty. The things we highlight about autonomous vehicles are always based on research rather than empirical proof, but we do this because we see so many potential benefits that could come from the technology once it is fully realized. The number of fatalities per year from the current auto culture is staggering and the harm reduction AVs could bring is one of many factors that motivate our optimism.

But there are some out there who doubt. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a difference between openly doubting and outright sowing of negative myths. And unfortunately, it seems like these doubts, when stated as facts, serve as amazing click-bait for people that are instinctively concerned about AVs.

So we’ve decided to begin a series where we’ll look at a few of these myths and shine some light on them. The potential benefits of AVs are promising enough to demand this approach.

Let’s start with one of the most well-worn chestnuts of doubt.

MYTH: AVs will cost so much that only the rich will be able to use them.

Some people never get past a figure that is oft-cited by AV doubters: $250,000. That’s how much a fully autonomous vehicle is estimated to cost given the current price of sensor technology. And, yes, that is on the surface a prohibitively expensive price tag for the vast majority of people. But it’s founded on two myths: one, that manufacturers will never find a way to make LiDAR sensors at a lower cost. (They’ve already made some breakthroughs there). But the second part of it is that it’s based on an unrealistic picture of what a culture powered by AVs would look like.

A recent study from Columbia University’s Earth Institute suggested that AVs could be run for 30 to 50 cents per mile, down from a $3-5/mile cost to taxi companies under the current regime. In Manhattan, they concluded, the rate would be about 40 cents a mile – whereas today the cost to companies is around $4/mile. If taxis and Ubers were 90 percent cheaper than they are today, would you rather pay to maintain your own car and deal with the regular hassles of repair and regular tune-ups, or spend one to two dollars per day being taxied all around town? Which would be more convenient for making it to work on time or getting your kids home from school? It’s a no-brainer.

This cost reduction could be even more dramatic. Currently, cabs have to focus on one customer per ride. People sometimes share taxis if they know one another and are at the same pick-up point, but rideshare apps have already shown the potential to drastically cut fares even under the $4/mile to operate conditions. If the reduction in costs to operate were paired with the ride-sharing component, getting around town via a hired car would cost far less than it currently costs to own and operate a car.

So, yes, if the technology remains as expensive as it is now – a big ‘if’ – maybe you won’t own your own autonomous vehicle. But maybe you wouldn’t even want to. Imagine never having to worry about changing the brake pads or renewing your registration again while still getting around town just as easily. I don’t know about you, but personally, that sounds like a future I can accept.

Heath Davis-Gardner is a professional writer and editor who currently serves as Strategic Communications Specialist at Mandli Communications.