Automotive and Transportation Trends and Predictions

FountainBlue’s April 6 VIP roundtable was on the topic of ‘Automotive and Transportation Trends and Predictions’, hosted by Intel.

Our executives in attendance represented a broad spectrum of entrepreneurs and executives with broad and deep experience around transportation. The conversation ran the gamut between autonomous vehicles to plugging stations to chips and security and AI. Despite the range of topics, our executives agreed on the following:

• Although we have made a lot of impressive advances in the past few years/decade, autonomous vehicles are not quite ready for prime time. The technology, the policies and the public sentiment have significant challenges currently, which need to be overcome before mass adoption takes place, and autonomous driving becomes commonplace.
• Infrastructure challenges such as roads will be barriers to successful transportation and automotive solutions. Mundane things such as sensors on the roads may impact sophisticated solutions such as self-driving cars. Becoming aware of these problems will help facilitate the collaborations and work needed to address the policy, technical, and tactical issues posing barriers to successful and consistent implementation of integrated transportation solutions and systems.
• Perhaps having separate standards for autonomous lanes and human-driver lanes might make sense in the interim, as having a mix of both may more likely create problems.
• AI, ML and other big data software solutions will continue to be integrated with hardware such as chips, sensors, drones, IoT solutions as we work collaboratively to develop future transportation and automotive solutions.
• Balancing privacy, security, and access will become increasingly more complicated and more necessary as automotive and transportation solutions become more sophisticated, and more integrated into our day-to-day lives.

It takes an ecosystem of providers and partners to transform the transportation and automotive industry.

• Entrepreneurs, Corporate Executives, Government Officials, Technologists, Utilities etc., must collaboratively shape, fund and develop transportation and automotive options for the future.
• The interdependencies between technologies and solutions makes it difficult to innovate in a silo, no matter how brilliant the foundational technology.
• The volume of available data (historical and current data from a wide range of sources) coupled with the rapid, real-time changes of that data and the complexity and sophistication of the technologies used (big data, mobile, IoT, sensors) makes it impossible for any one company or organization or government to address all elements of an integrated transportation solution. 

We conclude by agreeing that partnerships across leaders, across companies, across sectors, across technologies will be necessary imperatives. Progress may be slow toward that end, but it is both necessary and inevitable. 

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