Skip to main content

Industry collaboration ‘the key to avoiding autonomous driving traffic congestion’

A joint whitepaper published by Here and SBD argues that new levels of vehicle automation will increase traffic congestion in the foreseeable future and it's up to the automotive industry to enhance its collaboration in order to create a seamless transition as we reach these new levels of automation. According to co-author of the study, Andrew Hart, director at SBD, autonomous cars have the potential in the long-term to revolutionise mobility and radically improve the safety of our roads. However, the pa
July 19, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
A joint whitepaper published by 7643 Here and 4263 SBD argues that new levels of vehicle automation will increase traffic congestion in the foreseeable future and it's up to the automotive industry to enhance its collaboration in order to create a seamless transition as we reach these new levels of automation.

According to co-author of the study, Andrew Hart, director at SBD, autonomous cars have the potential in the long-term to revolutionise mobility and radically improve the safety of our roads. However, the path towards the fully autonomous car is full of potholes, which may create short-term pains in unexpected ways. The automotive industry and road authorities will need to work carefully together to navigate around these potholes, in order to gain the trust of consumers and reap the societal benefits of this new technology, he said.

The whitepaper claims there are two main factors that will determine just how big the impact automated vehicles will have on traffic congestion. The first is the level of vehicle automation. The second is the corresponding level of user adoption.

While basic levels of automation could have a small positive impact in helping to ease traffic congestion, higher levels of automation could have a detrimental effect on congestion when the user adoption rate is low.

In order to help mitigate the increase in congestion during these transition periods, Here and SBD urge the automotive industry to work together towards collaborative autonomous cars. This includes formalised efforts to break down information silos and establish vehicle, road network and infrastructure data exchanges in conjunction with local, state and national transportation agencies.

The white paper describes how levels of automation represent a sequence rather than a binary occurrence where one day the roads are exclusively filled with self-driving vehicles. According to SBD, 11 million cars in Europe, USA and China will be shipped in 2016 with driver assistance systems such as adaptive cruise control, automatic emergency braking or lane keep assistance. From 2020, car manufacturers have announced a new generation of autonomous vehicles will be launched that achieve Level 4 to 5 automation, allowing drivers to hand over control to the vehicle.

Related Content

  • November 10, 2015
    User-based insurance joins the battle for big data
    User-based insurance is blazing a trail others would like to follow and is also discovering the challenges. The ITS sector needs to keep a very careful eye on the automotive industry: “There’s a war going on in the connected car space creating richer datasets than we ever imagined possible” says Paul Stacy, research and development director of Wunelli, part of the LexisNexis group. The car makers have gone way beyond infotainment, unlocking huge amounts of data in the process … facts and figures which the i
  • December 8, 2016
    Data handling important for autonomous vehicles
    Data handling is becoming an ever-greater part of transportation and never more so than with autonomous vehicles, as Andrew Bardin Williams hears from some big names.
  • September 26, 2017
    Self-driving cars ‘could make traffic congestion worse’
    The University of Sydney has released the results of a survey that indicates that Australian drivers are unlikely to share their vehicles with other travellers and increasing congestion, contrary to predictions made by transport experts and the motor industry. The University’s University of Sydney Business School’s latest Transport Opinion Survey, conducted by the School’s Institute of Transport and Logistic Studies
  • August 18, 2016
    Highly automated driving ‘to spark adoption of centralised ADAS’
    As vehicles become highly independent and begin to drive and react to traffic on their own, autonomous systems will aggregate and process data from a variety of on-board sensors and connected infrastructure, says ABI Research. This forces the industry to hit a hard reset on advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) architectures, currently dominated by distributed processing and smart sensors. Automotive OEMs will need to adopt new platforms based on powerful, centralised processors and high-speed low la