Hail that pod! How Google, car makers see the future

Marco della Cava | USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO – On any given day, traffic snarls here on Market Street as commuters fight their way out of the city.

But fast forward 30 years and two divergent realities present themselves. In 2045, the Bay Area – one of 11 national mega-regions that will dominate commerce, according to the new Department of Transportation study, "Beyond Traffic" – could be either a hellish automotive zoo or a Valhalla of space and efficiency.

So imagine this. Privately owned gas-powered cars are banned downtown, replaced by fleets of electric, app-summoned self-driving taxis. These autonomous-and-shared pods are in constant circulation, allowing most of the city's parking lots to be reclaimed for real estate or parks. Air quality improves, greenhouse gases decrease.

That seems to be a vision of the future a number of car manufacturers and tech companies are angling toward, judging from a flurry of recent auto-tech news.

Ford recently announced a huge expansion of its Silicon Valley offices, which are focused on mobility issues in growing mega-cities. Google made headlines this week with news that it is reportedly working on a ride-hailing app, which could be paired with its fleet of self-driving pods that could be ready in five years.

Meanwhile, ride-hailing powerhouse Uber, which Google has invested in, just announced it will be opening the Uber Advanced Technologies Center on the Pittsburgh campus of robotics leaders Carnegie Mellon University.

This partnership seems inevitable. Uber's CEO, Travis Kalanick, said at a tech conference last spring that his goal was to eliminate the driver, noting that "when there's no dude (driving) the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle … and car ownership goes away."

In fact, tech-native Millennials who have embraced ride-sharing and hailing and seem to shrug at car ownership represent a bright spot in an otherwise dour DOT survey. Released this week, the report points out we spend 40 hours a week on average stuck in traffic at an annual fiscal cost of $121 billion.

According to "Beyond Traffic," which tellingly was unveiled at Google's headquarters, about 73 million U.S. Millennials age 18 to 34 are driving less than previous generations, logging 20% fewer driven miles in 2010 than at the start of the decade. And a longer-living American population also will embrace alternative mobility options that include self-driving cars, the report says.

But Millennials in particular "are key to improving transportation in our urban centers," says Neill Coleman, spokesman for the Rockefeller Foundation, which since 2007 has given a range of grants to organizations working on future transport issues.

"Millennials are going to be important for our megacities' economic health, and the ability to attract talent will be linked to making cities equitable in terms of access to mobility," says Coleman, noting that in a 2014 study 54% of Millennials said they would move to a different city if it offered better transportation options, and 66% said access to transportation was a top-three priority when considering a move.

"All the trends point to the end of (privately owned) cars," says Eric Jaffe, editor of the 2014 e-book The Future of Transportation, part of The Atlantic magazine's CityLab offshoot. "The natural pairing we're heading toward is e-hailing and a driverless taxi network."

Jaffe say one autonomous taxi can replace the need for at least a dozen privately owned cars, while eliminating the need for parking spaces, which often take up as much as a third of the land area in a given city. "Americans still drive a huge amount, but we'll need to create other choices," he says.

The first city to make the revolutionary switch to autonomous taxis isn't likely to be in this country. Experts routinely single out congested non-U.S. capitals as prime candidates for transportation makeovers.

Studies show that "the mobility demand of a city like Singapore could be met with 30% of its existing vehicles," says Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "And our Lab research suggests that number could be cut by 40% more if passengers were willing to share a vehicle."

Ratti says that it's little surprise companies ranging from Ford to BMW are envisioning a future where they are less retailers of a private purchase and more "mobility providers" that sell fleets of shared, autonomous vehicles. "Such reductions in car numbers would dramatically lower the cost of our mobility infrastructure and its associated energy cost," he says.

So what are we waiting for? To begin with, while automated car technology is advancing rapidly, it still isn't fully baked. But more significantly, regulatory issues abound as states individually grapple with safety issues associated with autonomous vehicles.

"Trust will be very key to the acceptance of self-driving cars," says Richard Vaughan, manager of design experience at Visteon Corp., which develops in-car tech for a range of automakers. "We'll need to redefine terms like 'car,' and retrain the way we think. Autos in the past had a front and back, but in the future they may not be directional."

Whatever they look like, they better not put us in danger. To help ensure that, a 32-acre spread in Ann Arbor, Mich., is being dedicated to thoroughly testing self-driving cars.

Dubbed M City and due to open this spring, the facility will repeatedly run autonomous vehicles through scenarios they're likely to encounter in the real world – people darting out from between parked cars - until their software and sensors are unimpeachable.

"We're on the cusp of a revolution," says Peter Sweatman, director of the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute, which oversees M City's research and has the assistance of five top automakers. "We need a new transportation ecosystem to make the 21st century a livable reality. And no one company will come up with it, we need to work together."