Autonomous Vehicles: Redefining Transportation Design Principles

Nearly 200 years ago, Hungarian engineer Anyos Jeldik had the idea of developing a small electric car with an electric motor. They were, obviously, nothing like the modern-day autonomous vehicles, but that was the beginning of something big. Little did Jeldik, and everyone at the time, know that autonomous vehicles would one day be the future of transportation.

Electric autonomous vehicles weren’t something within the realm of possibility as far as people’s imaginations were concerned. Several more engineers, such as Thomas Davenport and, later on, Henry Ford, were instrumental in keeping this revolutionary idea alive. Years later, when Elon Musk’s Tesla released the ‘Roadster,’ it truly ushered in the dawn of both electric and autonomous vehicles.

As of today, April’25, talks on making autonomous vehicles more mainstream are leading the discussions on every Transportation Design panel. While Elon Musk’s Tesla is aggressively forcing the narrative that ‘Autonomous Vehicle is the Future,’ other companies are also planning to catch up. With such a strong desire to turn this concept into a regular mainstay, let’s dive deep into the world of Autonomous Vehicles and how they are redefining Transportation Design.

Designers, Engineers, and Others Believe Autonomous Vehicles Are the Need of the Hour

There is an estimate that suggests that nearly 1.25 million people die every year due to road or car accidents. While there can be several reasons behind this, it usually always gets back to the human driver behind the wheel. 90-90% of those accidents are due to an error by the driver.

Designers and innovators who are hell-bent on making global transportation autonomous, strongly believe that Autonomous Vehicles can sort this problem out. They believe that if and when autonomous vehicles replace human drivers, the problem of people dying in accidents can be solved.

Autonomous Vehicles are being extensively planned out to be mass manufactured in the future. Several people believe that this limits the accidents caused on roads and reduces the present ‘human error percentage’ to a negligible minimum. In other words, autonomous vehicles might allegedly solve the road accident issue.

While that is a tall claim, one that has yet to be verified by trusted sources, businesspeople and designers are banking on this claim to spread the idea to the world.

Self-Driving Cars: A Reality by 2040

Autonomous vehicles will take over the transportation market in the world by 2040 making up at least 75% of all vehicles to be autonomous by then . It still depends upon many factors that are unique to each country and their Government.

Every country still has to pass this bill allowing for such a revolutionary change. Each country will be liable for the outcome once they start mass experimenting with autonomous vehicles.

On the other hand, self-driving cars will solve a lot of problems for people. It will give them a whole lot of extra time where they can work creatively or on their own. It will save personnel and man-management will be easier. While all these things seem smooth on paper, there is still some time and planning required for it to become a regular reality.

Three-Pronged Design Principle That Will Make Autonomous Vehicles a Possibility

1. Every autonomous vehicle has to sense its surroundings. The human part as a part of driving will only be complete when a vehicle can make last-second decisions on its own. When to swerve, when to brake, when to halt, when and how to navigate, etc.

They need to sense whether or not any car, pedestrian, or anything or anyone else is around them. When on highways, this sensory system needs to be further heightened, for it to avoid any potential accident.

2. Autonomous vehicles need to think intelligently about scenarios. It isn’t just about following the textbook guidelines of driving and taking passengers from one point to another.

Human drivers take a call on the road as per the need of the moment. Be it driving fast at times to avoid a timely and routinely traffic or anticipating a change in weather and combining that information with the road conditions ahead, to decide to halt at a safe place, only to resume the journey once it’s safe again, or any of the other situations that require human intelligence to make quick decisions and think on one’s feet.

Machines or Artificial Intelligence in autonomous vehicles are yet to achieve that with complete accuracy and efficiency. However, training programs and tasks are designed to train them accordingly.

3. Collection of Data and Absorbing Them to Make the Right Decisions – The final task in this three-pronged approach would be to collect a sufficient amount of data over years of observation from human activities and analyze them to form a behaviour that would exactly mimic human behaviour. Whether that would be a replica of a human driver’s intelligence and efficiency is yet to be seen. Only time can tell.

Challenges that Customers Might Face

While presenting these design concepts and offering a new concept to customers might seem exciting, most are still skeptical about the practicality of an autonomous vehicle. Mostly because of the irregularity of its safety control and the lack of ingenuity in the face of danger. However, designers have come up with a 4-part pointer to address these issues and tackle them accordingly.

The first and foremost challenge for the public would be ‘Trust and Confidence.’ Despite all the theoretical models and the research-backed prototypes, there aren’t many live examples of success for the public to completely trust autonomous vehicles.

Therefore, building trust among the larger mass will always be a challenge initially. However, designers, companies, and industrialists hope that with a few demonstrative examples in time, they can win over the trust of the public. But that will take time.

The second challenge would be getting the certifications and validations from automobile companies. While it’s true that most companies, industries, and designers very badly want the autonomous vehicles to be launched en masse, they would still need the proper certifications for everything.

Given the nature and unpredictability of autonomous vehicles, getting such validations might be difficult at first. Since the entire design components might be different, it would require a special check, one that isn’t similar to any IC (Internal Combustion) engine vehicle.

However, given that designers have circled around this issue to pose a challenge in the future from beforehand, they are confident to come up with an easy solution for it.

The third challenge might be something called, “Go-FAST Be Agile”. It means that since there will be a lot of competition once the autonomous vehicle becomes a norm, one has to not only outsmart the others in terms of basic design principles but also bring in additional efficient and attractive features from the get-go.

Automobile companies will have to adapt not only to the new mode of transportation, living up to public expectations, and facing their challenges, but also outrun their competitors. Innovation will always remain the key to this issue.

The fourth and final challenge will be to ‘Secure Connectivity’. Since the majority of the known autonomous vehicles will be electric, ‘Secure Connectivity’ will always be a major factor and a challenge to get it right initially. On the road, somewhere at an offbeat location, a vehicle must still have smooth connectivity. The company producing the vehicles and the designers behind it must ensure that.

Overall, the total autonomous driving process can be divided into three easy sections – Sensing, Thinking, and Acting. The car has to sense everything around it and gather data regarding it; it has to then think for itself as any human would i.e.

Artificial Intelligence; and then finally act accordingly after analyzing the data and finding a suitable solution path. That, in a nutshell, is how Autonomous Vehicles are going to redefine transportation design and principles.