The end of a status symbol. Interview with Gerald Huff

By Stefan Pabst

We won’t own a self-driving car, we’ll hire one as and when needed. Appearances will therefore become less important. That won’t just affect the people who currently use their cars as symbols of their personality. Manufacturers will also have to get used to totally new customers, says Gerald Huff, a leading software engineer in Silicon Valley.

What do you think traffic in New York City will look like in 25 years’ time?

By that time the era of self-driving cars will have well and truly arrived. All road users will use mobility as a service. We’ll provide details of where we are, where we want to go and for what purpose using a mobile device. A suitable vehicle will then pick us up. However, services like car pooling and car sharing will also be widespread. They’ll help to reduce traffic density, currently the biggest problem in urban transport. That said, it still isn’t clear how these new facilities will interact with public transport.
How will these developments impact on rural areas?

Will self-driving vehicles revive their attractiveness by enabling commuting time to be put to better use?

I think that actually is a possible scenario. One major challenge in commuting is handling the peak times. If that bottleneck can be cleared in an efficient way, regions outside the cities will become more attractive again. The future of commuting illustrates an uncomfortable consequence of the rise of autonomous cars: if commuting time becomes productive and, above all, cheaper, we may paradoxically commute even more. Accordingly, traffic density can only decrease if we develop new automobiles that can carry several people without their having to sacrifice their private sphere. The benefits of car pooling and self-driving cars need to be combined. Because if people still want to travel alone, congestion will not be eliminated even when self-driving cars come along.

Isn’t digitalisation making our working models more and more flexible and constantly reducing the number of traditional 9 to 5 jobs, which automatically distributes the traffic volume better?

These effects are actually becoming gradually more evident, and market forces will boost them further. Uber, the transport network company, already uses so-called “surge pricing” today, with demand setting the price of a trip. That makes trips outside the rush hour more attractive, which, in turn, could speed up the changes in the world of employment.

Virtualisation will soon be so advanced that remote working won’t feel remote any more. With augmented reality glasses, your co-workers will literally be with you. That being the case, what reason do we have to travel? Movement will evolve from a necessity to an option.

When will we travel, then? When we want to visit foreign places, perhaps?

Digitalisation will transform the travel industry as well. There will be travellers who would gladly have virtual travel as a substitute for the genuine experience. For many people, longhaul trips will be quite simply unaffordable in future. It’s not only visits to major cities that are getting more expensive, and for this reason virtual trips will become a real option for millions of people. A number of new business sectors will grow up as a result. You only have to think of the possibilities of visiting cities like Paris as a virtual tourist. The concept will start to get really exciting when these virtual tourists control a real robot locally that will move around Paris in their place and transmit all sensory impressions to them live.

What will become of the automotive industry when people no longer have to drive cars?

Private ownership of cars will plummet. The market will develop towards fleets of self-driving cars. This will change the automotive manufacturers’ customers. The customers will no longer be individuals, but companies that will manage these fleets.

The perception of what’s important in a car will also change. The future will still contain brands that promise a certain status. However, it’s not clear how these niches will develop for self-driving cars: customers’ loyalty to automotive manufacturers will fade significantly because in theory you can book a different vehicle every day. The choice will depend on what we want to use the car for: we’ll choose a luxury vehicle to get to a business appointment, a sporty number when we want to go out of an evening. Going out shopping we may rent the smallest and most efficient vehicle of the lot and, on the return journey, one with room for our purchases – the brand will take a back seat. Competition will then be about the entire product spectrum and the reliability of a fleet.

What role will vehicle design play?

I think this, too, will quite simply be less important. If I just get into the car and it takes me from point A to point B, its appearance plays far less of a role than if I’ve toiled for years to possess it at long last and express something very personal. A self-driving car will not make a statement about me. It’s like a taxi. It has to work and it has to be clean.

Let’s go back to the example of an important business appointment that you’re attending by car. If I want to leave an impression behind I may order a luxury brand to pick me up. That said, the others will know that the car isn’t mine. What status do I express by doing that? It’s evident that I’ve paid more for the trip, but is that enough? If I own a luxury car today, I’ve really achieved it, bought it myself, driven to the appointment myself, and then I meet with the others. That creates a social con- text and communicates something about me as a person. If I arrive with the equivalent car in 20 years’ time, I’ll have selected it on my mobile phone. Maybe we’ll send the same signals as today by doing that, but I doubt it very much.

What’s your opinion on the debate about ethical decisions by self-driving cars when accidents occur?

Today’s developers aim to prevent accidents of all kinds and therefore also to avoid ethical dilemmas. Research is very good at that even now, and it’s getting better all the time. Thought experiments like the trolley problem do not appear to be playing a big part in this development. Personally, I don’t believe that we are talking about realistic problems here. Cars can’t see how many children there are on a school bus or how old the driver of the other vehicle is. If, however, all vehicles were digitally linked, they might be able to exchange this information. But then the risk situations that require such ethical decisions won’t occur in that case, because the communication between the vehicles will prevent a collision. I don’t believe that self-driving cars will ever really make ethical decisions. All their decisions will be based on physical principles.

Gerald Huff is principal software engineer at a leading car manufacturer in Silicon Valley. Prior to that, Huff was director of the Technology Innovation Group at Intuit, exploring the application of emerging technologies to solve problems in the consumer and small-business space. In his keynotes he discusses particularly the impact of and potential solutions to the problem of technological unemployment.