Читать книгу Fully Autonomous Vehicles - Michael Nikowitz - Страница 7

Much like electric vehicles (EVs), autonomous vehicles may seem like a very recent initiative but were first developed years ago. The idea of driverless cars already existed several decades ago (as described in the previous chapter).

Experiments have been conducted on automating cars since at least the 1920s [8]. Fig 6 shows a selection of the history of autonomous cars.

Fig 6: History of developments of autonomous vehicles

Today, every major commercial automaker is engaged in research in this area. The introduction of fully autonomous vehicles to the general market is being predicted to occur within five to 20 years.

In 1961, we predicted that cars would be directed by a punched tape so you could sleep behind the wheel (compare Fig 7). And in 1967, we anticipated you could twirl a dial on a car’s dashboard, set it to your destination, and then sit back to read the morning paper on the way to work. But maybe this time it’s for real (Popular Science, 2015 [9]).

Fig 7: The Urbmobile - From the Popular Science archives [9]

What’s the differences between earlier notions, like in the early 50’s, and today? Why should they be available now but were not in earlier days?

Nowadays, the technology appears close to commercial introduction and maturity. This stands in contrast to earlier decades in part because global megatrends have huge influences on our mobility and on our vehicle concepts.

These global megatrends include: global environmental stress, globalization, urbanization and megacities, demographic change and the contemporary digital lifestyle.

Today, there are around 1 billion automobiles in use worldwide. This large number of vehicles has caused and continues to cause a series of major issues in our society, like greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, oil depletion, energy insecurity and population growth.

The focus of interest has shifted towards efficient and fast transport in urban areas - individual transport will still remain in a multi-modal transport scenario.

Further, the development of the world’s population and urbanization is playing a major role, as there will be a strong shift towards urban population until the year 2050, according to several reports from the United Nations. This development is visualized in Fig 8, which shows the development of the urban and rural population of the world from 1950 through 2050 projections. This draft highlights the trend to move in big cities - a trend, which is still unbroken! In 1800, only about 3% of the world’s population lived in urban areas. Today nearly 54% of the world’s population is located in urban areas. By 2025, there will be 29 megacities (cities that have a population over 10 million people), most of them in developing countries. By 2050, over 70% of the world’s population will live in big cities.

Fig 8: Development of urban vs. rural population worldwide [10]

Fig 9 demonstrates the influence of the demographic change on the mobility of the future. The trend towards urbanization influences the ability to support people to get hassle-free from A to B. Additionally demographic change has a massive impact on the need for zero accidents, as the safe mobility of elderly people has to be managed. Efficient and zero-impact transportation will be one of the key challenges of our society.

Fig 9: Global megatrends strongly influence our future

Major trends like connectivity, shared mobility, automated driving, light weight vehicles, consumers’ increasing levels of digital experience and alternative fuels will have a massive impact of the future of the automotive industry.

These facts have huge consequences for our automobile manufacturing industry in general, but city vehicles will get influenced most by increasing regulations that will continue to require them to perform "better" than today!

Future vehicles need to be able to meet the regulatory requirements, mentioned above. Thus, they need to offer the following characteristics: connectivity, efficiency, zero impact on the environment, safety, partly/fully autonomous driving (see Fig 10).

Fig 10: Major trends will impact the future of the automobile

Worldwide industry and government are forced to consider alternative and sustainable solutions for transportation.

Vehicles driven by alternative drive trains offer unique advantages concerning energy efficiency, emissions reductions, and reduced petroleum use. Thus, they have become a research focus around the world. Decarbonizing transport is proving to be one of the largest research and development projects of the early 21^st century. Low-carbon technologies are therefore rapidly advancing, with petrol and diesel hybrids (HEV), plug-in hybrids (PHEV), battery electric (BEV), and hydrogen fuel cell (FCEV) being developed by nearly every major manufacturer.

A BEV is an EV that utilizes chemical energy stored in rechargeable battery packs. EVs use electric motors instead of, or in addition to, internal combustion engines (ICE). Vehicles using both electric motors and ICEs are called HEVs and are usually not considered pure BEVs. HEVs with batteries that can be charged and used without their ICE are called PHEVs and are pure BEVs while they are not burning fuel. FCEVs use hydrogen gas to power an electric motor (Dictionary of Environmental Science and Technology [11]).

Electric driven vehicles, including BEVs, HEVs, PHEVs, FCEVs (further referred as xEVs in this book), are seen as one way of reducing oil use and GHG emissions and to improve local air quality.

All of the global megatrends mentioned above and their resulting requirements lead to two major trends in the car manufacturing industry:

• electrification of the drive train and

• fully automated (autonomous) driving.

Currently, the car manufacturing industry is facing the electrification of the drive train as well as autonomous driving.

The electrification of the drive train simplifies the introduction of autonomous vehicles. This was not the case in the early 50’s, as the internal combustion engine (ICE) was the dominating propulsion force and progress on EVs haven’t been available in that dimension which it is today.

The IEA [12] reports that there were approximately 700,000 BEVs and PHEVs on the streets (May 1^st, 2015). That number is expected to reach the 1 million mark by the end of 2015. There are predictions that the EV market will reach 8% of total car sales by 2020 (2.5M BEVs, 3.1M PHEVs and 6.5M HEVs).

Thanks to the implementation of xEVs, autonomous driving is becoming more realistic than ever.