The European Union commissioner for transport expects full self-driving capability by 2030, she said this week at City as a Lab conference in Slovenia.
That’s an important part of her “vision zero” to reducing traffic fatalities to none.
“By 2030 we believe we will have the new generation of vehicles that will be fully automated,” EU commissioner Violeta Bulc said. “This year auto manufacturers added 15 new [safety and automation] features to all cars of all price levels.”
Those mandated features on new cars include lane-keeping technology, driver distraction sensors, external sensors, intelligent speed assistance, and a "black box" recorder which can be accessed to help determine causes of accidents.
Some of them could aid in making vehicles more autonomous.
As commissioner Bulc has overseen and stimulated about 230 billion Euros of investment into European transport initiatives over the past four years. Most of that has gone to mass transit, with 70 percent to railways alone, while private companies have been investing in autonomous driving technology.
But Europe is working towards an integrated transport system that incorporates both private and public, personal and mass transit.
“Autonomous mobility will not only be about cars,” Bulc said. “It will be about drones, about ships, about trains, about airplanes … my dream is that we bring all this together.”
Essentially, this is mobility as a service (MaaS) at continent scale.
The vision she outlined doesn’t really have an equivalent in North America.
It involves seeing transportation as a service with many integrated components, where a traveller might initiate a trip involving multiple modes of transit with just one digital interface. For example, someone might use a small ride-sharing vehicle to get to a tram, which might then take them to a larger train station. After riding the train close to their final destination, the traveler might use a bus or another ride-share to get to his or her final destination.
Making these seamless includes ticketing and mapping.
Many if not most of those components will be self-driving or autonomous, Bulc said. That most likely includes aircraft.
Built into this vision is decarbonization: a complete transition to electric or other non-polluting engines by 2050. That’s a second leg of Bulc’s “vision zero” strategy: zero pollution. Transport is currently the second-largest contributor to pollution in Europe, Bulc said. (Zero paper in the entire transportation industry, including commercial shipping, is a third.)
Bulc knows, of course, that this transition will not happen easily or automatically.
“We will achieve nothing without strong ecosystem behind us,” she said, adding that innovation cannot flourish without investment.
Ultimately however, Bulc said that achieving mobility as a service requires a focus not on technology or modes of transport but on people.
“Don’t get trapped in a small story,” Bulc said. “The big story is about people. It’s not about computers, cars, roads, or drones … it’s about people.”
