i3 - July/August 2019 - 29

T
ITIES?
BY ROBERT E. CALEM

T

oday, cars and cities are inextricably
linked, and this will continue as the
future is dominated by self-driving vehicles. But the tie-up means both will have to
evolve in unison, say experts steeped in
autonomous vehicles, smart city technologies and urban studies. To wit: self-driving
vehicles must learn to navigate complex
environments filled with pedestrians and
other obstacles while cities become modified to accommodate them.

CONCURRENT EXPANSION

According to current definitions set by
SAE International and adopted by the U.S.
Department of Transportation's National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA), self-driving for automobiles is
defined in terms of levels.
There will be as many as 2.5 million Level
4 cars and 700,000 Level 5 cars moving
around the planet by 2028, according to
London-based research and analytics firm
GlobalData (see "The Levels of Self-Driving
Cars"). Moreover, in the year 2033, Level 4
car production will reach 6.5 million vehicles, and Level 5 production will reach four
million, adding substantially to the cumulative totals, GlobalData forecasts.
The firm says self-driving vehicles will
be the fastest-growing automotive sector
by 2033, with annual sales of more than
11 million vehicles. But many automakers will skip Level 3 production entirely,
leading GlobalData to anticipate production of fewer than one million of

The Levels of
Self-Driving
Cars

LEVEL 3

Vehicles can drive
themselves in certain
places under specific
conditions, such as on a
highway, but must turn
control over to a human if
they encounter trouble.

LEVEL 4

Vehicles can drive
themselves without human
intervention, but may be
kept within a specific
geographic area, such as a
college campus.

LEVEL 5

Vehicles are completely
self-driving and
unconstrained.

those vehicles in 2033.
At the same time, there's also the
explosive growth of cities. By 2025, more
than 80% of the U.S. population will live
in an urban area, and 12 cities in China
will be megacities - defined as having a
population size greater than 10 million
- GlobalData says. Worldwide, there
will be 41 megacities by 2025, up from
24 at the start of this century. As a result,
GlobalData projects the global market
for smart cities technology to exceed $2
trillion by the next quarter-century
mark, and this encompasses smart transportation technologies.
However, city planners and automobile businesses cannot underestimate
the great technical challenges that city
surroundings present to self-driving
vehicles, says Dave Leggett, director of
automotive services at GlobalData.
"There's an awful lot of elements in
how high levels of automation for vehicles in cities is going to play out," he says.
"Level 4 is a very high level of automation and the problems come really with
the last 5% of what's required" for utter
reliability.
While an Airbus A380 airplane needs
2.5 terabytes of data to fly on autopilot
across the Atlantic Ocean, a self-driving
car requires 45 terabytes of data to enable
a Level 4 autonomous vehicle to perform
"routine driving tasks," he explains.
"There are lots of complicated scenarios that are still very difficult for software
developers to build into the algorithms"
that self-driving cars will need to function in cities, Leggett says.
"Intelligent transportation systems
(ITS) will require a lot of infrastructure
to enable vehicles to move around in an
optimal way, to reduce congestion and be
as environmentally efficient as possible,"
Leggett adds. It will be the end of the
next decade or later before "everything is
in place to work to a level that is practical, and society is satisfied."
Dominique Bonte - managing director
and vice president responsible for global
automotive and IoT (Internet of Things)
research at ABI Research in Brussels,
Belgium - envisions a world where driverless cars are "the only type of traffic"
JULY/AUGUST 2019

29
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