January 28, 2020 • 31 mins
We rely on vehicles every day - whether it’s your car, shipping vehicles delivering packages, or public transportation getting us all where we need to go. Advancements in the next generation of wireless connectivity and mobility are bringing the future closer to us, with the promise of automated fleets and even someday self-driving vehicles. In this episode, we hear from Arthur Orduña, Chief Innovation Officer of Avis Budget Group-the global car rental company that also owns the popular car-sharing service ZipCar; Oliver Cameron, Co-Founder and CEO of the startup Voyage, which is testing and expanding the use of autonomous vehicles in retirement communities; and Marcus Welz who leads the Siemens Intelligent Traffic Systems business in North America, which is actively innovating to change the way we use public transportation. Make sure to check out other episodes in this series featuring: Natasha Franck, Founder and CEO of the startup EON and Paul Dillinger, Head of Global Product Innovation for Levi Strauss.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
On last week's episode, we discussed the future of connected
wearables and smart clothing. We heard from Paul de Linger,
head of Global Product Innovation for Levi Strauss, who is
developing connected clothing, Paul Winsbur, VP of athlete Performance under Armour,
who is creating clothing that uses data to boost athletic performance,
and Natasha Frank, founder and CEO of the startup Eon,
(00:26):
who is leveraging smartship technology to connect consumers to manufacturers
to drive better sustainability and new customer experiences. The automobile
has forever changed the way we're able to reach one
(00:47):
another and stay connected over great distances, but imagine a
future where our cars could connect to each other. The
next generation of wireless innovation with future five gen networks
will create new opportunities for connect to consume humors and
the ever changing landscape of the automotive industry. Thanks to
support from Temobile for Business Today would explore how advancements
(01:08):
in five G connectivity will enable innovations in transportation that
will shape the way consumers travel and commute. We're trying
(01:29):
to evolve and reinvent rental, and we need to evolve
to meet it with the vehicles that people want to utilize,
and then how we manage those vehicles, which is primarily
now going to be data driven. And that also means
that we have to communicate not only really well with
our customers, we have to communicate really well and in
real time with our cars. That's Arthur or Dounia, chief
(01:54):
innovation officer at Avis Budget Group, the global car rental
company that also owns the popular car sharing of his
zip car. Right now, we maintain on average about anywhere
between five hundreds and six hundred thousand global fleet because
we go up and down, so we ended the year
well over two hundred thousand of our fleet now completely connected.
(02:14):
Also makes a distinction between the regular fleet and the
connected fleet, and an important part of his responsibility is
to make sure more and more of the fleet is connected.
What does it mean to be able then to talk
to a car and have that car talked to us.
There really isn't an industry standard definition. Our definition is
(02:35):
really tied to about five requirements. So we leverage GPS
to give us real time location. We use telemetry in
the car to give us the second requirement, which is
real time mileage. We want to know how many miles
are on that car at any given point. The third
is fuel. We want to know two within a tenth
(02:57):
of a gallon or a leader, how much few was
in that car if it's an internal combustion engine, or
what percentage of charge if it's a hybrid or an
e V. The fourth is real time communication with the
other systems of the car, so low tire pressure is
one example. And then the fifth one is lock unlocked
(03:18):
slash immobilization remotely like through the cloud, and that's what
is key for zip car. What Arthur describes and the
way people can now interact with connected cars is radically
different from what it was like to rent a car
just ten years ago. But it was normal to wait
in line and haphazardly looked for your car in a
(03:38):
sea of similar looking vehicles. And the businesses who oversee
large fleets of vehicles, whether car rental, right sharing, or
even mass transit, there are powerful commercial benefits to having
more data about utilization. One of the technological advancements that
has allowed for many of these changes to take place
is improved wireless networks, but we're on at the beginning
(04:01):
of that story. In this episode, we look at how
five G could transform mobility, whether you're renting a connected
car or riding in a fully autonomous vehicle. I'm as Rushian,
welcome to this time tomorrow, So Carol. When I think
about all the advancements that have come along since the
(04:22):
smartphone and four G, some of the first that come
to mind are related to how we get around and
when was the last time you bought a guide book
when you went to a new city. Now I don't
do that. Um, I turned my phone on when I arrive,
and I use Google Maps to figure out if there's
public transportation to get me where I'm going, and if
there isn't, I call Uber and I find somewhere to
(04:42):
go to launch on Yelp. And then sometimes if I
have landed and don't know where to stay, yes, that happens,
I look on Airbnb, right, I mean, I confess I
have actually bought guidebooks very recently pas scroll within the
last three months. But even at home, you know, we
can access bike shares, figure out when to leave here
(05:03):
on the subway, so we arrive at work on time,
look at live traffic, pick a route accordingly. In fact,
qualcom who we spoke to an episode one and who
make the chips that power many four G devices. Were
early investors in ways the mapping software, presumally because they
believe mobility could be transformed by connectivity. Yeah, you know,
nobody could have predicted exactly how four G would transform mobility,
(05:26):
but the effects have been huge. You and I were
at cs a little ways back in Las Vegas, and
we saw so many booths where companies were discussing how
the future five G networks might transform different parts of transportation,
everything from autonomous vehicles to drones to my personal favorite,
last mile logistics, which is how a package will get
(05:48):
to my house package queen. But there are potential benefits
from five G in the world and mobility in everything
from easing traffic congestion to safety and even mitigating environment
an impact through more efficient traffic networks. And then of
course there's making better customer experiences. And then of course
there are the long promised self driving cars. I feel
(06:10):
like there's a little bit of self driving car fatigue
because we've been talking about them for so long. But
a few months ago I actually saw a really interesting
article about a company called Voyage, who are pioneering autonomous
vehicles in retirement communities and this struck me as a
super interesting use case. So I actually got to speak
to the CEO and founder, Oliver Cameron, and I spoke
(06:33):
to Marcus Wells, who you and I met at CS
and who runs the intelligent traffic systems business for Siemens
here in the US. His experience is in intelligent infrastructure,
and we talked about how five G could change the
way we use public transport. Before we get there, though,
let's go back to Arthur and how he's working to
integrate technology and connectivity to transform AVIS budgets business. The
(06:58):
problem set that rental solves is not going to go
away anytime in the near or long term future, because
that problem, said is, Hey, I don't have access to
the car or the vehicle that I own. I'm in
the next city over, or I'm on the other side
of the world. I need some mobility. So I think
today and for the last seven years, that solution has
(07:20):
been here's a car. Do you need it for an hour,
then become a zip car member. Do you need it
for a couple of weeks or for a couple of days,
then here's Avis or here's budget. In order to improve
on the experience, of renting a car, whether for an
hour or for a few days. Avi's budget didn't simply
chase new technology. They turned to their uses. We took
(07:41):
a product design approach to solve a customer problem. So
we actually began with a customer journey that said, how
do people consume our product today? Instead of just saying, oh,
let's create a new mobile app and make it look pretty.
We identified the key problem, such including not wanting to
stand in line, and said, okay, how do we actually
(08:03):
then create a solution for that. Oh, well, it ought
to be in people's pockets so that they can discover
at any time and utilize it. Oh, they don't want
to stand in the counter, they want to bypass it.
Oh that sounds cool. Oh it's if it's a connected
car and it's raining out there, Can we just make
sure you can turn on the lights or hank the
horn there it is, and then unlock the car really quickly?
Can I get out of this parking lot or out
(08:23):
of this garage really quickly? If we can authenticate that
it's the right person in the right car on the
right day and time, sure, go ahead leave. After making
it possible for people to more easily connect with their
rental cause. Author and his team got feedback from another
important group of stakeholders, Davis Budget employees. What happens when
(08:45):
you start listening as well to your employees and you
start thinking about them as customers and then suddenly we
had another turn. We had another set of customer journey
and pain points, but it was tied to the life
cycle of the car. How about our folks and our
colleagues who actually have to rent these cars out, have
to maintain and manage them, have to repair them, have
(09:06):
to clean and gas them, have to shuttle them from
one location to another, and we have to do so
at eleven thousand locations. Isn't there a better way of
doing that? How about connecting to our employees and to
our fleet. At the heart of Arthur's efforts to better
serve customers and employees is better connection to the vehicles
in the fleet. It allows customers to skip lines and
(09:29):
employees to track vehicle life cycles so they can detect
things like the car that's supposed to be rented on
the same day it needs to have a tire changed.
If this type of business enabled by connectivity is already happening,
I was curious what changes the higher bandwidth and lower
latency promised by future of five G networks could enable
for Arthur and his team actually have started to talk
(09:51):
heavily about what five G could bring. V to X
is what fast communication could afford by V two often
means vehicle to infrastructure communication and that could have far
reaching implications for how we get around. One of those
natural partners is a city, right, so could we exchange
(10:12):
data with the city that provides us safer smart roots
in real time? And in exchange for that, could we
give data back to the city that our sensors collect
that give them conditions of roads that we traverse on
a daily basis with lots and lots of cars, so
that they can understand in real time which roads actually
need to be repaired when. So it's our expertise and
(10:36):
next generation fleet management and connectivity that if cities want
to see fewer and fewer private vehicles right, individually owned
vehicles on the road, that actually matches our ambition. Who's
owning and managing those fleets? We think it could be
us leveraging connectivity which we learned beginning with zip car,
(10:59):
but expand ending Avis Budget Group into hopefully a potential
leadership position for the next generation of mobility. So Karrot,
what I find really interesting about what Arthur said is
that let's say we do find ourselves in this fully
autonomous world where we can call up a self driving
car whenever we need it and get to where we
(11:20):
need to go, someone still needs to manage the fleet right.
There needs to be humans in the loop, and a
pretty intricate system needs to be put in place to
make sure those vehicles are ready for the road. I've
walked by many a city bike stand and seeing some
bikes that no longer look like bicycles. That makes me
think how important it is that bike operating companies have
(11:43):
good data. Good data understand what's going on with the bikes,
who's using them, where they need to tune up. And
data has already become such an important driver of the
new economy. And that's what kind of what Arthur was saying.
All of a sudden, the data created by advis budgets
connective vehicles position them to part with cities on all
kinds of future mobility initiatives. As we know the promise
(12:05):
of future five gen networks, it's all about collecting more
data and processing it more efficiently to inform better decision making. Yeah,
and in the case of data generated by self driving cars,
according to tech Crunch, Weymo, which is Google self driving
car project, has driven ten million miles on real roads
and ten billion simulated miles. The data from the real
(12:26):
roads constantly makes the simulation more realistic, and five G
networks promised to make the data gathered from vehicles much richer.
That's said, it's not clear if and how autonomous vehicles
will fully roll out. To find out more, I spoke
with Oliver Cameron, the CEO of an autonomous vehicle company
called Voyage. What we're really focused on a Voyage is
(12:54):
delivering on the promise of self driving cause this technology
has this immense, you know, ount of potential, but in
many cases it's just woods, right, we're all, you know,
dreaming of this future. Oliver's right, Despite all the talk,
self driving cars still seem like something reserved for the
far off future. But in the last few years, the
(13:16):
concept of letting a vehicle drive you around became a
real possibility. But there's so many regulatory and cultural barriers
to mass adoption. So Voyage is going after a very
specific use case where the demand is higher and the
barriers to entry are lower. And what we're really trying
to do is bring this technology to market sooner and
(13:37):
in a really impactful way. We want to really focus
on just one customer and deliver a product for them.
I very much believe that this technology is going to
go through a time where it's real and it's out there,
but people are still using human driven lifts and ubas
(13:57):
and e bikes and scooters and public transportation and all
these sorts of things. And what we've really tried to
do is find a customer who doesn't have those alternatives
and deliver them that self driving car that can serve
as their primary means of transportation. And we have some
great early signs that seniors are going to be using
(14:17):
our product ten times a day versus you know, twice
a week. Like non seniors, seniors are seventeen times more
likely to suffer a fatality in a car crash than
a non senior. Seniors today are outliving their ability to
drive by about seven to ten years, So that means
for a significant chunk of everyone's lives, they are not driving,
(14:38):
and as we all know, driving as synonymous with independence
and freedom. Transportation for people who are of advanced age
and maybe can't drive on their own is a way
to have autonomy, and like Oliver said, this can radically
increase quality of life, including the ability to socialize and
get places on their own terms. But there was another
(14:59):
reason Voyage felt they could target this market. A significant
number of senior citizens live in these retirement communities. And
you know, as a at the time late twenties Silicon
Valley type, I I will admit that I, you know,
it was not too well versed in this part of
real estate. And what I learned was two things. One
(15:19):
is that these kind of all in one communities for
seniors is a huge market. Some of these communities are
hundreds of thousands of people big that is bigger than
many towns across the country. And then the second thing
that we discovered is that many of these places are
master planned. They reduced speed limits, They add more structure
to the roadways that they build in these communities. That
(15:42):
means less unprotected left turns and more intersections. It means
that you make the lanes that little bit wider. And
I couldn't think of a better analogy for the state
of the art and self driving cars in twenty seventeen.
So we see senior citizens as our go to market.
It's our Amazon Books, if you will. Amazon of course
didn't try and build everything from day one, and we're
(16:04):
gonna really build momentum in that market and then we'll
continue to expand. Cities present a lot of challenges to
self driving cars. Anyone who has driven in New York
City or Los Angeles can tell you that it's unpredictable
and complicated. Choosing these carefully built communities was a safe
and effective way for Voyage to pilot their self driving cars.
(16:27):
Are self driving technology is really designed for zero to
twenty five miles an hour today. That does not mean
that we need to revamp it or rewrite it for
zero to thirty five, zero to forty five. It just
means we'll need to spend that extra time validating and
refining a few things to get it ready. But our
technology is capable of handling a ton of complexity, whether
(16:50):
it's roundabouts, unprotected lefts into sections, jay walkers, you know,
lots of the craziness you see on the roads today.
We're really interested right now and getting the recipe correct
We're not going to do this in a rush. This
is a three ton vehicle that is moving around the
world and is controlled by software that we write, So
(17:12):
we are very cognizant of that responsibility and that kind
of commitment to safety. With so much buzz around self
driving cars, unless you've been in one, it's hard to
grasp what's reality, what's ambition, and what's actually possible for
the future. So today our vehicles have test drivers behind
(17:33):
the wheel to really enable us to stress test this technology.
That's an industry standard at this point in time. Like
most of the industry, these self driving cars don't drive
like humans. They drive a little robotically and they're very
very precise, right, which from a safety perspective you can
argue is tremendous, but from a comfort feel, it's a
(17:55):
little disorientating. It has three D sixty degree vision. It
can see, in our case, up to three meters around it,
and it has superhuman vision through a bunch of different modalities,
so you know, it's reacting to things that humans just
don't really perceive. It's almost too precise, and how it
drives and it needs some of that sort of human
feel and how it overtakes vehicles. It's a testament to
(18:19):
how far self driving technology has come that the problems
that Oliver is working on has moved from safety to
how to get autonomous vehicles to safely mimic a human feel.
One of the other big challenges is marketing, and I
wondered how you successfully persuade seniors to adopt an unusual technology.
One of the things that actually surprised me in the
(18:41):
very beginning is that I heard a lot that seniors
may in many cases avoid adopting new technologies. I learned
from many seniors who kind of schooled me on this
is that, you know, we younger folks like to think
of self driving causes this amazing cutting edge innovation and
oh my god, this is going to transform cities. And
(19:02):
seniors have heard this story many times, because, for example,
our oldest passenger was nine five years old, and this
senior likes to tell me quite frequently that she remembers
growing up and riding in a horse and cart, that
that was a thing, you know, And the senior growing
up has seen the birth of flight, the birth of
(19:24):
the automobile, the birth of mass transit. They've just seen
all of these many different transportation innovations. So you tell them, hey,
come for a right in a self driving car. And
I had hoped that people would be kind of jumping
in their seats with excitement, but you know, many of
these seniors are like, so, what I took a plaim
right in the fifties, And they'll tell you all about
(19:44):
that story. Oliver's ultimate vision is for the computational power
that autonomous vehicles require to be housed in the car
itself so it can make safe decisions even if network
connection fails. But he also sees many potentially trans formative
benefits that could come with future five G networks, because
definitely benefits to five G in the logistics, let's say,
(20:08):
of operating self driving vehicles. The more information we can
send about the vehicle over the network, the more a
human can better aid the vehicle. It's clear to me
that humans are going to be involved in aiding the
fleets of self driving cause for quite some time, whether
it's dispatching, rerouting, customer support, humans are going to be
(20:30):
integral to that. Will it be beneficial to have a
low latency connection to each and every vehicle through five G?
That's going to be you know, hugely beneficial for those things.
Oliver is talking about five G enabling efficient fleet management,
which would benefit businesses, but he also sees the potential
for real benefits to consumers as autonomous vehicles will be
(20:52):
able to use real time data to plan more efficient journeys. Today,
when we go out for the day, we begin day
by downloading the freshest maps. If anything changes construction or
what have you, that map is instantly stale. So would
it be beneficial for in the moment construction to be
(21:13):
noted in that map and then pushed within seconds to
every vehicle that's currently operating for sure, being able to
send over any information because latency and network bandwidth is
not a concern. That's amazing. So lots of benefits to
five G for sure that will adopt progressively. We're excited
about those. The future with five G is coming today.
(21:42):
T Mobile is leading the five G charge with thirty
billion dollars invested in their network to deliver new capabilities.
Improved connectivity and true mobility provided by an advanced network
from T Mobile for business could change the way we
all live and work. The five G era will take
the bestechnology is available today in the wireless space so
(22:02):
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T Mobile for Business knows that the future of business
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mobile for Business dot com. So as it was interesting
(22:27):
to hear Oliver talking about a future of autonomous vehicles
where humans actually remain in the loop, not on decisions
related to the actual car driving, but in terms of
fleet management, logistics, and presumably customer service. Right well, the
reasonability is such a hard problem is because it's so complex.
There's so many interactions between people and cars, people in infrastructure,
(22:50):
cars and infrastructure that will need to happen in real time.
And so although voyages building towards the future where autonomous
vehicles can operate without network connection, there are also the
benefits you can imagine in a world of five G,
things like much improved real time mapping. Imagine all the
time you'd have on your hands if you don't have
to drive. You know, right now, if you drive you
(23:10):
can listen to podcast. But five G could actually enable
live streaming video to vehicles at a massive scale. We
focused so far on this episode quite heavily on cars,
but future five G networks promised to transform all kinds
of vehicles and in particular the interaction between different modes
of transportation. This is something that Marcus Well spends a
(23:31):
long time thinking about. He's the head of the Siemens
Intelligent Traffic Systems business in the US, and from his perspective,
connectivity can play an essential role in making transport more
efficient by allowing us to more easily access different modes.
So what we do specifically from Seems Intelligent Traffic Systems
(23:52):
is that the one and accelerating public transit in cities.
We are also integrating public transits just m into overall
traffic management systems, and with that they know exactly which
buses are delays and which mitigation measures to take in
order to get those busses back on time. Marcus is
(24:13):
responsible for creating products the cities by to make life
of commuters easier and to connect underserved communities. Car density
is increasing significantly, in the answer cannot be building more roads,
so we need to consume the infrastructure more efficiently, and
part of the answer is also an efficient and attractive
transit systems. Also in five years and even in ten years,
(24:33):
it won't be just the cast themselves which are getting smarter,
but also the infrastructure. Where we can do better is
integrating them into bigger things and really look at mobility
in a city more holistically, because ultimately, what we need
to do in order to get people out of the
car and into a transit system is to think from
a travelers and commuter's perspective. The key to a more
(24:57):
sustainable transport situation in cities is certainly also driven by
integration of the various modes. One recent project Siemens has
worked on is an overhaul of the transportation system in Columbus, Ohio,
an initiative called Smart Columbus. We are equipping their transit
fleet with the equipment in order to communicate with the
(25:19):
infrastructure in real time, so for instance, that the bus
driver gets a warning if he or she is on
an impending wed light violation. And in Columbus we are
integrating the rail car, the bus system, right tailing, car sharing,
the taxis and the fleet of scooters into one system.
(25:39):
Here you can download the app, the city branded app
and plant book and pay your trips rather than opening
individual apps, you just plan and pay your ticket once
door to door. Marcus deals with all kinds of modes
of transport, but autonomy and autonomous vehicles very much top
of mind. Even if his focus is not on cars,
(26:02):
A traffic cham with no human driver is still a
traffic cham. So rather than thinking one for one, rather
than using self driving vehicle technology as replacement for an
individual car, what I believe is that a autonomous driving
car can very well be used as a technology to
enhance public transport. Again, because one of the biggest challenges
(26:26):
is the first and last mile in any transit system.
So imagine that those areas in the city which are
currently underserved in terms of public transport, that a fleet
of self driving buses could very well solve that problem.
In Marxist vision, real time user amount could alter the
roots of public buses, and that would be a profound
(26:46):
change to how we think about mobility and whether we
even feel like we need to own private cars. This
is couldn't be possible in a world of seamless, high
bandwidth connectivity that the next generation of wireless promises, And
there are other areas where the promise of future five
gene networks excites markers. So whenever five geese ready for
broad deployment, this will give more and faster access to
(27:11):
data which will enable new applications. Today we are collecting
data for vehicles and this is being used to mitigate concession,
for instance, to redirect traffic, to close a lane, to
change the patterns. So imagine if all the cars will
tell us where they are in real time. Potentially all
cars are equipped with five G technologies, we can get
(27:34):
real time data from all the vehicles at the same time,
and they can be processed efficiently and then made available
very quickly to the road users. Again, so all the
cycle between data collection, processing and ultimately bringing it back
to the road user to a traveler in real time
(27:54):
will get way more efficient. Available now from my Heart,
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(28:14):
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(28:37):
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is now available on the I Heart Radio app or
wherever you listen to podcasts. Carrots. Self driving cars capture
(29:02):
so much attention, and I think we intuitively think of
them as being the next iteration of the private vehicle.
But I love what Marcus says, A traffic jam of
autonomous vehicles is still a traffic jam, And if we
think a bit more broadly, perhaps autonomy could mean we
actually need fewer vehicles on the road. Yeah. I definitely
think we're moving towards a world where we don't each
(29:23):
need to individually own a car. And it would kind
of be amazing if you, for example, lived a few
miles from the closest train and an autonomous vehicle could
pick you up and deliver you to that mass transit
station and if that automous vehicle could be communicating with
the wider traffic system and the city to say, monitor
where potholes are. And also if that car could be
(29:47):
connected to mass transit and know if the train was
on time or running lead this time tomorrow, perhaps autonomous
buses could pick people up and take them to where
they need to go because they can adapt in real
time to people's needs and have flexible routes. Like Marcus said,
intelligent traffic systems can give people more freedom at the
same time as being more cost effective, cost effective for
(30:09):
people and communities. To me, it's really clear that in
order for this to work, we need to have a
really strong and fast network that can sustain this massive
landscape of devices, and that's exactly where five G could
play a huge role. On the next episode of This
Time Tomorrow, we'll look at how advancements in technology and
(30:32):
wires connectivity are changing the manufacturing industry from work of
safety to the use of cutting edge robotics. I'm also
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(30:53):
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(31:13):
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for Business dot com.
On last week's episode, we discussed the future of connected
wearables and smart clothing. We heard from Paul de Linger,
head of Global Product Innovation for Levi Strauss, who is
developing connected clothing, Paul Winsbur, VP of athlete Performance under Armour,
who is creating clothing that uses data to boost athletic performance,
and Natasha Frank, founder and CEO of the startup Eon,
(00:26):
who is leveraging smartship technology to connect consumers to manufacturers
to drive better sustainability and new customer experiences. The automobile
has forever changed the way we're able to reach one
(00:47):
another and stay connected over great distances, but imagine a
future where our cars could connect to each other. The
next generation of wireless innovation with future five gen networks
will create new opportunities for connect to consume humors and
the ever changing landscape of the automotive industry. Thanks to
support from Temobile for Business Today would explore how advancements
(01:08):
in five G connectivity will enable innovations in transportation that
will shape the way consumers travel and commute. We're trying
(01:29):
to evolve and reinvent rental, and we need to evolve
to meet it with the vehicles that people want to utilize,
and then how we manage those vehicles, which is primarily
now going to be data driven. And that also means
that we have to communicate not only really well with
our customers, we have to communicate really well and in
real time with our cars. That's Arthur or Dounia, chief
(01:54):
innovation officer at Avis Budget Group, the global car rental
company that also owns the popular car sharing of his
zip car. Right now, we maintain on average about anywhere
between five hundreds and six hundred thousand global fleet because
we go up and down, so we ended the year
well over two hundred thousand of our fleet now completely connected.
(02:14):
Also makes a distinction between the regular fleet and the
connected fleet, and an important part of his responsibility is
to make sure more and more of the fleet is connected.
What does it mean to be able then to talk
to a car and have that car talked to us.
There really isn't an industry standard definition. Our definition is
(02:35):
really tied to about five requirements. So we leverage GPS
to give us real time location. We use telemetry in
the car to give us the second requirement, which is
real time mileage. We want to know how many miles
are on that car at any given point. The third
is fuel. We want to know two within a tenth
(02:57):
of a gallon or a leader, how much few was
in that car if it's an internal combustion engine, or
what percentage of charge if it's a hybrid or an
e V. The fourth is real time communication with the
other systems of the car, so low tire pressure is
one example. And then the fifth one is lock unlocked
(03:18):
slash immobilization remotely like through the cloud, and that's what
is key for zip car. What Arthur describes and the
way people can now interact with connected cars is radically
different from what it was like to rent a car
just ten years ago. But it was normal to wait
in line and haphazardly looked for your car in a
(03:38):
sea of similar looking vehicles. And the businesses who oversee
large fleets of vehicles, whether car rental, right sharing, or
even mass transit, there are powerful commercial benefits to having
more data about utilization. One of the technological advancements that
has allowed for many of these changes to take place
is improved wireless networks, but we're on at the beginning
(04:01):
of that story. In this episode, we look at how
five G could transform mobility, whether you're renting a connected
car or riding in a fully autonomous vehicle. I'm as Rushian,
welcome to this time tomorrow, So Carol. When I think
about all the advancements that have come along since the
(04:22):
smartphone and four G, some of the first that come
to mind are related to how we get around and
when was the last time you bought a guide book
when you went to a new city. Now I don't
do that. Um, I turned my phone on when I arrive,
and I use Google Maps to figure out if there's
public transportation to get me where I'm going, and if
there isn't, I call Uber and I find somewhere to
(04:42):
go to launch on Yelp. And then sometimes if I
have landed and don't know where to stay, yes, that happens,
I look on Airbnb, right, I mean, I confess I
have actually bought guidebooks very recently pas scroll within the
last three months. But even at home, you know, we
can access bike shares, figure out when to leave here
(05:03):
on the subway, so we arrive at work on time,
look at live traffic, pick a route accordingly. In fact,
qualcom who we spoke to an episode one and who
make the chips that power many four G devices. Were
early investors in ways the mapping software, presumally because they
believe mobility could be transformed by connectivity. Yeah, you know,
nobody could have predicted exactly how four G would transform mobility,
(05:26):
but the effects have been huge. You and I were
at cs a little ways back in Las Vegas, and
we saw so many booths where companies were discussing how
the future five G networks might transform different parts of transportation,
everything from autonomous vehicles to drones to my personal favorite,
last mile logistics, which is how a package will get
(05:48):
to my house package queen. But there are potential benefits
from five G in the world and mobility in everything
from easing traffic congestion to safety and even mitigating environment
an impact through more efficient traffic networks. And then of
course there's making better customer experiences. And then of course
there are the long promised self driving cars. I feel
(06:10):
like there's a little bit of self driving car fatigue
because we've been talking about them for so long. But
a few months ago I actually saw a really interesting
article about a company called Voyage, who are pioneering autonomous
vehicles in retirement communities and this struck me as a
super interesting use case. So I actually got to speak
to the CEO and founder, Oliver Cameron, and I spoke
(06:33):
to Marcus Wells, who you and I met at CS
and who runs the intelligent traffic systems business for Siemens
here in the US. His experience is in intelligent infrastructure,
and we talked about how five G could change the
way we use public transport. Before we get there, though,
let's go back to Arthur and how he's working to
integrate technology and connectivity to transform AVIS budgets business. The
(06:58):
problem set that rental solves is not going to go
away anytime in the near or long term future, because
that problem, said is, Hey, I don't have access to
the car or the vehicle that I own. I'm in
the next city over, or I'm on the other side
of the world. I need some mobility. So I think
today and for the last seven years, that solution has
(07:20):
been here's a car. Do you need it for an hour,
then become a zip car member. Do you need it
for a couple of weeks or for a couple of days,
then here's Avis or here's budget. In order to improve
on the experience, of renting a car, whether for an
hour or for a few days. Avi's budget didn't simply
chase new technology. They turned to their uses. We took
(07:41):
a product design approach to solve a customer problem. So
we actually began with a customer journey that said, how
do people consume our product today? Instead of just saying, oh,
let's create a new mobile app and make it look pretty.
We identified the key problem, such including not wanting to
stand in line, and said, okay, how do we actually
(08:03):
then create a solution for that. Oh, well, it ought
to be in people's pockets so that they can discover
at any time and utilize it. Oh, they don't want
to stand in the counter, they want to bypass it.
Oh that sounds cool. Oh it's if it's a connected
car and it's raining out there, Can we just make
sure you can turn on the lights or hank the
horn there it is, and then unlock the car really quickly?
Can I get out of this parking lot or out
(08:23):
of this garage really quickly? If we can authenticate that
it's the right person in the right car on the
right day and time, sure, go ahead leave. After making
it possible for people to more easily connect with their
rental cause. Author and his team got feedback from another
important group of stakeholders, Davis Budget employees. What happens when
(08:45):
you start listening as well to your employees and you
start thinking about them as customers and then suddenly we
had another turn. We had another set of customer journey
and pain points, but it was tied to the life
cycle of the car. How about our folks and our
colleagues who actually have to rent these cars out, have
to maintain and manage them, have to repair them, have
(09:06):
to clean and gas them, have to shuttle them from
one location to another, and we have to do so
at eleven thousand locations. Isn't there a better way of
doing that? How about connecting to our employees and to
our fleet. At the heart of Arthur's efforts to better
serve customers and employees is better connection to the vehicles
in the fleet. It allows customers to skip lines and
(09:29):
employees to track vehicle life cycles so they can detect
things like the car that's supposed to be rented on
the same day it needs to have a tire changed.
If this type of business enabled by connectivity is already happening,
I was curious what changes the higher bandwidth and lower
latency promised by future of five G networks could enable
for Arthur and his team actually have started to talk
(09:51):
heavily about what five G could bring. V to X
is what fast communication could afford by V two often
means vehicle to infrastructure communication and that could have far
reaching implications for how we get around. One of those
natural partners is a city, right, so could we exchange
(10:12):
data with the city that provides us safer smart roots
in real time? And in exchange for that, could we
give data back to the city that our sensors collect
that give them conditions of roads that we traverse on
a daily basis with lots and lots of cars, so
that they can understand in real time which roads actually
need to be repaired when. So it's our expertise and
(10:36):
next generation fleet management and connectivity that if cities want
to see fewer and fewer private vehicles right, individually owned
vehicles on the road, that actually matches our ambition. Who's
owning and managing those fleets? We think it could be
us leveraging connectivity which we learned beginning with zip car,
(10:59):
but expand ending Avis Budget Group into hopefully a potential
leadership position for the next generation of mobility. So Karrot,
what I find really interesting about what Arthur said is
that let's say we do find ourselves in this fully
autonomous world where we can call up a self driving
car whenever we need it and get to where we
(11:20):
need to go, someone still needs to manage the fleet right.
There needs to be humans in the loop, and a
pretty intricate system needs to be put in place to
make sure those vehicles are ready for the road. I've
walked by many a city bike stand and seeing some
bikes that no longer look like bicycles. That makes me
think how important it is that bike operating companies have
(11:43):
good data. Good data understand what's going on with the bikes,
who's using them, where they need to tune up. And
data has already become such an important driver of the
new economy. And that's what kind of what Arthur was saying.
All of a sudden, the data created by advis budgets
connective vehicles position them to part with cities on all
kinds of future mobility initiatives. As we know the promise
(12:05):
of future five gen networks, it's all about collecting more
data and processing it more efficiently to inform better decision making. Yeah,
and in the case of data generated by self driving cars,
according to tech Crunch, Weymo, which is Google self driving
car project, has driven ten million miles on real roads
and ten billion simulated miles. The data from the real
(12:26):
roads constantly makes the simulation more realistic, and five G
networks promised to make the data gathered from vehicles much richer.
That's said, it's not clear if and how autonomous vehicles
will fully roll out. To find out more, I spoke
with Oliver Cameron, the CEO of an autonomous vehicle company
called Voyage. What we're really focused on a Voyage is
(12:54):
delivering on the promise of self driving cause this technology
has this immense, you know, ount of potential, but in
many cases it's just woods, right, we're all, you know,
dreaming of this future. Oliver's right, Despite all the talk,
self driving cars still seem like something reserved for the
far off future. But in the last few years, the
(13:16):
concept of letting a vehicle drive you around became a
real possibility. But there's so many regulatory and cultural barriers
to mass adoption. So Voyage is going after a very
specific use case where the demand is higher and the
barriers to entry are lower. And what we're really trying
to do is bring this technology to market sooner and
(13:37):
in a really impactful way. We want to really focus
on just one customer and deliver a product for them.
I very much believe that this technology is going to
go through a time where it's real and it's out there,
but people are still using human driven lifts and ubas
(13:57):
and e bikes and scooters and public transportation and all
these sorts of things. And what we've really tried to
do is find a customer who doesn't have those alternatives
and deliver them that self driving car that can serve
as their primary means of transportation. And we have some
great early signs that seniors are going to be using
(14:17):
our product ten times a day versus you know, twice
a week. Like non seniors, seniors are seventeen times more
likely to suffer a fatality in a car crash than
a non senior. Seniors today are outliving their ability to
drive by about seven to ten years, So that means
for a significant chunk of everyone's lives, they are not driving,
(14:38):
and as we all know, driving as synonymous with independence
and freedom. Transportation for people who are of advanced age
and maybe can't drive on their own is a way
to have autonomy, and like Oliver said, this can radically
increase quality of life, including the ability to socialize and
get places on their own terms. But there was another
(14:59):
reason Voyage felt they could target this market. A significant
number of senior citizens live in these retirement communities. And
you know, as a at the time late twenties Silicon
Valley type, I I will admit that I, you know,
it was not too well versed in this part of
real estate. And what I learned was two things. One
(15:19):
is that these kind of all in one communities for
seniors is a huge market. Some of these communities are
hundreds of thousands of people big that is bigger than
many towns across the country. And then the second thing
that we discovered is that many of these places are
master planned. They reduced speed limits, They add more structure
to the roadways that they build in these communities. That
(15:42):
means less unprotected left turns and more intersections. It means
that you make the lanes that little bit wider. And
I couldn't think of a better analogy for the state
of the art and self driving cars in twenty seventeen.
So we see senior citizens as our go to market.
It's our Amazon Books, if you will. Amazon of course
didn't try and build everything from day one, and we're
(16:04):
gonna really build momentum in that market and then we'll
continue to expand. Cities present a lot of challenges to
self driving cars. Anyone who has driven in New York
City or Los Angeles can tell you that it's unpredictable
and complicated. Choosing these carefully built communities was a safe
and effective way for Voyage to pilot their self driving cars.
(16:27):
Are self driving technology is really designed for zero to
twenty five miles an hour today. That does not mean
that we need to revamp it or rewrite it for
zero to thirty five, zero to forty five. It just
means we'll need to spend that extra time validating and
refining a few things to get it ready. But our
technology is capable of handling a ton of complexity, whether
(16:50):
it's roundabouts, unprotected lefts into sections, jay walkers, you know,
lots of the craziness you see on the roads today.
We're really interested right now and getting the recipe correct
We're not going to do this in a rush. This
is a three ton vehicle that is moving around the
world and is controlled by software that we write, So
(17:12):
we are very cognizant of that responsibility and that kind
of commitment to safety. With so much buzz around self
driving cars, unless you've been in one, it's hard to
grasp what's reality, what's ambition, and what's actually possible for
the future. So today our vehicles have test drivers behind
(17:33):
the wheel to really enable us to stress test this technology.
That's an industry standard at this point in time. Like
most of the industry, these self driving cars don't drive
like humans. They drive a little robotically and they're very
very precise, right, which from a safety perspective you can
argue is tremendous, but from a comfort feel, it's a
(17:55):
little disorientating. It has three D sixty degree vision. It
can see, in our case, up to three meters around it,
and it has superhuman vision through a bunch of different modalities,
so you know, it's reacting to things that humans just
don't really perceive. It's almost too precise, and how it
drives and it needs some of that sort of human
feel and how it overtakes vehicles. It's a testament to
(18:19):
how far self driving technology has come that the problems
that Oliver is working on has moved from safety to
how to get autonomous vehicles to safely mimic a human feel.
One of the other big challenges is marketing, and I
wondered how you successfully persuade seniors to adopt an unusual technology.
One of the things that actually surprised me in the
(18:41):
very beginning is that I heard a lot that seniors
may in many cases avoid adopting new technologies. I learned
from many seniors who kind of schooled me on this
is that, you know, we younger folks like to think
of self driving causes this amazing cutting edge innovation and
oh my god, this is going to transform cities. And
(19:02):
seniors have heard this story many times, because, for example,
our oldest passenger was nine five years old, and this
senior likes to tell me quite frequently that she remembers
growing up and riding in a horse and cart, that
that was a thing, you know, And the senior growing
up has seen the birth of flight, the birth of
(19:24):
the automobile, the birth of mass transit. They've just seen
all of these many different transportation innovations. So you tell them, hey,
come for a right in a self driving car. And
I had hoped that people would be kind of jumping
in their seats with excitement, but you know, many of
these seniors are like, so, what I took a plaim
right in the fifties, And they'll tell you all about
(19:44):
that story. Oliver's ultimate vision is for the computational power
that autonomous vehicles require to be housed in the car
itself so it can make safe decisions even if network
connection fails. But he also sees many potentially trans formative
benefits that could come with future five G networks, because
definitely benefits to five G in the logistics, let's say,
(20:08):
of operating self driving vehicles. The more information we can
send about the vehicle over the network, the more a
human can better aid the vehicle. It's clear to me
that humans are going to be involved in aiding the
fleets of self driving cause for quite some time, whether
it's dispatching, rerouting, customer support, humans are going to be
(20:30):
integral to that. Will it be beneficial to have a
low latency connection to each and every vehicle through five G?
That's going to be you know, hugely beneficial for those things.
Oliver is talking about five G enabling efficient fleet management,
which would benefit businesses, but he also sees the potential
for real benefits to consumers as autonomous vehicles will be
(20:52):
able to use real time data to plan more efficient journeys. Today,
when we go out for the day, we begin day
by downloading the freshest maps. If anything changes construction or
what have you, that map is instantly stale. So would
it be beneficial for in the moment construction to be
(21:13):
noted in that map and then pushed within seconds to
every vehicle that's currently operating for sure, being able to
send over any information because latency and network bandwidth is
not a concern. That's amazing. So lots of benefits to
five G for sure that will adopt progressively. We're excited
about those. The future with five G is coming today.
(21:42):
T Mobile is leading the five G charge with thirty
billion dollars invested in their network to deliver new capabilities.
Improved connectivity and true mobility provided by an advanced network
from T Mobile for business could change the way we
all live and work. The five G era will take
the bestechnology is available today in the wireless space so
(22:02):
that you can offer new capabilities to your business customers.
T Mobile for Business knows that the future of business
will be powered by advancements in wireless networks. With these
new technologies opening the doors for better ways to get
the job done. Business is changing. Learn more at t
mobile for Business dot com. So as it was interesting
(22:27):
to hear Oliver talking about a future of autonomous vehicles
where humans actually remain in the loop, not on decisions
related to the actual car driving, but in terms of
fleet management, logistics, and presumably customer service. Right well, the
reasonability is such a hard problem is because it's so complex.
There's so many interactions between people and cars, people in infrastructure,
(22:50):
cars and infrastructure that will need to happen in real time.
And so although voyages building towards the future where autonomous
vehicles can operate without network connection, there are also the
benefits you can imagine in a world of five G,
things like much improved real time mapping. Imagine all the
time you'd have on your hands if you don't have
to drive. You know, right now, if you drive you
(23:10):
can listen to podcast. But five G could actually enable
live streaming video to vehicles at a massive scale. We
focused so far on this episode quite heavily on cars,
but future five G networks promised to transform all kinds
of vehicles and in particular the interaction between different modes
of transportation. This is something that Marcus Well spends a
(23:31):
long time thinking about. He's the head of the Siemens
Intelligent Traffic Systems business in the US, and from his perspective,
connectivity can play an essential role in making transport more
efficient by allowing us to more easily access different modes.
So what we do specifically from Seems Intelligent Traffic Systems
(23:52):
is that the one and accelerating public transit in cities.
We are also integrating public transits just m into overall
traffic management systems, and with that they know exactly which
buses are delays and which mitigation measures to take in
order to get those busses back on time. Marcus is
(24:13):
responsible for creating products the cities by to make life
of commuters easier and to connect underserved communities. Car density
is increasing significantly, in the answer cannot be building more roads,
so we need to consume the infrastructure more efficiently, and
part of the answer is also an efficient and attractive
transit systems. Also in five years and even in ten years,
(24:33):
it won't be just the cast themselves which are getting smarter,
but also the infrastructure. Where we can do better is
integrating them into bigger things and really look at mobility
in a city more holistically, because ultimately, what we need
to do in order to get people out of the
car and into a transit system is to think from
a travelers and commuter's perspective. The key to a more
(24:57):
sustainable transport situation in cities is certainly also driven by
integration of the various modes. One recent project Siemens has
worked on is an overhaul of the transportation system in Columbus, Ohio,
an initiative called Smart Columbus. We are equipping their transit
fleet with the equipment in order to communicate with the
(25:19):
infrastructure in real time, so for instance, that the bus
driver gets a warning if he or she is on
an impending wed light violation. And in Columbus we are
integrating the rail car, the bus system, right tailing, car sharing,
the taxis and the fleet of scooters into one system.
(25:39):
Here you can download the app, the city branded app
and plant book and pay your trips rather than opening
individual apps, you just plan and pay your ticket once
door to door. Marcus deals with all kinds of modes
of transport, but autonomy and autonomous vehicles very much top
of mind. Even if his focus is not on cars,
(26:02):
A traffic cham with no human driver is still a
traffic cham. So rather than thinking one for one, rather
than using self driving vehicle technology as replacement for an
individual car, what I believe is that a autonomous driving
car can very well be used as a technology to
enhance public transport. Again, because one of the biggest challenges
(26:26):
is the first and last mile in any transit system.
So imagine that those areas in the city which are
currently underserved in terms of public transport, that a fleet
of self driving buses could very well solve that problem.
In Marxist vision, real time user amount could alter the
roots of public buses, and that would be a profound
(26:46):
change to how we think about mobility and whether we
even feel like we need to own private cars. This
is couldn't be possible in a world of seamless, high
bandwidth connectivity that the next generation of wireless promises, And
there are other areas where the promise of future five
gene networks excites markers. So whenever five geese ready for
broad deployment, this will give more and faster access to
(27:11):
data which will enable new applications. Today we are collecting
data for vehicles and this is being used to mitigate concession,
for instance, to redirect traffic, to close a lane, to
change the patterns. So imagine if all the cars will
tell us where they are in real time. Potentially all
cars are equipped with five G technologies, we can get
(27:34):
real time data from all the vehicles at the same time,
and they can be processed efficiently and then made available
very quickly to the road users. Again, so all the
cycle between data collection, processing and ultimately bringing it back
to the road user to a traveler in real time
(27:54):
will get way more efficient. Available now from my Heart,
a new series presented by Temobile for Business, The Restless Ones,
join host Johnson Strickland as he explores the upcoming five
year revolution and the business leaders who stand right on
(28:14):
the cutting edge. There are certain decision makers who are restless.
They know there is a better way to get things done,
and they're ready, curious and excited for the next technological
innovation to unlock their vision of the future. These Restless
Ones are in pursuit of bigger, better, smarter, stronger. They
seek new partners, new strategies, new processes. They pursue innovative
(28:37):
platforms and solutions to propel their teams, businesses, and industries forward.
In each episode, we'll learn more from the Restless Ones
themselves and dive deep into how they think of five
year revolution could propel their business forward. The Restless Ones
is now available on the I Heart Radio app or
wherever you listen to podcasts. Carrots. Self driving cars capture
(29:02):
so much attention, and I think we intuitively think of
them as being the next iteration of the private vehicle.
But I love what Marcus says, A traffic jam of
autonomous vehicles is still a traffic jam, And if we
think a bit more broadly, perhaps autonomy could mean we
actually need fewer vehicles on the road. Yeah. I definitely
think we're moving towards a world where we don't each
(29:23):
need to individually own a car. And it would kind
of be amazing if you, for example, lived a few
miles from the closest train and an autonomous vehicle could
pick you up and deliver you to that mass transit
station and if that automous vehicle could be communicating with
the wider traffic system and the city to say, monitor
where potholes are. And also if that car could be
(29:47):
connected to mass transit and know if the train was
on time or running lead this time tomorrow, perhaps autonomous
buses could pick people up and take them to where
they need to go because they can adapt in real
time to people's needs and have flexible routes. Like Marcus said,
intelligent traffic systems can give people more freedom at the
same time as being more cost effective, cost effective for
(30:09):
people and communities. To me, it's really clear that in
order for this to work, we need to have a
really strong and fast network that can sustain this massive
landscape of devices, and that's exactly where five G could
play a huge role. On the next episode of This
Time Tomorrow, we'll look at how advancements in technology and
(30:32):
wires connectivity are changing the manufacturing industry from work of
safety to the use of cutting edge robotics. I'm also
aloan see you next time, no matter what you're after.
T Mobile for Business is here with a network born
(30:53):
mobile and built from the ground up for the next
wave of innovation from mobile broadband to IoT to workforce,
mobile city, and everything in between. T Mobile for Business
is committed to helping you move your business forward with
the products and services you need, as well as the dedicated,
award winning customer service you'd expect from America's most loved
(31:13):
wireless company. Business is changing. Learn more at t Mobile
for Business dot com.
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