Autonomous Vehicles Should Start Small, Go Slow

Somewhat obvious,  but well examined suggestions here

Autonomous Vehicles Should Start Small, Go Slow
Self-driving vehicles can already work well on campuses where traffic moves slowly  By Shaoshan Liu and Jean-Luc Gaudiot   in IEEE Spectrum

Many young urbanites don’t want to own a car, and unlike earlier generations, they don’t have to rely on mass transit. Instead they treat mobility as a service: When they need to travel significant distances, say, more than 5 miles (8 kilometers), they use their phones to summon an Uber (or a car from a similar ride-sharing company). If they have less than a mile or so to go, they either walk or use various “micromobility” services, such as the increasingly ubiquitous Lime and Bird scooters or, in some cities, bike sharing.

The problem is that today’s mobility-as-a-service ecosystem often doesn’t do a good job covering intermediate distances, say a few miles. Hiring an Uber or Lyft for such short trips proves frustratingly expensive, and riding a scooter or bike more than a mile or so can be taxing to many people. So getting yourself to a destination that is from 1 to 5 miles away can be a challenge. Yet such trips account for about half of the total passenger miles traveled.

Many of these intermediate-distance trips take place in environments with limited traffic, such as university campuses and industrial parks, where it is now both economically reasonable and technologically possible to deploy small, low-speed autonomous vehicles powered by electricity. We’ve been involved with a startup that intends to make this form of transportation popular. The company, PerceptIn, hasautonomous vehicles operating at tourist sites in Nara and Fukuoka, Japan; at an industrial park in Shenzhen, China; and is just now arranging for its vehicles to shuttle people around Fishers, Ind., the location of the company’s headquarters.

Because these diminutive autonomous vehicles never exceed 20 miles (32 kilometers) per hour and don’t mix with high-speed traffic, they don’t engender the same kind of safety concerns that arise with autonomous cars that travel on regular roads and highways. While autonomous driving is a complicated endeavor, the real challenge for PerceptIn was not about making a vehicle that can drive itself in such environments—the technology to do that is now well established—but rather about keeping costs down.

Given how expensive autonomous cars still are in the quantities that they are currently being produced—an experimental model can cost you in the neighborhood of US $300,000—you might not think it possible to sell a self-driving vehicle of any kind for much less. Our experience over the past few years shows that, in fact, it is possible today to produce a self-driving passenger vehicle much more economically: PerceptIn’s vehicles currently sell for about $70,000, and the price will surely drop in the future. Here’s how we and our colleagues at PerceptIn brought the cost of autonomous driving down to earth.  .... "