Page 96 - Big Data Analytics for Connected Vehicles and Smart Cities

76 Big Data Analytics for Connected Vehicles and Smart Cities Connected and Autonomous Vehicles 77

capabilities of a smart city should extend to the original origin of visitors to the
city and be able to understand where they’re coming from, why they are travel-
ing, and what they do when they get to the smart city.
As is the case with all emerging technologies, there is a temptation to iden-
tify a solution and then look for a problem. So the really smart city would apply
services based on identified and defined needs, issues, problems, and objectives.
The Emerging Technologies Forum of ITS America [14] is working to
provide support materials on this subject. A group of people drawn from both
the public and private sectors is defining a checklist of services that would be
expected in a smart city and a catalog of use cases that can be incorporated into
smart city plans. A use case is simply a description of a problem that can be ad-
dressed and how it can be done.
It is likely that autonomous vehicles have an extremely important role to
play in the future smart city and that the introduction of this technology will
have a dramatic effect both on how we use transportation and, ultimately, on
urban land use. It is likely that progress with autonomous vehicles will be mir-
rored by progress in back-office automation, as our understanding of demand
and operating conditions enables a higher proportion of automated event trig-
gering. The smart city of tomorrow will make use of an internet of transporta-
tion to provide a higher level of decision support to transportation operators.
Perhaps we will reflect on the current situation in 50 years’ time and wonder
what the transportation profession and automotive manufacturers were think-
ing in allowing people to actually drive vehicles?

4.12 The Likely Effect of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles on
the Automotive Industry

Gartner predicts, “by 2020, there will be a quarter of a billion connected vehi-
cles on the road” [15], enabling new in-vehicle services and automated driving
capabilities There is a general sense that the future direction of the automotive
industry is becoming clearer and that technology will define the future. As we
discussed at the beginning of the chapter, the electronics content of the auto-
mobile has been increasing steadily since the 1950s, which has set the scene for
a much more active involvement of the IT industry in the traditional automo-
tive business.
This is interesting since typically the automotive industry has focused
on developing and providing robust technology, well-proven products that are
reliable enough to avoid large-scale recalls. Automotive manufacturers clearly
understand that the average vehicle will stay on the road in the U.S. fleet for an
average of 11.5 years [16] and that any technology advances have to be sustain-
able enough to endure for that length of time. However, there are a number of