UNIVERSITY TUNKU ABDUL RAHMAN

SUNGAI LONG CAMPUS

UEME4363 INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE

ASSINGMENT TOPIC:

What is the future trend? Are we going into autonomous electric

cars? Discuss

NAME : Lo Rui Ann

ID : 1302561

COURSE&YEAR : ME Y4S3

LECTURER NAME : Prof. Dato’ Dr Goh Sing Yau

 CONTENTS PAGE NUMBER

Introduction………………………………………………………………... 1 - 2

Short history of AVs……………………………………………………….. 3

Level of automation of AVs……………………………………………….. 4

How does AV works……………………………………………………….. 4 - 5

Discussion of AVs in many aspects

Safety and prevent crashes…………………………………………5 - 6

Traffic congestion…………………………………………………...6

Promote taxi and reduce car ownership………………………….. 7

Road capacity………………………………………………………..7

Value of time………………………………………………………... 8

Land use…………………………………………………………….. 8

Environmental……………………………………………………….8 - 9

Future trend and predictions……………………………………………….9 - 11

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………12 - 11

References……………………………………………………………………13 - 15
Introduction

The automobile and transportation invention has indeed shaped the whole society in many
ways on how we travel, build the cities and infrastructure or create a new industry, affecting the
condition that where we live. There are innovative technologies present in the segment such as
communication and robotics, which lead a substantial influence on our daily lifestyle in the way
of transportation. In the recent trend, throughout the yearly automotive research and development,
many organizations are now gradually racing towards complete and full autonomous vehicles with
in such a way that this technology will not require any driver to control the car. These technologies
have brought to the further development of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology which have
several main objectives such as to reduce car road accident, energy wastage, earth pollution and
congestion.

In despite that idea of driverless vehicles has been arisen for more than 10 years, the huge
amount of costs have been a hinder for the large-scale production (Fagnant et al., 2015). There has
been a rapid pace for research and development efforts to bring the general concept of the AV to
become successful. For example, the Google car has brought AVs to the focus of the public
(Guizzo., 2011, Markoff., 2010). Besides, the automotive industry has spent their research and
development cost around €77 billion worldwide which the focus was to stay innovative and
competitive (Niewwenhuijsen., 2015)

Figure 1. Prediction of autonomous vehicles specifications at year 2020 (Knight., 2013)

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The fast innovation of communication technology and the requirement to keep up to the increasing
human population in developed countries has increase potential to make AVs a good business
sector (Hong et al., 2008). Several scholars have gave out warning to say that transportation
landscape is rapidly transforming due to the ideas and technologies like social networking
technologies, smart phones trend and as well as AVs (Anderson., 2014) . For instance, Uber
nowadays is changing the cities in such a way that taxi firms are struggling to keep their business
good and at the same time remains very competitive. On the next, Manyika et al. (2013) stated that
vehicle automation is on the top ten list innovative and outperforming technologies at the future.

As a consequence of close and great competition between car manufacturers, the year 2020
has been said as a good year to bring out the commercial AVs to the general whole market (Petit.,
2015). Figure 1 describe a competition overview among the popular car makers. There is high
probability to predict that current middle of the century will become the years of the AV to become
fruity. In regard to latest deployment adoption of previous smart technologies in the vechiles, such
as hybrid-electric drive and automatic transmission. There is forecast to be made that AVs are
believed to get around 50 % of vehicle sales and 40 % of all vehicle travel by 2040 (Litman., 2015).

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Short history of AVs

The first attempting idea of autonomous vehicles started around at early 1920s and finally
got the momentum started to regain in the 1980s. At that time, some researchers were successful
to develop an automated highway systems (Weber., 2014, Fenton., 1991). This development has
made the possible for the connection of semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles with the
highway infrastructure.

The development of AVs are largely due to the great and restless research made by the
defense sector known the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (Blasch.,
2006). Not only that, Google’s driverless car produce a huge role model to the AV sector and
attracted a lot of talent from all over the whole. At July 2015, Google’s driverless cars have the
record of over one million miles driving, provided that only 14 small traffic accidents on the roads
were happened. In all cases, it means that the AV itself was not the one to be blamed, rather that
it was either the fault to drive the car manually or the driver who to be blamed (Google., 2015).
The first accident of the Google car happened on Valentine’s Day of 2016. On the incident, the
Google car hit the side of a public bus in the Silicon Valley city, which located at Mountain View
(Muir., 2016).

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Levels of automation in AVs

These are crucial aspect for all the people to understand the level of automation that can be
classified from none to fully automation. NHTSA has classified the level of autonomous vehicle
in five levels (NHTSA., 2013):

Figure 2. NHTSA levels of Vehicle automation

 No-Automation (Level 0). The driver has to control the vehicle such as turn the steering,
step on the brakes, throttle and so on.
 Function specific automation (Level 1). There are some independent control functions such
as pre-charged brakes or electronic stability control are automated.
 Combined function automation (Level 2). There are more than two primary control
functions are automated such as adaptive cruise control with lane centering.
 Limited self-driving automation (Level 3). The driver can put down full control on safety
critical functions and let the vehicle to drive on its own. Driver need to keep track for any
changes in any situation that require for the transition to driver control under certain traffic
or environmental conditions.
 Full self-driving automation (Level 4). The vehicle is designed to monitor road conditions
on its own. The vehicle will perform safe and critical driving operation for the entire trip.

How does AV work?

In general working principles, AVs normally operated on three category design known as
‘‘sense-plan-act’’ which could be found in plenty of robotic systems nowadays (Behere et al., 2015,

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Diclemente et al., 2014). Nowadays, a huge challenges are for AVs in understanding all the
complicated and dynamic driving environment. Besides, AVs are pre-equiped with a lot of radars,
digital sensors, vision camera and many more. These help to collect raw information from the near
environment in the surrounding. After that all the captured data would be served as input into the
software for the calculation and at the same time recommend the suitable action to be taken such
as acceleration, lane changing, and overtaking (Farhadi et al., 2009). Essentially, there are need of
combination of unique surveillance technologies to solve such as a challenging task. Normally,
this task is coped by a combination implementation of radar technology, lidar system, as well as
mono or stereo camera system.

Discussion of AVs in many aspects

The main purpose of the existing of transportation is to help in order to prosper the societies,
at the same time in reality it cannot be avoid to come in relation to negative issues such as pollution,
as well as car crash accidents, that also lead to human casualties. A lot of studies are now predicting
the costs that come in term with vehicles that under human driven (Parry et al., 2007). Those
incurred costs are difference from the direct costs spent like the cost of petroleum, vehicle
maintenance fee, vehicle registration fee, licensing and public transport fees. The externality cost
can be said as a hidden cost that bring on society as a whole one. The externality cost will include
costs, for instance car crash accidents, security, traffic jam and environment degradation. AV
technology are potentially known by public to have the ability to greatly reduce many of these
negative externalities from existing. The purpose of coming out with the AVs can bring out
additional advantages. For example like helping to increase accessibility in transportation, mobility
and also improve land use. Despite that there are several disadvantages that in related with AVs,
but it is largely believed that the disadvantages are greatly outweighed by the potential advantages
in the future.

AVs to promote safety and prevent crashes

In the United States year 2010, the statistics for road accidents is a shock for all people.
The amount was around 40,000 people were killed. Not only that, 3.9 million people are injured
in car accident, and 24 million vehicles are getting damages. The result brought out that tangible
and also with intangible costs that made up to $277 billion (Blincoe et al., 2015). This cost causes
burden that come up with the ripple effect which bring an huge impact on productivity, legal court

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fee, workplace losses, medical fees, emergency service fee, insurance and administration fee and
property losses.

Nowadays, the trend of the number of air accident crashes that happened in United States
is greatly due to the adoptive innovation of new technologies like airbags of passenger and river,
anti-lock brake system, popular system like electronic stability control and head-protection side
air bags as well as forward collision warnings (NHTSA., 2012, IIHS., 2010, Jermakian., 2011).
Those features and car system will be carried out in every AVs. In this research, human error is
the most blamed factor for causing over ninety percent of crashes in the world (Maddox., 2012).
Hence, AVs can be used to prevent or reduce a considerable number of car crashes, that will
proceed to eliminate the traffic delays that all now considered a very troublesome issue to all people
(Anderson et al., 2007).

Traffic Congestion

Anderson et al. (2007) have come up with several factors that are related to AVs which could affect
congestion in positively and negatively matter. The first one is to reduce delayness of traffic due
the declination of the number of vehicle crashes. The second is to enhance vehicle throughput and
the third to change the total vehicle-kilometer-traveled (VKT) which mean that there is an
anticipated reduction of car crashes that eventually will result in fewer delays of traffic, after that
will lead transport system to have higher reliability. In fact, AVs could be connected in order to
solve the issues of congestion. From that, Dresner and Stone (2004) has proposed a reservation
based algorithm system for reducing and coping with the traffic congestion, especially at
intersections when AVs are connected. From the system, results states that reservation-based
system which are implemented for connected AVs can do up to three times better performance
than traffic lights. Therefore, it can gradually cope with the situation that has more congested
condition. On the other hand, Dresner and Stone (2007) said that as the number of AVs that are
driven the road are getting increasing, traffic delays will reduce towards to the levels that are
presented on their previous research. It’s clear to understand AV technology will obtain a good
effect on solving the traffic congestion problem.

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AVs in promoting Taxi and reduce car ownership

The invention of AV technologies can be transform into the concept like driverless taxis or
car-sharing program. As a consequence, driverless taxis are predicted to become more and more
cheaper if the driverless taxis are being mass-volume invented and put into service. This scenario
will after all could discourage people to buy car. The program scheme of driverless taxis is as good
as to car-sharing program which could become a good business model. This is because AVs can
help to improve car sharing schemes as they can hold up to multiple persons when there is demand
(Fagnant et al., 2015).

Besides, people from all households are able to discover driverless taxis more often and
convenient. It is cheaper to hire a driverless taxis rather than buying a car. In addition, for the car-
sharing scheme, driverless taxis fee will not be costly. This is due to the fact that driverless taxis
do not have the annual fixed costs and the maintenance fees. All incurred fees are normally in
relation with car-sharing fees and parking fees. The car-sharing has been discovered to make VKT
become lower in market of United States market (Martin et al., 2011). Cheaper rides will be slowly
come out by new demands from all people, especially those from poor family who cannot afford
to buy car.

AVs and Roads’ capacity

The technology of AV is able to perform acceleration and braking with finely tuned
maneuvers when moving on the road, since the AVs are able to constant in monitoring the
surrounding environment and traffic condition at all times. Hence, AVs are capable to move fast
and rapidly at the same time maintain shorter distance, also known as lower headways. Aside from
that, semi-autonomous car are equipped with adaptive cruise control (ACC), which has already
perform quite a remarkable function (Ploeg et al., 2011). AVs will not affect the safety even for
the lower headways function therefore, it is likely to witness platoon of AVs cruising on the road
normally. Therefore, the throughput, or roads capacity will greatly increase (Fernandes et al, 2012).
There are some studies shows AVs are connected which lead to few signals delay and increased
road capacity (Fajardo et al, 2011).

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AVs and value of time

During the interval of cruising inside AVs , drivers are free from any physical and mental
activity to drive the car. Therefore, drivers can make used their free time on engaging some
productive activities on the route. Hence, this could allowing the drivers to reduce the value of
time travel losses. (Anderson et al, 2007).

AVs and land use

AVs could make some huge impacts on the land-use behavior by allowing the land value
to increase gradually at the surrounding of central city where there are many job opportunities
available such as banking and administration, financial market and many other services. The
starting invention of automobiles in the early of 20th century caused the existence of household
residential area. The relationship between AVs and land use are complexed. For example, the AVs
could facilitate a trend to use the wide and low-density land-use patterns at the region surrounds
of metropolitan regions. In other meaning, AVs could facilitate further growth of one small
population area and may further expand into more widen population areas.

Next, the AV technology also remove the necessity for parking spaces especially in the big
cities because the parking space can be freed up for other development and planning. After that,
AVs could help to stimulate the growth of central districts due to previously parking facilities has
already consume huge spaces. Shoup (2005) predicted that the total area given to parking space
nowadays on about 31 % of district region. For expectation, everyone would most likely to witness
more populated urban area, more infrastructure and much lesser parking spaces with the adoption
of level 4 AVs technology. (Anderson et al, 2014).

AVs and environment in term of energy and emission

Anderson et al. (2014) has stated out two factors that make the impact of AVs on the environment
to be either good or bad:

 Fuel efficiency of AVs.

 Carbon-intensity and emissions of the fossil fuel to power AVs

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Before the AVs have been invented, there is advancement of vehicle design as well as engine
efficiency in order to reduce the fuel consumption. For the typical passenger cars in the market
now, fuel consumption was getting near to be halved in contrast to the old car model at 30 years
ago (Alson et al., 2014). The picking up of AV technology nowadays at levels 1, 2, and 3 will
promote the optimization of driving technology, also known as eco-driving. For instance, eco-
driving technologies resulted in smoother cruise control and firm and steady acceleration and
deceleration. Eco-driving is proved to promote fuel economy around 4 % to 10 %. Even there is
more optimistic prediction that said the fuel efficiency can up to 39 % (Atiyeh., 2010).

AVs has the ability to communicate their maneuvers and actions with each other in to make
the idle time lesser, meanwhile to improve traffic and driving performances. Seeing from afar, a
huge pack of AVs that would not stop or slows down suddenly will be similar of a moving train.
This will resulted in lower peak speeds, which is to improve fuel economy and on the other hand
greater effective speeds will be obtained, which is improving travel time (Folsom., 2012, Lu et al.,
2014).

On other perspective, the high safety of AVs will make the car manufacture to turn the
AVs into lightweight vehicles from car. This is because car manufacture will put a lot of safety
efforts to promote accident avoidance. Hence, light-weight AVs are a promising technology due
to lesser fuel consumption. In general for a typical vehicle, There is 20 % of the car weight is used
for the construction of safety-related features (NRC., 2010). From engineering perspective, 10-
percent deduction of weight can reduce around 6 to 7 percent fuel consumption (Anderson et al,
2014, Brooker et al., 2013, US-DOE., 2011, US-EPA., 2013).

Predictions and future trend

Up to today, the technology of AV is still at the testing stage. There are quite a number of
prototype AVs are performing in such a way that the vehicles at 10 years ago could not seem to
achieve it. The AVs from the Google firm have completed up to 700,000 miles. The Google AVs
did not cause any accident during all the mileage. (Davies, 2015). Besides that, the top leading
Germany automotive companies, Mercedes Benz and Audi have tested their AVs. For instance, a
autonmous vehicle, RS7 Audi equipped with 560 horsepower is highly capable to reach top speed
up to 150 miles/hour on the road surface (Eckardt, 2015) .

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 Aside from that, the Ministry of Transport in the German in these few years has announced
to initiate a project in order to convert a part of the A9 highway that is located between Berlin and
Munchen. The part of the highway will be used a research track for the autonomous vehicles. On
that highway, devices that used for autonomous vehicles communication will be installed and
portion of the frequencies band of radio communication between vehicles will be removed.
(Ulieriu, 2015). Not only that, there are already many closely-related projects are progressed and
well developed at many countries, however there is nobody has attempt to use a highway portion
like the one between Berlin and Munchen. This can be said that the Germans have good
determination and strong will to transforming the transportation industry as well as AVs
technology to become better one. In other company, Nissan automotive company has construct a
plan to provide their consumers, fully AVs by the year 2020. (Davies, 2015)

Moreover, other popular automotive maker such as Ford, Jaguar, Tesla and Land Rover
are making prediction that they will come out with their own respective fully AVs onto the public
on next five to ten years. (Hars, 2010) This AV technology is expected to come over a steady
increase between 2020 and 2035, on that period many people are able to access to the AVs. (Davies,
2015). The rate of accidents are expected to be reduce greatly, due to the implementation of these
AVs. Therefore, when the accident rate is slowly diminish, less repair would be need and the
people can live in more safe environment. Another possible prediction is that there will be a new
autonomous system for the truck and there is no need for professional truck driver to control the
truck.

Typical Americans use their time about 111 hours in a year to drive in the traffic. (INRIX,
2015) The gradual advancement of AVs will relieve those driver from struggle to drive the car.
Instead, they can use their time spent in traffic beneficially to do some efficient and productive
activities such as reading, write and send email, do report and so on. At the beginning of year 2040,
there is a forecast to estimate that AVs will be the human major transportation method. The
prediction said that there would be up to 75% of vehicles will become fully autonomous at this
period. (IEEE, 2012) Numerous things will change due to the fully AVs. This is due to autonomous
vehicles are able park themselves in much closer to each other, so that a lot of parking space will
be freed. (Manyika, et al., 2013). Furthermore, another major change will be the AV cars’ design,

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which would be modified in a way that there are forward-viewing positioned seats, the old car
specification such as reverse mirrors, throttle and the steering will not be available anymore.

The fully AVs will change the human perception on vehicle ownership as private property.
At now, research said that a lot of cars were unused about 95% of the time. Therefore, the
implementation of AVs as shared vehicles or taxis, the number of vehicles trend in the whole world
will be greatly decline. As the consequence, the road surface will be improved, and increased
comfort during in the traffic. If the people are no longer owning a vehicle as private property,
garages and car dealerships will not be needed anymore, even for bus stations as well. There will
be land area in a lot of locations that are suitable metropolitan development. In addition, the lesser
number of vehicles travel on the road and together with eco-friendly AVs will reduce the emission
of pollutant since AVs will be powered by electric. As the result, it would also eliminate the large
scale usage of gasoline and oil in automobiles. (Manyika, et al., 2013)

Conclusion

It is believed that most number of AVs are likely to be powered by electric at the future
timeline. This statement is supported by CEO of Tesla incorporation, Elon Musk. He made out his
point to believe that half of all car production in the world will be electric by 2027, and almost all
will be autonomous. This will contribute a positive effect on the environment.

AVs have been in the research in some decades but it is high active in the research during
these past five years. There are lot of efforts delivered by universities and manufacturers in order
to make AVs to get closer upon readiness. AVs are believed by the experts to be considered low
transportation costs. In the estimation, AV has impacts in terms of crash savings, travel time
reduction, fuel efficiency, and parking benefits can be amounted to $2000 to $4000 per annum per
AV (Fagnant et al., 2015). Although AV is still under “infancy” stage. There still is a long way
road to go before the maturity, implementation as well as mass release to market are ready to be
completed.

The AV path is facing problems and challenges. The detection and perception to
environment is the biggest challenge for AV to handle reliable and safe driving. There are
numerous of research questions that need to be answered. The research question somehow is not
limited to customer acceptance, social impacts, ethical issues, planning, policy and so on. Other

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than that, software issues, like system security and integrity have also emerged as serious challenge
to be coped with. There are also a number of policy challenge in order for policymakers to regulate
many AVs with various operating limitations. It is importance for policymakers to make sure that
drivers comply and aware of these AVs capabilities and could operate them in a safety manner.
(Sivaraman., 2013).

AVs undeniably will become an important role model in the latest transport systems at the
near future. In addition to such rapid development and advancement of this AVs transportation
systems, the education firms must align themselves together with those arisen technologies.
Transportation and traffic engineering education firms must update their curriculum courses from
time to time in order to make sure that they deliver more and sufficient diversify subjects including
environmental software development, communication technologies, energy sustainability and
electrical engineering to keep pace with the AVs development.

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