Looking Out #11
Road deaths rising, Underground particulates, rage-inducing robots and personal Co2 reduction.
11th November, 2019
A newsletter about the auto industry, mobility, design, and the cultures that surround us. Brought to you by Joe Simpson and Drew Smith of The Automobility Group. If you like what you see, tell your friends!
Auto
As cars get safer, road deaths are rising
Why it’s interesting: the safety of cars has improved significantly over the past 20 years. New ADAS technology should be making them safer still. But deaths on the roads are rising again. Why?
Despite the past 20 years’ improvements in vehicle safety, road deaths are actually rising again. Dig into the figures and the reality is stark. Deaths of people in vehicles isn’t rising. But deaths of people who are outside them and come into contact with them, very much is.
A host of possible theories as to why are being kicked around – from more people walking in the US, to more people staring at their phones and not paying attention, to drivers staring at touchscreens or using the mobile phones, but there’s a growing body of evidence that it’s something altogether simpler: the rise (both in sales, and stature) of SUVs and light-trucks, which tend to be heavier, bulkier and less forgiving when they contact soft bipeds.
The NYCStreets Blog this week charts the fall in death rates for SUV occupants (10.4 per 100k vehicles in 2008, dropping to 6.9 per 100k vehicles in 2017), and puts it in stark contrast to the 45% of cyclist deaths and 41% of 2018 pedestrian deaths which were accounted for by an SUV or light-truck.
But the specifics aren’t well known, and the real truth is hard to understand – because as the article points out, in many places – New York city being one – somewhat bafflingly, the type of vehicle involved in fatal crashes hasn’t been recorded, until now.
The finger pointing at SUVs over deaths plays into a wider dialogue about the role of SUVs on our roads, and their appropriateness – or possible lack of it – in urban areas. Is it reasonable to point the finger of blame at a specific technology, or typology of vehicle and ultimately ban it? Because that’s increasingly the direction things are tilting. Bristol this week became the first UK city to announce a blanket ban on diesel vehicles at certain times of day. At what point will we see the first city ban SUVs on safety, instead of (or as well as) environmental grounds?
With many car brands prioritising investment into the development of easier to sell, higher-profit SUVs, this safety context adds to the environmental one to create a possible perfect storm in the future. OEMs love SUVs, so do consumers. But cities, cyclists and environmental bodies really don’t. We’ve been down this road before. So the message is simple: if car makers want to avoid ending up the victims of a backlash, SUVs need not only to get more efficient, they need to become safer for those unfortunate enough to come into contact with them, too. It’s a tough – but not impossible – ask.
Image: Tony Webster via Flicker
| JS
Locked in and unloaded
Why it’s interesting: Customer lock-in is the holy grail for many businesses, but it comes with the risk of alienating suppliers and impoverishing customers. In the automotive industry, we’re just getting started.
Designing products or services that lock customers in can feel like a surefire way to bolster revenue and margins, and protect or even build your relationship with your customer.
Not all lock-ins, however, are created equal.
Some rely on inducing a level of friction, real or imagined, that makes it too emotionally or mentally taxing for customers to consider the switch. There’s nothing stopping you from switching to an alternative product or service, but things tend to work so seamlessly that you can’t be bothered.
Other lock-ins rely on inflicting the potential of financial loss on customers, and it’s this model that’s starting emerge in the vehicle repair space.
As ever more vehicles fitted with ADAS sensor arrays are involved in accidents, there’s a battle brewing. On one side, you have vehicle manufacturers, who threaten to withdraw a customers’ right to warranty repairs if they use aftermarket sensors. On the other, we find the aftermarket parts manufacturers, the independent repair shops they supply, and the customers who rely on both to get a better deal on their crash repairs.
For manufacturers, any opportunity to regain margin in the after-sales market is a boon. However, it will come at an enormous cost to the locked-in customer’s wallet - OEM parts prices are 25%-50% higher than aftermarket - , and to the detriment of a crash repair sector made up mostly of small to medium-sized businesses that find themselves locked out of providing repairs.
This trend for lock-in is only set to grow, for while electric vehicles are much simpler in mechanical terms than their internal combustion counterparts, manufacturers will take every opportunity in the design of their software to ensure that their vehicles can only be serviced at licensed dealers and workshops.
Good for manufacturer profitability. Bad for the customer.
Pair with Navneet Alang on how a tech duopoly killed the headphone jack.
| DS
Mobility
Particulate emissions: the Underground edition
Why it’s interesting: in another blow to folk trying to do the right thing by taking public transit, the air quality in London’s Underground system is shown to be worse - far worse - than at street level.
A recent study conducted by the Financial Times ($) has shown that London’s Underground, oft hailed as the world’s leading metro system, is actually the dirtiest place in the city.
With a combination of metal dust from brakes and motors, clothing fibres, and human hair and skin, the air found in some segments of the network is more than 10 times dirtier than guidelines for particulate pollution set by the World Health Organisation, and 18 times worse than roadside air.
Transport for London, the Underground’s operating company, is instituting new cleaning procedures, but it’s work that’s still largely completed by hand, by crews that work over night. It’s a mammoth task on a network that covers 400 kilometres.
So, for those wanting to navigate London in the healthiest way possible? Try walking, followed by cycling, according to the FT’s research.
Image: The FT
| JS DS
Throwing standards in the bin?
Why it’s interesting: Uber’s autonomous drive system didn’t account for jay-walking pedestrians, flouting international software standards. So who provides the checks and balances in emerging eco-systems?
The death of Elaine Herzberg, killed by a self-driving Uber test vehicle in Arizona last year, now feels like a turning point in the development of autonomous vehicles.
The NTSB (National Transport Safety Board) found that Uber’s systems didn’t identity Herzberg (who was pushing a bicycle) as a pedestrian, because Uber’s:
“System did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians”
Ken Tindell – CTO of an automotive start-up – has an interesting thread about this on twitter, discussing the processes and standards for safety critical software in cars.
As Tindell describes:
“The 1980s was when we really started to address the issue of safety critical software… and developed processes and standards.” “ Over the years a number of standards were developed for safety critical software applications… [including] cars. These standards specify what needs to be done to ensure safety.”
Tindell is damming in his assessment of the way the nascent autonomous vehicle industry has treated these standards:
“In the rush to build self-driving cars, the whole field has been chucked in the bin…sometimes because they didn’t even know about engineering safety critical software. Sometimes because they didn’t care. And most cynically, because somethings they knew they couldn’t actually meet those standards required. So today we have the disruptive MVP tech industry culture at its worst: negligently breaking all the rules, and daring the lawyers and regulators to stop them.”
It begs the question, where is (and will) the restraint coming from in emerging sectors? In the few months since Herzberg’s death, we’ve seen a real climbdown of timescale ambition and proposed roll-out across the autonomous industry. Is it public outcry causing this? The (potential) repetitional damage caused by the deaths of the likes of Herzberg? The new-found ROI realism that Silicon Valley’s VCs are demanding? Or something else?
Pair with Edward Niedemeyer’s Hailing a driverless ride in a Waymo
| JS
Design
Standing in the way of progress
Why it’s interesting: a company that builds autonomous delivery robots forces its lack of diversity on the folk who can least afford it.
Starship builds autonomous delivery robots.
Starship is helmed by a team of white, able-bodied men.
So it’s unsurprising, maddeningly so, that Starship’s robots reflect the privilege and behaviours of their creators.
Emily Ackerman is far better placed to give you the blow by blow. But look at the image above. Imagine being a wheelchair user or blind and trying to get off the road. There’s traffic approaching, and a little white robot is blocking your way.
Postscript: After relaying her experience on Twitter, University of Pittsburg asked Starship to remove the robots from their campus.
| DS
Disassembly at scale: the challenge of recycling EV batteries
Why it’s interesting: as the auto industry moves to electric drive technology, the lithium-ion battery will become a staple, but its ultimate ‘sustainability’ is hotly debated.
Cars are tremendously complex things, numbering tens of thousands of parts. One of the perceived advantages of moving to EVs is that you actually reduce complexity – lithium-ion batteries and electric motors have far fewer moving parts than internal combustion engines.
But what happens when these batteries reach the end of their lives? Nature features the excellent diagram above, which describes the different challenges posed by battery disassembly, as part of a bigger paper on recycling batteries from vehicles, which is worthy of your time.
What does the future really hold for these batteries? Much has been written about the negative impact of mining materials like Cobalt used in batteries, with firms like Apple taking the recycling of the materials in their batteries very seriously as they move towards a circular approach, ultimately aiming not to mine some raw materials in the future. But is the end of life problem overstated? In the field, car and battery manufacturers are finding batteries are degrading rather more slowly than they had thought. End of life for the battery in a Tesla is as high as 500,000 miles, and Musk has plans to take that up to a million. That’s rather more than the typical internal combustion engine lasts, and at average annual mileages, suggests a life as high as 25-30 years (so, probably longer than the rest of the car will last).
Even when the batteries reach a point where they’re no longer useful in a car (perhaps only able to hold, say, 70 percent of their original capacity), the more interesting debate should perhaps be around whether it’s better to disassemble and recycle these batteries, or up-cycle them into home storage packs… which will hopefully be useful for collecting the solar power your house will in future be harvesting while you’re out at work, the battery storing electricity you need to use later?
| JS
Culture
Climate emergency? We’re fretting about the wrong things
Why it’s interesting: Most will now agree there’s a climate emergency, but there’s surprisingly little guidance on how best to make life changes, and a worrying lack of awareness about which changes make the biggest impacts.
Frank Bilstein, a partner at A.T. Kearney, admits that “Greta got to him, a little” but in his quest to try to reduce his own personal CO2 emissions then identified that there was:
“surprisingly little guidance out there for those looking at ways to cut their personal carbon emissions.”
Bilstein ultimately comes up with a useful approach – a weekly/monthly/annual changes matrix, which avoids what he amusingly describes as the “kill yourself and your family now” approach prescribed by some online guides advising people on how to reduce their CO2.
But having researched the impact of various behaviours changes, from going veggie, to taking one less flight, to banning plastic bags, what shocked Bilstein when he surveyed 1500 respondents in Germany and in the US, is how very few seemed to understand which choices made the biggest impact on CO2 emissions reduction.
In Germany “No more plastic bags” comes out top for having the biggest impact (energy efficient heating and insulation has a 250 times bigger impact), and came second in the US. Meanwhile, “taking one less flight per year” barely registered on the needle in the US, and eating meat isn’t really seen as a source of CO2 in Germany.
Check out Bilstein’s graphics, comparing perceived impact with actual impact below. And also Germany with the US. It seems, for many, we’re fretting about – or trying to change – the wrong things… the irony of writing this on an EasyJet flight back from Copenhagen isn’t lost on me!
Pair with TheUnheard’s similarly themed “turning off the lights won’t save the planet”.
Image credit: Frank Bilstein
| JS
Around the moon with Claire de Lune
Why it’s interesting: just because.
I can only imagine how Claude Debussy would feel to see footage of the moon paired with Claire de Lune, his musical tribute to moonlight.
Magical, uplifting stuff.
| DS
Thanks to Navneet Alang, Ken Tindell, and Reilly Brennan for inspiring us this past fortnight.
That's it for this issue. We love feedback (positive and negative), and to answer any questions you have. So email Joe or Drew and we’ll get back to you.
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