I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get impatient with connected/electric/autonomous vehicle adoption. Everywhere I look, more exciting predictions pop up about where the auto industry is (or isn’t) heading. Yet in my day-to-day, I rarely see more than a rogue Telsa cruising down the highway or a random hybrid bus shuttling commuters to their final destination.
This begs the question: When will widespread adoption of next-gen auto innovations gain real momentum?
Judging from the continuous uptick in smart city investments across the globe, it might come sooner than we think as connected vehicles and smart cities depend on each other to succeed.
Even billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates is getting in on the smart city action, committing $80 million to help build a smart city in Arizona. As Business Insider details, Gates' investment will help propel the adoption of connected and autonomous vehicles:
Covering nearly 25,000 acres of land, the futuristic city is expected to offer built-in high-speed internet, accommodations for self-driving cars (such as traffic lights that communicate with one another to minimize congestion), and smart manufacturing technology.
Wide open spaces = room for connected car growth
At this point, there are more than 2 billion parking spaces across the United States with some U.S. cities having more than a third of their land area consumed by parking spaces “becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment,” according to MIT. Does it make sense to have so much free space underutilized 98% of the time, just to accommodate capacity peaks like, say, Black Friday?
Smart cities built form the ground up, like the one Gates is involved with, will provide an opportunity to prove that the world doesn’t need more parking lots and/or expensive parking garages in cities like New York, according to Uli Muench, Global Vice President, Industry Automotive Unit, SAP.
Muench believes connected vehicles and parking optimization technology like SAP Vehicles Network helps remediate the overabundance of parking spaces.
“With ubiquitous, autonomous vehicles we will theoretically not need parking lots anymore,” said Muench, who also cites the Rinspeed Snap concept as an ideal solution. “The vehicle is on the road permanently, outside of maintenance, so the only parking space required is a service bay, for one percent of the lifetime of the vehicle.”
With the Rinspeed Snap concept, each passenger has three displays at their disposal for interaction. Personal settings are selected with the 'Personal Control Panel' featuring an interactive control dial. Personal contents and messages are shown on the touch-controlled 'Hover Tabs,' which are brought into position by swiveling arms. SAP enables the digitized ecosystem for Rinspeed Snap in the areas of smart cities, connected health, connected mobility, and transportation.
SAP's Muench believes smart cities will allow the aforementioned innovations to shine -- by creating tangible, economic benefits -- which will help speed the adoption of connected, autonomous vehicles.
"There's no doubt these next-gen vehicles will take stress off city roads and parking infrastructures, use parking real estate in more profitable ways and allow ride-hailing service providers to forgo the costs to drivers."
Rinspeed Snap will be unveiled at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show January 8-11 at the Harman Exhibit in the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel.
