How will the shape of cars change if they become autonomous?
When vehicles become completely autonomous and then the whole reason for the journey will
probably be different. So first of all people will still be getting from A to B
that's taken as red but cars will then become livable environments so they'll
be used as offices, they'll be used to perform leisure time functions, such as watching
movies or using social media talking on the telephone, so the vehicle interior is
going to change quite considerably over the next 20 or 30 years or so as
autonomy becomes more and more of an issue and you will see vehicles become
almost like mini offices in some ways so you'll have meeting spaces. If we can be
totally reliant on the technology to get us safely from A to B you might even
find situations where people can recline the seats, kick back and relax so you
might have reclining seats for example and that changes the whole vehicle
interior much beyond where we are currently. So there's going to be big
changes in the interior of the vehicle over the years ahead and it could be a
very exciting future for us all.
Will drink drivers ever be a thing of the
past with new technology? There is already technology at the moment that is
available to help with drink driving problems. So we have the technology
available of an interlock. This is a breathalyser that you can put on the
vehicle so it means that you have to breathe into the vehicle and the
ignition won't start until it's got a negative reading for alcohol.
So these are becoming more and more common so for example they're regularly used in Sweden
on public transport, so public transport drivers would be required to give a
breathalyser reading and the vehicle won't start
if they're showing positive for alcohol. I think that level of technology could
be readily rolled out and become widely available on cars.
Is there a possibility of ever having time travel?
This is a really good question. I have
pondered on this considerably over the years. Sadly I don't think it's ever
going to be possible though and the reason why I say that is because there
would already be people amongst us who had come back or traveled back in time
from say the 22nd century who would be sharing their experiences with us and as
that is not the case I just don't think that time travel is ever going to be
possible because it would already be reality.
The question is how will the
provision of charging ports for electric vehicles change over the next few years?
So obviously it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation as people probably know
it's very much about how many electric vehicles there are and then there's the
infrastructure and one doesn't really survive without the other. I think the
interesting thing is really about where these charging points will be so
generally they're kind of in car parks or service stations and so on at the
moment. But there's an awful lot of push to have them just in street furniture so
people in London might have already seen them. So they have them in lampposts,
other places where there's already the electrical supply so that obviously that
will make it much easier for people just to be able to charge wherever they are.
There's also a push for charging in residential streets now as well. There's
a whole new concept called vehicle-to-grid and that's kind of
really driving interest in the residential areas.
How do you expect the shape of cars and other vehicles to change over time?
It's quite hard to predict
because a lot of vehicle shape is a design driven things so it's it's a
style driven aspect of the vehicle but if we're going to reduce drag and move
towards more electric type of vehicles then it's possible to package the
vehicle differently because you haven't got to put a you haven't got to put an
engine in the vehicle and that may provide the opportunities to make cars
slightly lower which can reduce the aerodynamic drag. We can optimize them
slightly differently and of course the other thing that we can do in future is
perhaps make vehicles a bit smaller because that has a big impact on the
amount of energy that we consume.
Does elevating public transport to the sky represent more or less dangers to citizens?
Really good question.
And if you think about it there's an awful lot of sky. I think we have to take
some lessons from plane travel where we're hardly to get any planes having
mid-air collisions because there is just so much sky for them to utilize which
means that you can keep planes relatively separate so the answer could
be on the surface yes I think it's going to be a reality in the years ahead
and I think it will be quite safe because we've got the space to utilize
in order to keep these vehicles separate. On the ground we've only got so much
space and we as you know from congestion from the roads being the way that they
are crashes are a common everyday occurrence. I think this could be very
positive for us in terms of safety but I think the technology is going to take a
little while to perfect yet before we can say that they're going to be a reality.
Why are electric cars so much more developed than electric motorcycles?
That's true. Here in the UK we
don't see too many electric motorcycles on the road but things are different on
the other parts of the world. So in China we have more than 20 million electric
two-wheeled vehicles on the road and that number is growing so I think the
difference is because of the culture or habit difference or the road
infrastructures not so friendly here in the UK for electric motor vehicles.
So how safe are driverless cars? Very good question because at the moment we simply
don't know the answer which is why we're doing a lot of research in this area.
We think on the whole they'll be pretty safe and the evidence in laboratory
tests and on test tracks etc suggests that there is a high degree of safety
associated with these vehicles but if you look at what's happening with things
like Waymo vehicles, those are the Google cars that you see travelling
around North America, they've only logged about 100 million
miles so far and really you need about three times that amount of travel and
say a fleet of a hundred vehicle without any accidents at all to be
confident that these vehicles are entirely safe and having said that we've
seen some anecdotal cases of accidents involving driverless cars with
pedestrians and cyclists where they're not really sort of tuned into the
scenarios that those particular traffic situations represent and that's
a bit of a worry for us. So if those vehicles can't really detect the
presence of pedestrians and cyclists and other road users satisfactorily then
there may be some safety challenges that we've yet to overcome.
The question is how might public transport change in the future?
I think one of the main things is that
we won't necessarily see that kind of a very usual, regular timetable that we see
now. I think one of the big issues people have in terms of particularly maybe bus
use is it never quite goes from your door to where you want to go and it
never quite goes at the time you want to go so there's something called demand
responsive transport which is becoming I mean it kind of does exist in some
cities already and I think it'll become much more prevalent and that's
essentially you kind of find out generally where where people are wanting
to go and then you kind of manage the transport system around them so it may
be that you have a lot of people going from one house in this state to a
particular place of employment. University is a really good example lots
of people come from, I know, where I live to here. There's no particular bus that gets
you door-to-door and the idea of demand responsive transport it's almost like
your personalised bus service and it will get you from A to B and
obviously with mobile phones and data and you know being able to kind of know
be much more aware of kind of where people are going and at what times
having transport on demand is kind of a much more viable option now.
What will driving tests in the future be like? This is a very good question
simply because I think the whole role of the driver in autonomous vehicles say in
20 or 30 years is going to shift dramatically from being somebody who's
in control of the car to being maybe a monitor of the technology to make sure
that everything is functioning fairly reliably. So there probably won't be a
need to do all the sorts of things that we take for granted
such as understanding clutch control, acceleration, braking, gear change, using
the mirrors, because all that will be done for you by the car so maybe there will
be more of a role for having the driving test as being a monitor of the vehicle
and the monitor of the technology, understanding the technology's
functionality, rather than being somebody who's actually fundamentally being in
control of the vehicle so yes I think we're going to see pretty big changes in the
years ahead.
Could new vehicle technology lead to a
reduction in accidents on the road and if so how? There's a lot of projects
going on at the moment trying to work out the best way that we can use
technology to help reduce the number of accidents on on the road. As Transport
Safety researchers this is our ultimate goal is we want to reduce the number of
accidents that we see and technology does have a strong role to play in that.
One of the projects that I'm working on at the moment we're starting to think
about how we can integrate technologies related to monitoring a vehicle so
knowing for example what speed the vehicle is going but then integrating
that with a different set of technologies which could monitor the
driver so for example having a technology which can monitor the driver's
heart rate, will give us an indication of things such as their stress level but
then we also want to know if we can integrate these with other technologies
which could monitor the environment. Technologies which would include perhaps
cameras like forward-facing cameras that can pick up the proximity to other
vehicles. So these are three very different types of technology and then
if we can integrate these signals together into one technology system
which can help inform the driver of any upcoming accident then the driver will
have the opportunity to take action to stop the situation arising before the
accident occurs and then on from that in the future when we have more control
over the vehicle and interacting with the vehicle itself perhaps the
signals or our intervention can bypass the driver altogether go straight to the
vehicle and allow the vehicle to intervene before an accident occurs.
Well we are be driving hydrogen power cars one day so yes there's no doubt that
future transport has to be a low carbon or carbon neutral but there's different
options to achieve that. We have electric vehicles and hydrogen fuelled cell cars.
I don't see they are like competitors in the future you are seeing a mixture of
low carbon vehicles on the road. Battery vehicles are more suitable for urban
mobility because it has benefits on the techno economics when we drive in the
short range but hydrogen fuelled cell vehicles probably are more suitable for
our long distance, heavy duty vehicles. commercial vehicles etc.
What will autonomous driving's biggest obstacle be before it becomes a common feature?
I think the answer to this has to be reliability and that's why so many of
the manufacturers are doing so much testing in order to ensure the
reliability of vehicles. If you look at autonomous vehicles they can function
very very well currently on motorways situations. So Tesla for example already
has an auto-drive function where you can just allow the vehicle to perform very
limited maneuvers on a motorway and that makes a lot of sense really you've got
all of the uniform all of the traffic traveling in a uniform direction there
are no junctions there are no vulnerable road users most of the speeds are fairly
homogeneous so overall you can really program a car to do autonomous
functionality in that situation quite comfortably. What becomes a challenge is
when you've got more complex traffic situations so where you have the inner
urban area traffic situations or you've got potential for traffic conflicts.
You've got a large percentage of vulnerable road users using the roads.
Those are the situations currently where autonomous vehicles don't deal with very
well and we've already seen anecdotal cases particularly in the US where
autonomous vehicles and vulnerable road users have come
together and obviously the vulnerable reality is that it is the person who
comes off worse. So that's the biggest obstacle, trying to ensure that
autonomous vehicles can cope with these very complex traffic situations where there's
lots of unpredictability on behalf of the other road users.