Impact on Mobility

Impact on Mobility

Mobility is becoming the biggest differentiator between the developed and developing countries, and the investments being made in road, rail and air infrastructure and newer and more sophisticated means of transportation are very substantial in countries like India and other aspiring leaders from the Global South as they seek to make their impact through goods and services made and delivered better, faster and cheaper than incumbents in the Western world.

In India, the government, through the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s software technology parks, established in 1991, the Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Autonomous, Connected, Electric and Shared Mobility (ACES), appropriately called the MOTION CoE. With Ganesh serving as chief mentor since inception, MOTION has seen more action than most other CoEs, with large enterprises, mentors, collaborators and start-up entrepreneurs lining up to take advantage of the knowledge and capital flows facilitated by the CoE.

In discussions over the last couple of years, AI has been the centrepiece of conversation, given its impact on safety enhancement, efficiency and accessibility apart from sheer convenience. A case in point is the ride we took from Newport, New Jersey, to visit the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha temple near Princeton. Our friend, who picked us up in his Tesla, just entered the address in his car and confirmed the driving route and was then chatting with us for the next hour without an eye on the road. The car navigated perfectly through the highway system and busy traffic in some of the towns we drove through, and we emerged fresh and unconcerned with all the traffic encountered on the ride.

Self-driven cars have been around for some time with the combination of electric mobility and AI completely transforming both driving efficiency and comfort, and the real impact will be on shared mobility with smart driverless buses operating on city streets and trucks on lonely interstate expressways. Drone taxis, drone delivery of packages and AI-coordinated convoy driving or truck platoons will soon become the order of the day, and our trains, too, can become fully supported to avoid accidents of any kind. In the EV area itself, what we have seen in the ACES CoE, and indeed what is happening worldwide, is optimisation of battery usage and placement of charging infrastructure for maximum convenience and efficiency. The mobility ecosystem also gets transformed with AI-enabled management of ride share availability, traffic flows and signals management, enhancement of current route planning and optimisation and scheduling of public transits on roads, rail and water. Use of AI in mobility will also greatly enhance the ability of senior citizens and the physically challenged to become more independent with a host of new gizmos like smart wheelchairs and canes and voice-enabled guidance mechanisms enhancing their confidence.

Over the next ten years, a major share of new cars will be electric, and over half of all transport mechanisms can be autonomous. Apart from Tesla, the automatic ride-hailing capabilities being implemented in the United States and the advent of new players in China and Korea seeking to challenge the domination of the West and Japan in automobile brands will drive convenience higher and price points lower. In the future, we can expect to see trends towards fossil fuel elimination and sustainability drive major AI innovations in mobility and integration of transportation systems, both private and public, with mainstream smart city infrastructure. Automatic guidance available from command-and-control centres of smart cities to individual autonomous automobiles will optimise travel efficiency, and the rides like the one we had to the temple in New Jersey will become the rule, not the exception. Traffic congestion may become a thing of the past, and safety can reach new and predictable levels. One can expect that public acceptance and trust will be easier to get in this area than in banking and healthcare through cybersecurity, and management of complex traffic scenarios will continue to be a daunting factor in the move towards an increasingly drive-free world.