Brock University AV Technologies as a Disruptive Innovation Case Study Just read the case attached and answer the following question.Can we say developing

Brock University AV Technologies as a Disruptive Innovation Case Study Just read the case attached and answer the following question.Can we say developing AV technologies is a disruptive type of innovation? Why? The picture in autonomous vehicle (AV) or self-driving vehicle sector
The long, winding road for driverless cars
Carmakers like to talk about autonomous vehicles as if they will be in showrooms in three
or four years’ time. The rosy picture they paint suggests people will soon be whisked from place
to place by road-going robots, with little input from those on board. Autonomous vehicles will
end the drudgery of driving, people are told. With their lightning reactions, tireless attention to
traffic, better all-round vision and respect for the law, autonomous vehicles will be safer drivers
than most motorists. They won’t get tired, drunk, have fits of road rage, or become distracted by
texting, chatting, eating or fiddling with the entertainment system.
The family autonomous vehicle will ferry children to school; adults to work, malls, movies,
bars and restaurants; the elderly to the doctor’s office and back. For some, car ownership will be
a thing of the past, as the cost of ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft tumbles once human
drivers are no longer needed. Going driverless could cut hailing costs by as much as 80%, say
optimists. Welcome to the brave new world of mobility-on-demand.
All these things may come to pass one day. But they are unlikely to do so anytime soon,
despite the enthusiasm of people such as Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, a maker of electric cars.
Within two years, he says, people will be napping as driverless vehicles pilot them to their
destinations. Mr Musk has defied conventional wisdom before, and proved critics and naysayers
wrong. In this case, however, too many obstacles lie ahead that are not amenable to brute-force
engineering. It could be a decade or two before Autonomous vehicles can transport people
anywhere, at any time, in any conditions—and do so more reliably and safely than human drivers.
Consider how long it has taken for something as simple as electrically powered cars to
carve a niche for themselves. After a couple of decades, hybrid and pure-battery vehicles still
account for no more than 2% of new-car sales in most countries. Battery prices and storage
capacities are now approaching a point where sales could feasibly take off. But even using the
most optimistic of assumptions (say, electrics accounting for half of new-car sales), it would be
2035 at the earliest before they represented half the vehicles on American roads. Expect fully
autonomous vehicles to face an equally long and winding road.
To put matters in perspective, most cars on the road today require the driver to do
practically everything—signaling, steering, accelerating, braking, watching the traffic ahead, to
the sides and to the rear. This is Level 0 motoring on the scale of autonomous vehicles devised
by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) in America. Vehicles equipped with rudimentary
forms of driver-assistance, such as cruise control or reversing sensors, are classed as Level 1.
Fitted with wide-angle cameras, GPS sensors and short-range radars, Level 2 vehicles can
adapt their speed to the surrounding traffic automatically, maintain a safe distance from the
vehicle ahead, keep within their own lane, and even park themselves occasionally. For short
stretches of time, the driver’s hands may be removed from the steering wheel and his feet from
the pedals. But the driver must be ready to take full control of the vehicle at any instant. Tesla’s
Autopilot system is classed as Level 2 technology—or was until it was rolled back recently to
Level 1 for safety reasons.
In the accident that killed a Tesla driver in Florida in 2016, that driver either failed to
respond in time to avert disaster, or mistakenly assumed that Autopilot meant more (as its name
implied) than mere driver-assistance. Tesla continues to include the Autopilot sensors and
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software in its cars, but has deactivated the system while further testing is undertaken. The
company plans to re-activate it in 2020 or thereafter.
Level 3 autonomous driving is even more controversial. The main difference is that, while
the driver must still remain vigilant and ready to intervene in an emergency, responsibility for all
the critical safety functions is shifted to the car. This has a lot of engineers worried. Experience
has not been good with control systems that relegate the operator to a managerial role whose
only job is to intercede in the case of an emergency.
It was this sort of thinking that allowed an accident at a nuclear power plant at Three Mile
Island, in 1979, to escalate into a full-blown meltdown. Plant operators failed to react correctly
when a valve stuck open and caused the reactor to lose cooling water. They then made matters
worse by overriding the automatic emergency cooling system, thinking there was too much water
in the reactor rather than too little. The accident report blamed inadequate operator training and a
poorly designed computer interface.
Similar human failings have led to countless airline accidents—most recently, the Asiana
Airlines crash at San Francisco in 2013. Over-reliance on automation and lack of understanding
by the pilots about when they needed to intervene were cited as important factors contributing to
the Asiana crash. Some carmakers fear that—even more than reactor operators or professional
pilots—untrained motorists may only worsen the problem when suddenly required to take
control of an otherwise fully automated system. Ford believes it is better to skip Level 3
altogether, and go straight to Level 4, even if it takes longer.
In theory, Level 4 technology should be safer. Such vehicles will carry out all critical
driving functions by themselves, from the start of the journey to the end. The only proviso is that
they will be restricted to roads that they have been designed for. This means routes which have
been mapped in three dimensions and “geofenced” by GPS signals, to prevent Autonomous
vehicles on them straying outside their designated zones. Ride-sharing services like Lyft and
Uber are likely to be the first to operate Level 4 vehicles.
In fully autonomous Level 5 motoring, the vehicles have to perform in all respects at least
as well as human drivers—in short, they must be capable of going anywhere, in every
conceivable condition, and be able to cope with the most unpredictable of situations. That means
travelling on dirt tracks off the map, in blizzards, thunderstorms or pitch darkness, with animals
bursting out of bushes, children chasing runaway balls and crazy people doing crazy things. To
fulfill their promised role, Level 5 cars and lorries will have to do all this and more.
The most crucial piece of technology needed to make that happen is lidar (light detection
and ranging). Lidar uses pulses of laser light flashed from a rotating mirror on a vehicle’s roof to
scan the surroundings for potential obstacles. Unlike video cameras, lidar cannot be dazzled by
bright light. Nor can it be blinded by darkness. It is far more accurate than radar at measuring the
distance and speed of objects. Better still, it provides an image in three dimensions. Clever
mathematics can allow lidar sensors to tell whether an object is hard or soft—in other words,
whether it is another vehicle or a wayward pedestrian. The Autopilot in Tesla’s cars does not rely
on lidar, though it may yet have to if it is to match the resolution of other ranging and detection
systems.
While not cheap, lidar sensors are available from a number of suppliers. But as far as
autonomous vehicles go, the real value lies not in the laser hardware, but in the software that
combines lidar images with signals from radar detectors and video cameras, and overlays the
resulting 3D map with GPS data. Waymo, an autonomous-vehicle firm set up by Alphabet
(Google’s parent), is believed to have the most sophisticated lidar systems of all. They are
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expected to be the jewel in the crown when Waymo comes to license its autonomous technology
to carmakers around the world.
Hence a court battle that has raged in San Francisco, with Waymo accusing Uber of having
stolen its intellectual property and copied its lidar designs. In a ruling on May 15th, Uber was
ordered to return the stolen property and for the alleged culprit to cease work on the disputed
hardware. There is now a real possibility of criminal charges being filed. That would seriously
hamper Uber’s plans to field a fleet of ride-sharing cars without costly drivers.
Before this can happen, however, numerous matters need resolving. Local governments
will have to spend money making roads more (autonomous vehicle) AV-friendly. Besides that,
who will be responsible for all the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I)
low-latency wireless networks needed to manage the driverless traffic? On another issue, the
courts have yet to determine how Autonomous vehicles should share the road with unpredictable
human drivers. Who will be held liable when the inevitable accidents happen? The AV owner?
The manufacturer? The software supplier? And how will Autonomous vehicles be shielded from
cyber attack? Meanwhile, the legal and ethical discussions around letting algorithms resolve
human dilemmas concerning life and death have barely begun.
The enthusiasts are right on one thing, though: testing is paramount. Waymo has logged
more than 2m miles (3m km) of autonomous driving. But that is nowhere near enough to gauge
whether autonomous vehicles are safe enough to let loose on the public.
According to statistics from America’s Bureau of Transportation, there were about 35,000
fatalities and over 2.4m injuries on American roads in 2015. That may sound a lot but, given that
Americans drive three trillion miles a year, accident rates are remarkably low:1.12 deaths and 76
injuries per 100m miles. Because accidents are so rare (compared with miles travelled),
autonomous vehicles “would have to drive hundreds of millions of miles, and sometimes
hundreds of billions of miles, to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries,”
says Nidhi Kalra of RAND Corporation, a think tank in California. At present, there is no
practical means for testing the safety of Autonomous vehicles before their use becomes
widespread. For many, that is a scary thought.
Nor is there any consensus on how safe Autonomous vehicles should be. “Safer than
human drivers” ought to be a minimum requirement. Some would go further and require roadgoing robots to present no threat whatsoever to human life. That would imply it is acceptable for
humans to make mistakes, but not for machines to do so. Such safety issues will have to be
resolved before any regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles can be put in place.
All of which raises questions for consumers to ponder. The most obvious one is economic.
According to Fitch, a financial-ratings agency, the average car spends 96% of its usable life
parked in a garage or on the street. When maintenance, depreciation, insurance and running costs
are totted up, cars are the most underused asset consumers own. So, what happens when people
have an alternative that is cheaper than owning a car but just as convenient? Clearly, some will
opt to hail driverless vehicles instead of having a car. Carmakers could thus find themselves
selling fewer vehicles to individuals, and more to operators of driverless fleets, who will run
them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and scrap them after a year or two. The coming era of
“transport-as-a-service” suggests motor manufacturers will need to rethink the way they do
business.
So as not to be blind-sided, General Motors has invested $500m in Lyft and forked out
nearly $1 billion to acquire Cruise Automation, an autonomous-vehicle developer in Silicon
Valley. Meanwhile, Ford has replaced its automotive-industry stalwart of a boss with an outsider
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brought in last year to oversee experiments with self-driving cars and ride-sharing services. FiatChrysler has been using 100 minivans to test autonomous technology supplied by Waymo.
Most carmakers have plans to start testing the market with Level 3 or possibly Level 4
autonomous vehicles around 2021. Such Autonomous vehicles may still have steering wheels
and pedals, and be able to drive autonomously only on designated roads. The majority are likely
to be bought by ride-hailing services. Consumers wanting the flexibility and freedom of full
Level 5 vehicles will have to wait a good deal longer. Come that day, though, the choice will be
drive or be driven. The betting is that a surprising number of people will still want to drive
themselves—whether out of mistrust of the machine or the satisfaction that comes from having
total control.
Who’s self-driving your car?
With its successful test of robo-taxis on the streets of Pittsburgh in September 2016, Uber
has dominated recent headlines on autonomous vehicles. But behind the scenes three groups—
technology giants such as Uber, carmakers and a whole fleet of autoparts suppliers—are in a
tight race. Each is vying to develop the hardware and software that make up the complex guts of
a self-driving vehicle.
A couple of years ago tech firms appeared well ahead in this battle. But, Uber aside, they
have dabbed the brakes of late. The recent departure from Google of Chris Urmson, the
company’s figurehead for autonomous vehicles and the man who once promised it would put
self-driving cars on the road in 2017, is a significant reversal. The recent slimming of the team at
Apple that is devoted to building an autonomous electric car, also shows that tech firms are not
having it all their own way (though Apple’s possible tie-up with McLaren, a British maker of
sports cars and Formula 1 racing team, would be one way to put its carmaking ambitions back on
track).
Carmakers, meanwhile, are making more of the running after a slow start. Despite recent
safety concerns, Tesla, an electric-car maker, is making progress with its Autopilot system. In
2017 Volvo, which is also working with Uber to get cars to drive themselves, will test selfdriving cars by handing them for the first time to a select group of ordinary motorists. And in
August 2017, Ford said it would launch a fully-autonomous car, without steering wheel or pedals,
for car-sharing schemes by 2021.
All parties recognize that the biggest profits from autonomy will come from producing an
“operating system”—something that integrates the software and algorithms that process and
interpret information from sensors and maps and the mechanical parts of the car. Tech firms
probably have the edge here. But carmakers and suppliers are not giving up easily. So they are
involved in a bout of frenzied activity to keep control of the innards of self-driving cars. In July,
for example, BMW, Mobileye, an Israeli supplier that specializes in driverless tech, and Intel, the
world’s biggest chipmaker, said they were joining forces.
Another strategy for carmakers is to develop autonomous driving in-house. They are
hoovering up smaller firms that have useful self-driving technology, notes Andrew Bergbaum of
AlixPartners, a consulting firm. Ford has put money into a lidar company, and into another that
sells mapping services. It has also acquired two other firms that specialize in machine-learning
and other artificial-intelligence technology.
The losers in this race look likely to be the big parts-makers, whose relationship with their
main customers could become strained. Over time carmakers have largely ceded to them the job
of developing new technology. If they turn back the clock and reintegrate vertically that may
leave less business for the suppliers.
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The tech giants still have huge advantages. As well as their financial resources, they are in
the best spot to claim the big profits from the operating system. Apple’s plans to build a car may
be swiftly revived if it buys McLaren. And Google is ahead in machine-learning, the vital
element in developing algorithms that will eventually replace drivers. But carmakers are coming
up surprisingly fast on the inside lane.
What’s going on in the self-driving car sector
The whizzy gadgets for geeks to goggle at during CES, an annual consumer-electronics
show in Las Vegas, have typically been small enough to pick up. But they have been joined in
recent years by an increasing number of cars. The Detroit motor show, America’s biggest and
glitziest, starts later in January 2016, but many in the car industry now regard CES, which
opened in the same month, as a more important event. Mary Barra, GM’s boss, unveiled a new
production version of its Bolt electric car at Las Vegas in February 2016.
Incumbent manufacturers are recognizing the double threat posed by technology, as carsharing takes off and driverless vehicles come closer. First, some people who might hitherto have
wanted to own a car may no longer do so, cancelling out the growth the motor industry might
otherwise have expected from the rising middle classes in developing countries. Second,
technology firms may be better placed than carmakers to develop and profit from the software
that will underpin both automated driving and vehicle-sharing. Some of these firms may even
manufacture cars of their own.
In a report ahead of the Las Vegas and Detroit shows, Morgan Stanley, an investment bank,
said the motor industry was being disrupted “far sooner, faster and more powerfully than one
might expect.” It predicted that conventional carmakers would scramble in the coming year to
reinvent themselves. As if to demonstrate this, shortly before CES opened, GM announced a
$500m investment in Lyft, a ride-sharing service.
A rumored tie-up between Ford and Google to produce driverless cars failed to materialize
at the show, but even the rumors underlined the disruption that tech firms are bringing to the
motor industry. And other partnerships were announced: Ford is teaming up with Amazon to
connect its cars to sensor-laden smart homes. It was also revealed at CES that Toyota would
adopt Ford’s in-car technology, which is a competitor to Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android
Auto, to access smartphone apps and other features.
That is not the only example of carmakers joining forces to avoid being beholden to the
tech giants. In August 2016, BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen’s Audi division jointly bought
Here, a mapping service, from Nokia, to ensure that carmakers have an independent provider
rather than having to depend on Google Maps. Nevertheless, carmakers are also teaming up with
tech firms because each has something the other needs. Building and marketing cars, and dealing
with safety and emissions regulators, is tricky. Tech firms could copy Tesla, which has built its
own electric cars for more than a decade. Apple, which is said to be planning an electric car, may
try to have them made in the same way as it does its iPhones, outsourcing to a contract
manufacturer. But a more obvious route is to ally with an established carmaker.
Carmakers also have lots to learn. Most are working on making their vehicles either fully
or partly self-piloting, and a number are running their own car-sharing experiments. But Google
remains the leading exponent of autonomous driving. Its robotics, drones and search engine all
contribute expertise that helps to guide a driverless car down the road avoiding pedestrians,
obstacles and other vehicles, using computing power and sophisticated software to interpret
masses of data received both from the car’s on-board sensors and from external sources through
wireless connections.
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Yet if the tech firms have much to gain as they muscle in to the motor business, the
carmakers are wary of what they have to lose. Profits may seep away towards the producers of
the software and the owners of the data, and away from the makers of the hardware. Hitherto,
new cars—even quite modest ones—have tended to be bought as status sym…
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