Google, Apple, Uber, Tesla and the future of cars

A comrade from abroad visited the People's Cycling Front HQ over christmas. As he works for a european motor manufacturer, his debriefing was very informative.

What scares them? Tesla and Google; to a lesser extent Apple and Uber

Apple: for providing expensive status toys that don't have wheels on them. Phones are the new coming-of-age accessory, the thing you need to stay in touch with your friends. Ask people which they would do without, car or phone, and the under 30s say: phone. It's the 50+ who say "car". And, like tobacco company customers, their over-use of the product is causing them to die out.

Apple have done more though: set the expectation on how easy devices are to use, and how fast devices evolve. A 3 year old phone? How ancient! Yet car manufacturer "in car experiences" are designed to stay in a car for its entire life, and take years of effort beforehand. The car companies just aren't nimble enough here. Their user experience sucks: go to a car shop and either stare in horror at the number of buttons, or in a different kind of horror at a touch screen that requires attention.

Google: for leading the self-driving car work. Mercedes may have been showing off their self-driving car, but it still likes to offer the "driving experience", while allowing you to rotate the seat 180 degrees for a meeting with your colleagues or family. Google don't care about driving experience, and don't see their users caring either. They want the Apple market -and if you go online via the phone on a train, bus or car: they're happy. They don't have the myth of the open road or their motoring heritage brand to sell. They have something useful: extra online time with your friends. If there's one thing the car companies like about Google is that it may be possible to work with them. Though there the android experience scares them. Google own Android; phone companies come and go.

Uber: not a direct threat to the car companies, yet. What they represent though is is the driving accessory to the iPhone. Uber relies on all their customers having a smartphone. Which means it is OK to spend the money you'd spend on a car on a phone, a bike, public transport and Uber. Throw in car-club and boris bike and provided you live in a city: no car is needed. That is only going to get worse. Every time someone takes a ride with Uber, they know the pickup and dropoff points, and can start planning ahead. Taxi drivers may know that London Paddington is busy when the trains from Bristol arrive, but Uber can know more: that there are 12 customers heading in from Reading, with regular routes for 6 of them.., so start pre-emptively shifting vehicles.

Where Uber really have power is the money behind them. That lets them go beyond evolving the application to be better than anything competition can do, and get into a world that until now only the taxi and car organisations have done: get involved with government. They need to do that to overcome the barriers that some cities are putting up. The LTDA have got power in london by regulatory capture of the TfL taxi licensing authority, and access to press and politicians when in their cars. They can be individual lobbyists for their causes. Except who wants a conversation with a taxi driver when you can be on your phone doing interesting things? Meanwhile Uber has the strength to go to state and federal governments in the US to overcome city restrictions, restrictions which start to come over as anti-consumer.

But Uber can do more, because of their near neighbours in Silicon Valley. The LTDA represents Taxi Drivers. Uber represents Uber. If Uber could roll out a service with a fleet of self-driving electric cars, they would. Their customers aren't paying for 20th century driving experience, they are paying for a ride to wherever —and the chance to catch up with things on their phone while it happens.

With international scale, Uber have the opportunity to work with google for self-driving cars that meet the needs of today's customers.  They are also building up the skills needed to lobby in cities and countries, initially to make Uber legal...but those skills and contacts will help with any transition to self-driving vehicles.

Which brings us round to the one that impresses yet terrifies the car manufacturers: Tesla.

Mikhael and the copenhagenize crew may emphasise the "auto industry" as sellers of an obsolete brand, fighting back against demographic and social change, but Tesla threatens to render the existing car companies obsolete, even while driving itself remains a valued tool.

It comes down to this: what is a car company?

More precisely: what are the core skills of a car company, the barriers to entry which keep competition out?

The answer: engines

Car companies may have brands and marketing, different sub-brands (VW Audi group being the big EU example with Audi, VW, Seat and Skoda), but what takes up most of their R&D budget today, and most of their capital costs is engine plant.  Which is why all vehicles in VAG share motors from the same common pool of engines: shared NRE costs and CAPEX for plants that can cost hundreds of millions of pounds.

What Tesla say is: so what?

New mechanical engines are incredibly expensive to develop. It's not just a matter of designing something powerful, efficient, quiet, not-very polluting, reliable and easy to maintain, it's about designing engines that are cost effective to manufacture. Its those factories that take the capital.

The existing car companies may have some of the best mechanical engineers in the world, capable of designing the engines and the factories, but Tesla have come along and said: its no longer about petrol and diesel engines —it's about batteries, electric motors and the software around them.

The existing car companies may have manufacturing and supply chains optimised to keep stock down to a minimum, partner with their suppliers to get exactly the right number of spark plugs to the factory floor when needed —but that's a supply chain for mechanical parts.  Tesla have come along and said: those moving parts? You'll be needing less of those. Stop worrying about engine cooling, focus on keeping batteries at optimum temperature —and how to recharge them fast.

The existing car companies may have the dealers that nobody else can use to break into a market, but again Tesla have looked at apple retail outlets and said "we like that". Tesla don't have dealers, they are a vertical business, from battery to customer.

That vertical business model transforms servicing. If Toyota have to do a recall, it's expensive, some cars will be missed and its a massive hit to the company. Whereas Tesla have all their cars online, with telemetry and the ability to take software updates. Tesla didn't have to do a recall to (temporarily) disable a suspension-lowering facility while questions existed about its safety. Tesla pushed out the change, later on reversing it. No other player can do that.

In ten years, Tesla have gone from being a company with nothing to being a car company whose battery, charging and vehicle monitoring and management skills make those incumbents look like dinosaurs. And they back up those skills with factories that are far more modern than what the incumbents have. Yes, Tesla cars are expensive today: but they are the new status toys. And those costs can only come down, as Tesla scales.

And guess who are within range of each other: Google, Tesla, Apple and Uber.

The centre of the motoring universe has moved, from Germany and Detroit to California, where it has the potential to do for the incumbents what Apple did for Nokia: destroy them, not out of maliciousness, but because they weren't agile enough, because they stayed in the old world —rather than see the future.

Think about that when the LTDA protest about the cycle superhighway, when a taxi driver cuts you up: Google, Apple, Uber, Tesla

If an autonomous car break the speed limit -who takes the blame?

Autonomous Cars are the great hope of the car industry, ironically, to solve all problems that cars have created: congestion, safety, parking, etc. It's also an obsession with google -maybe in a misguided belief that it will solve problems, more likely that they want to get all those extra hours people spend in traffic -browsing time.

Ignoring the technical issues -will they work- there are legal issues -and that's something cycling and road safety campaigners need to sort out -before the decisions are made for them.

Start with a simple question: If an autonomous car break the speed limit -who takes the blame?

This is a simple question but gets complex fast.  Today, if a car breaks the speed limit, the driver takes the blame. The driver is expected to be aware of what type of road it is, and what extra road signs show restrictions on the mandated maximums: 50 mph, 40, 30, 20. There are even temporary speed limits -those on motorways are still enforced.

It doesn't matter whether speed limits are long-standing, temporary or recent -if you break them, you take the blame.

Yet lots of people do break the limits, to the extent that if you drive round Bristol at 30 mph drivers behind you start to get impatient and then frantic. Drive down the end of the M32, where it's become 30 mph -you'd have a bus go into the back of you.  And as for the M5 to Birmingham: 85 is the minimum speed in the fast lane.

The defacto speed limits of much of S Gloucs and Bristol are higher than what's legal -the reason people drive at those speeds is because they get away with it. Which is why there's so much hate of speed cameras. Everyone views it as their right to drive at 85 mph down a motorway,  35 in town. Speed cameras don't catch one or two speeders -they force the speed limit down by 15 mph.

But speed camera or police camera: driver is always guilty.

Now, what about Autonomous Cars?

If they can be configured to break the speed limit, if there is some "break the law" button, what would that mean? That drivers have the option of telling the car to break the law -and if so, they are liable? But even building such a feature in means the car manufacturer wink-wink providing an overtake option "to use in emergency" -exactly the same way they hint about how cars can drive at 130 mph "in Germany".

The alternative: you can't speed in autonomous mode, you have to go manual -how is that handled? Does the a-car log this fact and speed? They'd have to: because if the car got caught speeding in manual mode, then the fact it wasn't in autonomous mode is something that'd be used by the car manufacturer as a defence.

But what if the car broke the speed limit in autonomous mode? If you are driving there is no excuse for doing so -and you take the hit: points and penalties. What happens in automatic mode? Does Ford or Google take a hit? Does the driver who was reading email get blamed for the actions of their car?

And how does the car know the speed limits?

Drivers have the road and its signed, but a-cars are going to have to rely on digital maps with speed-limit data on it. How often are those maps going to be refreshed? When a new 20 mph zone is rolled out, can a-cars break the limit until they get an update? And who is at fault then? Is it an "oh well never mind" problem? Is the fault of the driver? The map updaters? Or even the council? After all, today's GPS units have a big disclaimer "don't rely on this" -which is precisely what autonomous cars plan to do.

It gets better thought: in france the speed limits on autoroutes changes depending on weather -that's officially, not just "Slow down in the rain" hints.

Nominally then, an automatic car could break the speed limit in france even if the map was up to date -because it wasn't aware of the weather.

These all sound theoretical questions -but if they don't get answered the likely outcome will be "if an autonomous car breaks the speed limit -never mind". That will be especially in the case in changed limits, permanent or temporary. While drivers could get penalised, the fact that autonomous cars break the limits until the maps are updated is something that could become accepted as inevitable.

No doubt car manufacturers will also be pushing for higher limits for a-cars on motorways, say, 85 mph in dedicate lanes. Which is what they will know they have to in order to preserve the defacto 85 mph limit, to sell autonomous driving on motorways.

Yet from a road safety perspective, this question, who takes the blame when an autonomous car breaks the speed limit, is critical.

Because the answer to that will shape the answer to the next question: if an autonomous car kills someone: who takes the blame?

What the Fuck is an Urban SUV?

The car manufacturers love to wave their green credentials, their electric toys, then demand more money from the governments "to go electric", more concessions, more subsidies. The politicans love to get in the regional papers visiting car factories round the country: Northumberland, Liverpool, Swindon, Oxford, and make hose same promises "the car industry will bring economic recovery to the country", "electric cars are the future".

Bollocks.

Buy a newspaper. Look at the adverts. See any selling electric cars? Not likely. What you are likely to see are adverts for "Urban SUVs". Not eco-friendly electric. Not saving the planet. But what the car manufacturers want you to buy.

What the fuck is an urban SUV?

First, there were 4x4s, Landrovers, jeeps. Functional for farmers, the higher end Range Rovers for the landed gentry. Pickups for the builders. Then people started buying them for the image, and the car industry was happy to sell them. They discovered the new market didn't need four weel drive, so calling them 4x4s or 4WDs wasn't right. They invented a new term: SUV. Sport Utility Vehicle.

Then they sold them for sport, for utility. Pictures of snowboarders driving in the snow with snowboards on top. Rock climbers in the wildeness. Pickup drivers "haulin'". Image things. If you do those things, you need an SUV. And if you had an SUV, you lived an active, sporting live. Never mind the fact that snowboarding and rock climbing are lifestyles -and the people who live that lifestyle can't afford SUVs. They live in camper vans in ski resort car parks in winter; campsites in summer. If they do have a job in a town, there'll be a fiesta or astra full of climbing gear. Lifestyle snowboarders, climbers and other "extreme sport" people are just the image for SUVs, not the customer. The customer is someone with money who would rather have a life more interesting than what they have -and the SUV helps pretend that they do.

Nowadays: the SUV is a family vehicle, it's sold on safety for the kids. The marketing dept. loves a few days of snow or summer floods, so the TV can show landrovers coming to the rescue of people who "only" had hatchbacks -they'll buy ad space in the papers to say "this is what you need".

Though the price of buying an SUV - a lot-, the cost of fuel -a lot- and the servicing charges -way more than a hatchback- means that there's a limit to how many "real" SUVs they can sell.

And so we have something new: "The Urban SUV". This is not an SUV for the mountains, it is one for the town.

Think about this: a vehicle with no more luggage capacity than a normal car, worse fuel economy (aerodynamics), worse handling (higher centre of gravity), worse use in town (the width needed to compensate for that SUV means they need to be wider), is now being sold as a vehicle for use in the cities.

That's where the car manufacturers money is really going. Not into electrics, but into overweight, overpriced alternatives to "practical cars".

How do they sell them?

They scare people.

Look at all the adverts. They portray the city as an edgy place ("graffiti"), dark and anonymous, and something that you need an armoured car to get through safely;

• Toyota Urban Cruiser: Tough. Selling a car driving round a city at night "scary", nobody around "danger", but you are safe in your SUV.
• Ford Kuga This one is still sold on the outdoor bollocks, but look at the bike shot. Shit bikes, shit suspension, floating rear triangle design. No luggage rack. These are not useful bikes in a city -and they are shit offroad too. Same as the SUV itself.
• Nissan Quashqai. This is the worst example. "The ultimate urban car", the quashquai is "The king of the urban jungle". Marketing: Graffiti. The rough inner cities that you drive through on your way to the suburbs, doors locked, hoping you don't make eye contact with the locals. Tinted windows help there.

These overpriced vehicles are sold by scaring you that cities are dangerous places where you need tough SUV-like cars. That may help convince people who "still" drive round in hatchbacks, estate cars and the like that they need something tougher for use in a dangerous city.

The danger in a city is not the graffiti. It is not unexpected snowstorms coming in off the cotswolds and covering emerson's green in 18" of power snow. It is not car-jacking criminals loitering at the perennial traffic block by parkway station. What is the danger in the city?

It is selfish wankers driving urban SUVs who think they have more right to the road than people on bicycles and pedestrians. It is those drivers on the school run, bully bicycles out the way, going past them with millimetres to spare, turning back to look at their kids on the handheld games consoles and saying "look how dangerous it is out there -I am glad I am driving you to school". It is people in Urban SUVs who believe they are safe in one, start getting complacent, making phone calls, and run over someone "they came out of nowhere".

Yet nowhere in the adverts do Nissan, Toyota, Ford or anyone else come out and state the truth: the danger to the drivers of urban SUVs are other drivers of Urban SUVs.

For cyclists, Urban SUVs make things worse

• They ruin visibility for everyone. You can't see over them -and vehicles past them can't see you.
• they're wider, so are harder to squeeze past
• the raised seating makes people harder at judging their position, which means they pass you worse, or hold back and then pass you baldly at the wrong point.
• if you really think your car is "tougher", you drive more aggressively -to bicycles, pedestrians and other cars.
• in snow and ice the drivers get overconfident as they discover that their "all terrain" vehicle needs winter tyres to stop.
• they cost more than standard cars -making people think they have even more right to the road than cyclists who don't pay road tax
• They reinforce that car-as-status-symbol bollocks. If you have an "urban SUV", you are more than just another persion. 

Even without the SUVs on the streets, the whole "you need an urban SUV to survive an edgy city" marketing is an enemy. It's designed to scare people into armouring themselves and then driving through the rough parts of town at speed.

Contrast that with the cycling chic story: cities are nice places for people to cycle round.

You can only have a cycle-chic environment in a city without Urban SUVs. they are our enemy.