The first debate of the symposium focused on the relative potential of flying cars versus autonomous vehicles. GCV contributing editor Tom Whitehouse moderated, while the combatants were Francois Auque, chairman of the investment committee at Airbus Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of the aerospace company, and Jason Ball, managing director at Qualcomm Ventures Europe, which invests on behalf of the mobile chipmaker.
Auque contended we were 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 cited the “gold rush around autonomous vehicle technologies right now”. In addition to Qualcomm Ventures’ interest in what is called “level V autonomy” of vehicles that are completely automated and without human intervention, Ball said investors were increasingly interested in retrofitting solutions for existing vehicles to make them autonomous.
Auque said he identified 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.”
He pointed out that vertical take-off and landing technology is in the best position to allay concerns about environmental and noise pollution in such environments. He also stressed there was already “a lot of experience in flying autonomously on commercial airplanes”, where pilots spend very little time actually flying an 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 was clearly a key challenge, 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 for either technology, and Ball conceded that autonomous vehicles currently 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 huge amount of input in real time.
The closest autonomous vehicles were likely to get to commercial reality can be found in interurban freight transport, Ball said, as urban environments entailed 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 would have an upside in that the urban airspace would not be immediately crowded.
As for the concerns that flying cars may only catch on the developed world, Auque said there were already Uber-like services for helicopters operating in Brazilian cities.
The debate concluded by discussing the major challenges and concerns for both flying and autonomous cars – cybersecurity and air traffic management, with Auque predicting that dense cities with traffic problems were likely to be “very open-minded” about regulatory concerns.
Above: Tom Whitehouse introduces the debate
