10 Things that will influence the future of transportation

It’s quite difficult to predict the future of urban mobility, both in India and across the world. Technology will play a large part in how the entire transportation industry plays out on land, water and air in the upcoming decades. A look at some of the factors that could decide how you commute in the future…

1. Smart vehicles

   Electric vehicles are not the future. Smart vehicles are. The first person to realize this was billionaire genius Elon Musk. Tesla smart cars are expensive, but state of the art, sleek and sexy. If it was affordable, then everyone would buy a Tesla. A smart car is much like your smartphone using software with all its revolutionary over-the-air updates. That means even after you buy a car, it can keep learning new tricks. Bugs are also fixed seamlessly. Apart from the now-ubiquitous GPS navigation, there are also umpteen sensors and an autopilot functionality which is not exactly the same thing as a driverless car. Of course, if petrol and diesel cars get smarter, they could also survive. While they may have limitations as compared to an electric car, a hydrogen car might prove to be better. Countries are trying to legislate out fossil fuel cars, but history has shown that such things aren’t easy. Especially because of the gigantic fossil fuel deposits that are still in existence. In the end, it won’t be environmentalism or legislation that will dictate the future of urban mobility, but technology. The next big disruptor could well throw everyone’s plans out of the window.

2. Mobile rooms

   The moment a car becomes driverless, it ceases to have the driver’s seat. In fact, it ceases to need kind any kind of seat and conventional travel as we know it is thrown out of the car window. The driverless car then becomes a mobile room that can be used for business, tourism, hospitality and unending long drives. If we do make legislation and technological breakthroughs, then urban mobility would be totally disrupted. You could have large mobile tourist rooms equipped with Virtual Reality-Augmented Reality-Mixed Reality (VR-AR-MR) that would give you a flavour of the history of the place you are passing through and visiting. Business conference rooms on the go could be popular. Like the way India has sleeper buses, you could have a multitude of smart sleeper cars. We would have a huge grid of nationwide smart cars, but could you extend that to a grid of pilotless planes? While the Boeing 737 MAX debacle is on everyone’s minds, we will one day get past that. There is also the science of the ethics of a driverless car: Should an autonomous car save an old lady or a pram with a baby if it has to choose one? That’s where Artificial Intelligence-Machine Learning will be tested to the limit. The car will become a thinking robot.                                                                                             

3. Smart batteries

   Without this, the electric car has no future. Another thing realized by Musk and that’s where Tesla took the lead. The Tesla Model S Long-Range can go up to 600km on a single charge. The lifetime of the battery is 1.6 million km, meaning it can last your lifetime too. Many other electric cars from other companies have also reached the range of a few hundred kilometres. Musk has changed the whole concept of batteries thanks to SolarCity. Tesla is associated with Australia’s Hornsdale Power Reserve, which housed the world’s largest lithium-ion battery and they are increasing capacity by another 50%. Smarter batteries are not only game-changers for cars, but can be for homes and establishments and maybe even the entire energy industry. Panasonic, Amperex and BYD are some of the other large EV battery manufacturers in the world. The 2019 Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to the scientists who developed lithium-ion batteries. Batteries are getting smaller, lasting longer and taking lesser time to charge. Sodium, Fluoride, Magnesium… everyone is looking for the next lithium killer.                                                                                                                                     

4. Charging stations 

   This is a place where India could seriously lag. Post-2014, we are barely catching up with roads, power-LPG connections and toilets. So to have a nationwide electric charging grid will be a truly Herculean task. That’s another reason why 5G in India has been indefinitely delayed due to intense capital expenditure. We may have 5G corridors, but their reach may be limited to urban centres. However we should definitely have large pilot solar-powered charging stations in sunny states like Rajasthan. India is planning to go electric in a big way by 2030. But all those grand plans will fall flat if we don’t have a nationwide charging station grid. That’s another area where Musk has succeeded. Tesla has charging stations in multiple countries. As of last year, there were around 15,000 Tesla Supercharger stalls in more than 1500 locations worldwide. However the Netherlands capital Amsterdam takes the cake with its thousands. It has the highest density of charging stations in the world for any city.

5. Mobile Apps 

   In the 2010s, ride-sharing with Uber and Ola simply took off. GPS navigation and mobile apps meant that every car in the world could become a taxi and anyone who had a driving license could become a professional driver. You didn’t have to leave the comfort of your home to hail a cab. SUVs and autos jumped on the bandwagon. While people had been discussing carpooling for ages, Uber Share just made things that much easier. Of course carpooling apps also came like BlaBlaCar, which made its foray into India. Then there’s “Rent A Bike Bounce” and Rapido, where every bike becomes a taxi, Yulu electric bike etc. Many of these are powered by IoT (Internet of Things) (even the helmet!). There are startups which want to make even things like skateboarding a popular form of urban transit. Lyft tied up with Segway-Ninebot for electric scooters. The types of vehicles that can be used for urban transit is endless. Thanks to GPS, IoT and mobile apps, the types of networks that can be created around them are also endless.

6. Up in the air 

   Thanks to the likes of Flipkart-Amazon and Swiggy-Zomato, the numbers of delivery boys has simply skyrocketed in India. That has proved to be a real game-changer.  But is another disrupter on the way? Could drones replace the delivery boys in the future? Amazon Prime Air launched a few years back and they want their drones to deliver packages to customers within a 10-mile radius within half-an-hour. Interestingly driverless cars also fall within this Amazon delivery division. Delivery drones are already transporting medicines and food all over the world and once even delivered a live kidney for a successful transplant. Boeing has tested a cargo drone with a payload of more than 200kgs. Many companies are exploring this option. Talking of the air, we have Uber Helicopter and that’s another form of transport that could get popular. There are car-planes that have been prototyped and are readying for mass production. In the Hollywood film Back to the Future, one saw the sky full of people driving flying cars. Maybe it will be more like a sky full of driverless drones, copters, planes and cars all zipping across furiously avoiding each other thanks to high-tech sensors.

7. Gen IV N-plants 

   If you take all energy requirements by mankind, then by one estimate, fossil fuels are a whopping 85% of the pie. Out of the remaining, renewables like solar, wind and tidal are quite minuscule. We are reaching our limit with things like hydroelectric power. Hydrogen fuel in many cases is still compressed and transported using fossil fuels. In fact the first Hydrogen cells had a high carbon imprint during the manufacturing process in the first place. While alternatives may come in the future, right now nuclear is the only option we have. The old nuclear plants were inefficient and had disasters like Chernobyl. The latest ones called Gen IV are safer and more efficient despite being cheaper. Bill Gates is one of their advocates. Right now the transportation industry is controlled by the fossil fuel network. While you can have solar charging stations in sunny regions, a replacement may come only in in the combination of hydrogen and electric vehicles with small compact Gen IV nuclear plants powering charging stations in non-sunny regions.

8. Newer forms of transport 

   The better the public transport, the lesser there is a need for private transport. That’s been a battle largely won by the personal car as this is still the most popular form of transport if a person can afford it. While trains, buses and planes have been around for ages, metros are really taking off, off late. In fact, by last accounts India has about a dozen metros with another dozen in the construction/planning stage with more proposed. But maybe we’ll need some new form of technology for public transport to totally break ahead of private. Things like maglev trains are path-breaking but highly expensive. Something that could really catch on is Hyperloop. Musk’s The Boring Company is building one under 200-acre Las Vegas Convention Centre. When completed, visitors will be able to travel at 250kmh: A 15-minute walk would end up taking about just a minute. There are other proposals like elevated cycle paths, urban transport pods and long moving walkways across cities.

9. Communication versus transportation

   It was sci-fi writer Arthur C Clarke who said that the better personal communication got, the lesser there was a need for personal transportation. Taking it to its logical end, if personal communication reaches perfection, then there’s no need for transportation. We are reaching a stage where holographic 3D conferencing could be quite realistic and effective. Coupled with real-time collaborating tools which facilitate the instantaneous exchange of documents, files and videos, in the long run this could greatly reduce business travel. As VR-AR-MR gets more realistic and widespread, people could enjoy exotic locales and tourist spots from the comfort of their homes. You could also use that to complete your education without going to school or college. In sports, more fans watch key matches in large screens rather than actual stadiums. Transportation for both business and pleasure could come down with the advance of technology.

   

10. Population versus automation 

    For most of the civilized world, the population has been growing and the transportation industry desperately trying to keep up the pace. World population growth peaked in the late 1960s and hovered at around 2%. Since then it is steadily declining and is around 1% today. It may well become half of even that in 20-30 years. At the same time automation is on the rise. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can handle a lot of repetitive tasks that humans do while actual robots physical robots are replacing manpower. How will a world of declining humans and growing robots look like? Will transportation decrease or increase? EM Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops”, written way back in 1909, talks of an “omnipotent global machine” which takes care of all of mankind’s “bodily and spiritual needs”. People largely message each other all the time. Sounds familiar? Since communication is perfect, transportation nears zero and many people live permanently below the ground in a standardized room in the short story. Possible? Make a prediction about the future of the global transportation industry only at your own peril!