Despite the prodigious R&D, the commercialization of self-driving technology has been delayed because of excessive corner cases, different traffic regulations in different countries, increasing chip computing power requirements, high energy consumption of the system and other impediments. Apart from insurance liability determination and ethical issues related to the trolley problem, technical barriers alone pose a challenge great enough to delay the commercialization of L4+ self-driving systems until after 2030. To date, quite a lot of self-driving technology startups have run out of capital and started to exit the market one after the other just like EV startups. However, if we shift from the perspective of automakers (business interests) to the goals of "ameliorating traffic congestion and improving road safety" for a new urban landscape in the future, "driving autonomy" is obviously not the only solution. What we need is to accelerate the schedule for autonomous vehicles to hit the road through comprehensive planning that entails the IVICS.
Traffic congestion and traffic accidents are due to political and economic factors such as insufficient road construction, but there are greater causes, including dangerous driving of human drivers, vulnerable road users (pedestrians, bicyclists, pensioners, the disabled, pregnant women, and children), failure to transmit information on dynamic traffic conditions in real time, lack of dynamic adjustment of traffic signal systems, poor management of commercial vehicle fleets, inadequate road maintenance, absence of timely emergency rescue, and other problems. To solve these problems, it is necessary to define five functional areas:
- Vehicle safety and control technology
- Real-time traffic control and message transmission
- Road operation services (including bus scheduling, electronic toll collection, etc.)
- Pedestrian and non-motorized vehicle safety services
- Emergency rescue services
The above functional areas are underpinned by four technologies: C-V2X, big data, cloud computing, and AI. Thanks to the synergy of people, vehicles, roads, networks and clouds, real-time road data collected by cameras and sensors installed at traffic signals and streetlights along the road can help car users and pedestrians significantly improve road safety. In the functional area of "vehicle safety and control technology," for example, the self-driving system, currently faced with numerous technical hurdles, can make up for the weaknesses of corner cases and chip computing power by using real-time information from the edge computing-based traffic facilities to enhance driving safety. Right now, China is the most active country in promoting vehicle-infrastructure collaboration platforms. Beijing section of the Jingxiong Expressway has just been fully covered with 5G networks for a 27-km stretch, with a base station set up every 600m on average. Moreover, Beijing Mobile has introduced big data and AI analysis to provide highway supervisory units with sufficient data for monitoring, scheduling, and decision making. Even though there are no autonomous vehicles on the expressway and the road conditions are not as complicated and changeable as those on urban roads, China has officially inaugurated the era of vehicle-infrastructure collaboration. We have every reason to believe that the construction of relevant infrastructure will pick up speed in major cities in China, and that China will reap the fruits of the vehicle-road synergy program it has tirelessly deployed across the country since a few years ago.
That said, do advanced countries like some European countries, the U.S., and Japan not have similar plans? If governments do not have a long-term comprehensive strategy for future urban development, the huge investment in transportation infrastructure is unlikely to be felt by road users in the short term. In ten years, powerful countries will no longer merely compete in the automobile industry per se, but rather, the competition will be about smooth traffic flow and improved driving safety brought about by technology, as well as resultant urban reengineering projects.