Autonomous Vehicle Engineering - January 2021 - 2

Editorial
Reality confronts R&D
I vividly remember a high-level
engineer for a global automaker telling
me a couple of years ago that he was
more than a little miffed when he saw
the figures for what the company
planned to invest in " self-driving technology " in the coming year. " Somebody
needs to figure out what's reality and
what's R&D, " he griped.
I think that's becoming clearer.
Almost by the day.
Don't think it's all about COVID and
the perverted reallocation of resources
that a year under its cloud has wrought.
Although COVID caused a serious schism
in the mobility-as-a-service (MaaS)
business model that once was a cornerstone of the argument justifying the
" need " for accelerated autonomous-vehicle (AV) development, the virus has in
a similarly dispassionate fashion created
new opportunities for MaaS.
It's going to be a while before most
people feel buoyant about jumping
into an Uber or other shared-mobility
modalities. However, some of that
revenue potential may be replaced by
new and expanded impetus for automated-delivery vehicles. I don't think
driverless food delivery, for example,
is soon going to be the new norm, but
automated last-mile delivery, in many
forms and for many kinds of goods,
certainly is looking more desirable.
But we already knew commercial
applications were going to be the first
and most plausible path from the lab to
the road for AV technology. High-level
autonomy development - at least for
the established OEMs and the tiered
suppliers - faces a bigger challenge than
COVID: electric vehicles (EVs).
There are increasing indications
throughout the industry that the competition for resources that already existed
between AV and EV programs has tilted

2 January 2021	

distinctly toward EVs. Yes, the privations
of COVID have pressured automakers
and suppliers to make choices they
perhaps would have preferred not to
make, but the reality is that EVs were
going to assume a dominant role in
R&D, even without COVID. It's a matter
of addressing the more immediate need.
In editor-in-chief Lindsay Brooke's
reporting of what's really going on in
the reach to higher-level vehicle automation (see p. 4), he notes that the new
economic realities across the industry,
along with increasing global regulatory mandates for EVs, have shifted the
paradigm. In the story, Christophe Marnat,
senior VP of the Electronics and ADAS
division at ZF, said the emergence of EV
directives " has changed priorities on what
developments the OEMs are focusing on
first. Electrification is a necessity and a
key to survival. "
More telling is Marnat's assessment
of the near-term future. The industry's
sunny early projections for the advent of
high-level automation, already eroded in
so many predictable and unpredictable
ways, are backing up even further. COVIDstrained budgets and the need to get EVs
on the road in real volumes, he said, are
going to set back high-level automation
for many years.
Not long before this writing,
Uber sold its Advanced Technologies
Group (ATG) to Aurora Innovation for,
apparently, not much actual money,
despite having a valuation around $4
billion (Uber subsequently sold off its
air-taxi unit, too). Barely a year prior,
ATG boasted a valuation in excess of $7
billion. This transaction probably won't
be the last between AV-industry heavyweights as the line between R&D and
market reality becomes progressively
more distinct.
Bill Visnic, Editorial Director

EDITORIAL
Bill Visnic
Editorial Director
Bill.Visnic@sae.org
Lindsay Brooke
Editor-in-Chief
Lindsay.Brooke@sae.org
Paul Seredynski
Senior Editor
Paul.Seredynski@sae.org
Ryan Gehm
Associate Editor
Ryan.Gehm@sae.org
Jennifer Shuttleworth
Associate Editor
Jennifer.Shuttleworth@sae.org
Lisa Arrigo
Custom Electronic
Products Editor
Lisa.Arrigo@sae.org

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AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE ENGINEERING
Autonomous Vehicle Engineering - January 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Autonomous Vehicle Engineering - January 2021
