Optimized Autonomous Vehicles

A key tenet in my Autonomous Vehicle approach is that each vehicle should be optimized for the load it will be carrying, the transportation mode, and many other characteristics. Transportation is 28% of overall US Energy Usage, so this optimization, along with other improvements in our Autonomous Future, will have a major impact, not only on energy but on our lives.

In the past over 99% of all vehicles had a driver, or pilot, or captain, or engineer, some human controlling the vehicle, no matter what the cargo was, from a loaf of bread to 100 loaded freight cars. Thus each vehicle had to provide not only seating and controls, but also the safety and comfort features for the human pilot.

We are conditioned to think of vehicles as having a driver – it is crucial that we break this meme. This meme imposes major restrictions on the minimum size and other characteristics of vehicles, but we already have examples of Autonomous Vehicles that are smaller than can accommodate a driver:

• Automated warehouse vehicles, such as those produced by Kiva Systems, have already automated warehouses with a whole fleet of suitcase-sized vehicles that are all networked together. They pick up a set of shelves of the correct goods and bring them to a person to pack, and then adaptively manage the shelf locations so the most frequently accessed items are nearby, and the less used ones are farther away. In case you think Kiva Systems is some small company, Amazon.com has bought them, with its vast warehouses, and big plans.
•  Autonomous flying vehicles are becoming very popular, and not just with the military -- you can buy one from Amazon.com for about $20. From the Wired article on the Drone Boom, a $17 standard package provides all the sensors needed to manage a drone. See How I Accidentally Kick Started the Domestic Drone Boom, By Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine, June 22, 2012.
•  And of course fiction has predicted such Autonomous Vehicles in the 1977 Star Wars movie: theMSE-6-series repair droid, sometimes referred to as the mouse droid, was a small, box-shaped, wheeled general purpose Autonomous Vehicle often used for delivery and maintenance purposes.
•  Larger Autonomous Vehicles will also exist, both to carry larger loads, but also for economy of scale and the complexities of higher speeds.

Thus I expect most Autonomous Vehicles will not be sized to carry an individual person, and most will be much smaller. Here are samples of Autonomous Vehicles “today”.

Today 93% of the 246 million vehicles in the US vehicles are personal vehicles: cars, light trucks, and motorcycles.

When we weight that by daily energy usage of 13 million barrels of oil, we still see a 64% predominance of cars and light trucks, but freight jumps to about ¼ of the total energy use. An interesting question is what fraction of the energy usage from those light trucks reflects being used to carry more than just the driver, and how much is due to their poor efficiency.

Imagine what will happen when we are using Autonomous Vehicles to deliver the applications I’ve already talked about: each person’s doses of medications, daily food orders, individual water uses, and the host of applications yet to be invented. I predict that trips involving people will be less than 1%.

Let’s see what optimization might do to change today’s automobile.

Gasoline engines are quite inefficient. “Most steel engines have a thermodynamic limit of 37%. Even when aided with turbochargers and stock efficiency aids, most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18%-20%. ... Electric motors are better still, at around 85-90% efficiency or more.“

Let’s look at how that energy is used in Highway driving, where 20-26% of energy is even delivered to the wheels, and City driving, where only 14-16% of energy is delivered to the wheels.  

Here is a representation of typical vehicle today. Let’s look next at how optimization of Autonomous Vehicles might impact vehicle design.

First, it’s an Autonomous Vehicle, so we can take out the steering wheel, pedals, shifter, and other controls.

Every pound we save means we can make key components lighter, which then saves more weight. That in turn means a smaller engine and drive train, lighter frame, lighter suspension, and smaller tires, and the car just keeps getting lighter – this is an excellent feedback loop.

One of the major benefits of the Autonomous-Ways, or A-Ways, is that we’re only going to operate around other Autonomous Vehicles, so we can assume no collisions, and thus remove the bumpers, crumple zones, and air bags.  That leads to an even lighter engine, drive train, etc.

Other benefits of the A-Ways are no weather, dirt, or other obstructions, and a very flat, even surface. This means a much lighter frame, lighter seat, and we don’t even need inflatable tires or much of a suspension system at all, so everything keeps getting lighter.

Also we don’t need to go 100 miles per hour, or even 55, because we can get onto a Convoy Vehicle to go really fast for longer distances.

That’s another meme we need to get over: why should we assume that the same vehicle that will take us 2 miles to the store at a maximum speed of 35 mph, could also take us 3,000 miles across the country? We don’t assume that for our bicycle, or our inline skates, or our Solowheel.

When I was a boy, at the height of the Cold War, I remember hearing a story about a fiasco in the Soviet Union’s 5 Year Plans. The success of the lighting industry was measured by the total weight of light fixtures produced each year. They couldn’t meet their quotas making normal light fixtures, but they discovered that by making huge chandeliers they could even exceed their quotas, while other industries were falling behind, so the leaders became successful party members. The problem was that there weren’t enough light fixtures to go around, and to make things worse, when they tried to hang the heavy chandeliers in the poorly constructed apartments, the ceilings collapsed – no light for the proletariat. 

I laughed and said that nothing like that could happen in the US because we have a capitalist system.

Fast forward 60 years, and look at today’s cars. In many ways my driver’s seat is more comfortable than my living room sofa. My Chevy Volt weighs almost 2 tons, granted that that includes 435 pounds of batteries, but still. I’m not complaining about the car at all, I really like it, especially using relatively little gasoline -- we're at 86 mpg overall. But it does remind me of the Russian chandeliers, and the power of an industry to go to extremes.

Hopefully our approach to optimizing the Autonomous Vehicles will help solve a lot of these problems

We’re a bit heavier than a bicycle, but we’ve included an engine, a seat, and an enclosed cabin. We’ll consider more changes as we go along.