Zero Emission And ‘Driverless’ Cars

BY Chuks Oluigbo

The world is on an irreversible march to a future of vehicles without drivers and auto makers are leaving no stone unturned in their bid to prove that autonomous technology can truly deliver desirable benefits.

A driverless car, also called self-driving car, autonomous vehicle (AV or auto), or robotic car (robo-car), is a vehicle that can, with a combination of a variety of sensors, perceive its surroundings and move safely with little or no human input. It first gained widespread public attention at General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, where the automaker envisioned “abundant sunshine, fresh air [and] fine green parkways” upon which cars would drive themselves.

Larry Burns, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan, in 2014 referred to driverless cars as “a vaccine that can save a lot of lives”, saying they could be the cure for one of the world’s biggest causes of deaths – road accidents.

Forecasts say there will be over 33 million driverless vehicles on the road by 2040, and around 55 percent of small businesses look to adopting self-driving car technologies in their operations within the next two decades.

Even though dysfunctional road infrastructure and machine learning problem make the idea of self-driving cars on most African roads sound like a fairy-tale, across the world countries have been readying themselves for driverless vehicles through policy and legislation, infrastructure development, among others. Singapore, for instance, created a test town for driverless vehicles complete with traffic lights, bus stops, skyscrapers and a rain machine that recreates its stormy tropical weather, according to a 2019 KPMG report.

The KPMG report lists The Netherlands, Singapore, Norway, US, Sweden, Finland, UK, Germany, United Arab Emirates, Japan, New Zealand, Canada, South Korea, Israel, Australia, Austria, France, Spain, Czech Republic, China, Hungary, Russia, Mexico, India, and Brazil as the countries most ready to adopt autonomous vehicles.

Similarly, Motional, Uber, AutoX, Optimus Ride, Arity, WiTricity, Zscaler, Unity Technologies, Ouster, Cruise, Waymo, Voyage, Swift Navigation, Embark Trucks, and Nauto are among the top self-driving car companies paving the way for an autonomous future.

An auto maker like General Motors (GM) has pumped billions of dollars in this regard and the company’s CEO Mary Barra is focused on creating a future with zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion. These are just three out of the bounties that driverless cars are expected to deliver.

“Algorithms can’t get drunk, drowsy, or distracted, which are the leading causes of road fatalities and are largely responsible for killing 1.3 million people in traffic accidents every year. They are not prone to road rage, eating while driving, or fiddling with the entertainment system. And they can move faster, yet more safely, through traffic, which decreases congestion,” writes Ashley Nunes, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School, in a 2020 article.

“Computerised systems are also better than their human counterparts at choosing the most fuel-efficient route. They accelerate and brake more smoothly. These eco-friendly driving practices collectively save fuel, which ultimately reduces exhaust pipe emissions,” Nunes says in the article “Why driverless cars have an emissions problem”.

More specifically, Gary Shapiro, president and CEO at Consumer Technology Association, reckons that self-driving technology will save money, cut the cost of insurance, licensing and repairs, free up time spent in traffic or searching for parking spaces, boost productivity, generate new avenues for economic growth, increase fuel efficiency and eliminate many traffic snarls, Shapiro says.

“Self-driving vehicles will change the nature of our cities. We will likely need fewer parking spaces, and may be less likely to buy cars. Today, most cars sit unused 95 percent of the time. If we cut this in half we will need fewer cars,” he reasons.

Concerns remain, however, that driverless cars have the potential to worsen emissions problem.

A study by Europe’s transport campaign group Transport & Environment (T&E) finds that the unregulated advent of driverless cars could increase traffic in European cities by 50 percent-150 percent by 2050, which would be like a rush hour that lasts all day. It could result in 40 percent more CO2 emissions from cars building up to 2050, throwing Europe’s climate goals into disarray.

T&E figures that driverless vehicles could become so cheap and convenient as to create an increased demand for car travel, possibly worsening congestion problems in Europe’s cities.

In the US, the transportation sector has been the single largest source of greenhouse emissions since 2019, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Light-duty vehicles account for more than half of that output.

According to the T & E study, a way of ensuring that driverless vehicles do not lead to increased CO2 emissions is for cities to refuse access for automated combustion engine cars. If this is done, it could cut emissions by 23 percent between now and 2050 compared to a world with no electric or driverless cars.

“Automation, electrification and sharing are three revolutions that can transform the way we move around. But whether this will be a good thing for the environment or for the livability of our cities depends entirely on the choices governments make. If we want sustainable mobility we need to ban driverless cars with combustion engines and gradually reduce road space for cars in our cities,” says Yoann Le Petit, clean vehicles and new mobility officer at T & E.

“We urgently need policies to ensure all taxi and uber-type vehicles operating in large cities are zero emissions no later than 2025, with incentives for shared rides, and a gradual reduction in parking slots available for private cars,” said Le Petit.

The State of California in the US is already on track with a regulation that will require all light-duty autonomous vehicles that operate in the state to emit zero emissions starting in 2030.

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law the SB 500, the latest effort by the state to limit the sale of new internal combustion vehicles aimed towards reducing greenhouse emissions. Newsom had in 2020 signed an executive order that effectively banned the sale of new gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035. Similarly, the state’s Air Resources Board mandated that all new trucks sold in California emit zero emissions by 2045.

This move by California is aimed at preventing autonomous vehicles from becoming major polluters in the future, particularly if driverless taxi services become popular among commuters.

Some auto makers like General Motors are also on a similar track. Mandi Damman, GM’s chief engineer of autonomous vehicles, told Delloitte in an interview that the auto maker believes autonomous vehicles should be electric vehicles and so built its programme off the zero-emissions Bolt EV platform.

“In terms of zero congestion, deploying the first autonomous vehicles in a rideshare environment allows us to adjust the times when vehicles are on the road. When the cars aren’t transporting rideshare passengers, we can use them to deliver packages in the middle of the night to completely change the way mobility works,” Damman says.