Thank you very much for inviting me to appear before you and for giving me the opportunity to share my opinions on the field in which I have been working for more than 30 years.
We often have to ask ourselves questions about the motivation that drives us to make autonomous vehicles. Let's first look at our transportation system and our mobility issues.
In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a more inefficient transportation system than the one we currently have. Our transportation system is based on a business model that relies on the sale of vehicles and the individual ownership of cars. Population growth is constant, and part of the population moves to larger cities at the expense of the regions. In economics, the just-in-time method has been used. All goods that were transported by train are now being transported on our roads by road trains, which has contributed to destroying our road infrastructure. We just have to look at the current state of our roads to see it.
The occupancy rate of the vehicles is to the tune of 5%. Furthermore, 80% of people still travel individually in vehicles. You just have to compare the average weight of a person with the average weight of a vehicle, which is increasing because, according to statistics, people are buying more and more SUVs or vans: this is not going in the right direction at all.
There are still pollution-related issues. More than 80% of vehicles still have combustion engines.
In addition, vehicles are used for approximately one hour per day. Once again, the vehicle usage rate is about 5%, which is completely ineffective. Ask any business owner if they would buy equipment that they would use for only 5% of the time. Nobody would invest money for that.
As we can see, this is significant.
Fortunately, the transportation sector is currently experiencing a revolution around three major pillars. Clearly, there is the electrification of propulsion systems, but I will not talk much about it today. There is also the automation of driving, and the whole area of connectivity, of telecommunications systems. Those three aspects are bringing about a revolution in the transportation sector. This revolution will have major repercussions both in terms of business models and in terms of possible solutions to mobility problems. However, it is up to us to make drastic decisions in order to change course and improve our transportation systems. Like it or not, despite the digitization of our society and the importance of information technology, we remain physical beings manipulating physical objects and we will always have the need to move around.
I will now talk about automated driving.
Why do we want to have autonomous vehicles? There are two major reasons.
First, we want to improve road safety, because computers have a much faster response time than humans. In addition, because of the diversity of on-board sensors and current processing systems that are highly advanced and that continue to improve, including through artificial intelligence, we can come up with solutions to improve road safety and reduce the number of accidents, injuries and fatalities.
The second reason is that autonomous vehicles, as far as the concept of robotic taxis is concerned, can help us reduce the number of vehicles on the roads. Traffic congestions is really one of the major problems, besides the aspects related to the danger of travelling by road.
Telecommunications is also an interesting aspect because it allows us to consider the sharing of intelligence between vehicles and road infrastructures. So far, car manufacturers have invested all their efforts in including embedded intelligence in vehicles, while transportation agencies, departments and all public agencies that deal with road infrastructure have invested very little in their infrastructure to make them smarter. In the current situation, there is an imbalance. We need to further harness the communication capacity in order to try to optimize the sharing of intelligence between infrastructure and vehicles.
In terms of the recommendations, I think we urgently need serious and detailed work on regulations and legislation to accommodate these new vehicles, vehicles that can communicate and drive autonomously.
In particular, in the short term, it is essential to oversee the way pilot projects are carried out on public roads and to invest in the development of vehicle testing and validation procedures, including through Transport Canada and testing sites such as the ones we have in Blainville, north of Montreal.
I will stop there.