The first debate of 2017’s GCV 2017 Symposium took place on the main stage this morning and focused on the relative potential of flying cars versus autonomous vehicles.
Global Corporate Venturing contributing editor Tom Whitehouse was moderator, while the combatants were Francois Auque, chairman of the investment committee at Airbus Ventures, the corporate VC arm of aerospace company Airbus; and Jason Ball, managing director at Qualcomm Ventures Europe, which invests on behalf of mobile chipmaker Qualcomm.
Auque contended that we are likely to see flying cars become commercialised and hover around cities before we see fully autonomous self-driving ground motor vehicles. Ball argued the contrary position – that autonomous cars will become the predominant means of transport.
Dressed as a hybrid superhero with a Superman mantle and a Batman mask, Whitehouse opened the debate by alluding to 2016 blockbuster Superman vs Batman, where Superman is “essentially a flying car”, while Batman drives a “semi-autonomous but not quite completely autonomous car.”
Ball started off by citing the “gold rush around autonomous vehicle technologies right now”. In addition to Qualcomm Ventures’ interest in what is called “Level V autonomy” of vehicles which are completely automated and run on their own without any need for human intervention, Ball said investors are increasing interested in retrofitting solutions for existing vehicles to make them autonomous.
Auque explained that he identifies opportunities around low-altitude space in dense urban environments, saying: “Within this type of environment what is still very much available as an option is the air.”
Auque pointed out that vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) technology is in the best position to allay concerns about environmental and noise pollution in such environments.
The Airbus Ventures chairman also stressed there is already “a lot of experience in flying autonomously on commercial airplanes,” where pilots spend very little time actually flying the aircraft, which runs mostly on autopilot.
Given all these technological factors, Auque suggested that when developing flying cars for use in a dense urban environment it would be “easier, though not necessarily cheaper, to develop a fully autonomous flying car than an autonomous vehicle on the road.”
Ball responded by raising concerns about the short duration of drone flights at present, and although Auque recognised that energy storage is clearly one of the key challenges in that area, he suggested that short flight may be acceptable within dense urban environments.
“Battery efficiency would be a key driver,” Auque said. “[Flying cars] will not be used for medium or long distance. That makes our expectation more realistic.”
Whitehouse raised a question about the public readiness of either technology, and Ball conceded that at the current juncture autonomous vehicles in development are probably “not as smart as they should be in a dense urban environment, such as central London.”
Ball also pointed out that the gap is a “human-robot interaction problem” and that there are still quite a few computational challenges for computers in autonomous vehicles to process and understand a massive amount of input in real time.
The closest autonomous vehicles will likely get to commercial reality can be found in interurban trucking transport, Ball said, as urban environments entail bigger challenges.
In terms of urban air mobility, Auque also discussed the problem of the cost and prospective availability flying vehicles in both the developed and developing world, but pointed out that the initial high cost will have an upside in that the urban airspace will not be immediately crowded.
As for the concerns that flying cars may be only catch on the developed world, Auque stated that there are already Uber-like services for helicopters operating in Brazilian cities.
The debate concluded by discussing what are major challenges and concerns for both flying and autonomous cars – cybersecurity and air traffic management, with Auque predicting that dense cities with traffic problems are likely to be “very open-minded” about regulatory concerns.
