Transport Committee on March 28th, 2018

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

We'll move on to Mr. Iacono, please.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My thanks to the witnesses for being here today.

I understand the importance of being proactive on this issue. I agree with my colleague Mr. Aubin. I love driving cars. What will happen to the Ferrari of tomorrow? Will it exist only so that we can admire its style?

Still, I have some doubts about the automobile. Even today, the automobile can be perceived by outsiders as a sign of wealth. I continue to believe that the need to own a vehicle will not diminish.

Congestion is already a problem. How can autonomous vehicles overcome this problem?

My question is for one of you three, and I would like the answer to be short.

[Bern Grush]

All of my work says that car ownership would still be 25% of all vehicles at the best. There is no way that car ownership is going to go away completely. I actually think it will be fifty-fifty.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

So, do you agree that we will have to build special roads for autonomous vehicles?

[Bern Grush]

In the end, no, but in the interim, yes. There needs to be some degree of thought and separation in these first 15 or 20 years. One of the biggest risks is that we will build something that's going to be for 10 or 15 years that we then don't need anymore, so there is a double hit here, a double expense.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Could you explain to me whether the following scenario is possible?

Suppose I am in an autonomous vehicle, and suddenly I'm on a public road and the vehicle stops. At that point, is it possible for the vehicle to function as a regular car? It would be sort of like the cruise control option we have today. Would it be possible to have a dual system, an autonomous vehicle with some of the features of today's automobile?

[Bern Grush]

Yes, those already exist. Those are called “level 3” in those five SAE levels. Level 3 is called “conditional automation”. You can turn it on, and it drives for you. When you don't want it to drive—for example, if you're in a place where it can't drive—then you turn it off, and you can drive. Those already exist.

[Mark Aruja]

I may have a bit of a different perspective, and let me tell you why. When you own a fleet of delivery vehicles, you can buy an application to track all of those vehicles. If someone stops at a Tim Hortons for more than 15 minutes, it will tell you. That technology is in your cellphone.

That technology, I believe, is going to be far more adoptable today, rather than grade separation and all of those things. We can put that into driving cars today to prevent going into a lane that has, let's say, autonomous vehicles in it. We have the technology today to do that, and we're implementing it today for UAVs. We're just putting a propeller onto the cellphone to manage it.

One of the things that was mentioned by Bern is called geofencing. This technology is now widespread out there. It makes sure that autonomous systems or unmanned systems do not go past a geographical barrier, and it goes right into the control system. The technology is here today. It is very simple to adopt it in a manually driven car.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

This week, witnesses have told us that the infrastructure to accommodate autonomous vehicles was not entirely necessary, but desirable. Manufacturers are designing their products on the assumption that such infrastructures will be poorly developed.

First, is it possible to do without specific infrastructure, or not?

Second, what kind of infrastructure is needed? Is having smart cities an advantage?

[Bern Grush]

I think it would be an advantage to have a smart city. I have to caution everybody in the room that these smart city ideas are new in the last couple of years, and they call for changes that would cost trillions of dollars. The city I come from can't fix its potholes, so I don't know how we're going to do this kind of infrastructure that you're describing, which is why the manufacturers in the autonomous space are saying they will develop systems that require no changes.

The problem is that if virtually all the cars are automated at some point in 30 to 40 years, but 10% to 20% are not, how will those last few cars survive in that environment? This is unresolved.

Your question is a very good one. There hasn't been a pathway to that solution yet.

[Mark Aruja]

You're going to have a shift from talking about cars to talking about data, and the UAV industry has made that transition, because the money is in the data. Cars are going to be a commodity. When the day comes that it's a shared system and it just shows up, you have no brand allegiance and you don't care what colour it is. You just care that it gets you there. There'll be no more attachment to it.

The data will drive it. The data is going to be where the money is, and cities and jurisdictions will need to figure out what slice of that revenue stream they need. We had this discussion in the case of Netflix. Where is that industrial Internet of things? Where is the carve-out on the taxes to support that infrastructure for the public good?

The discussion 10 years from now is going to have nothing to do with cars. I suggest it's going to be about the data moving on those networks, and those cars will be just a data source and a data sink.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you.

Do you want two minutes, Michael?

Go ahead.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

This is more of a comment.

When I listen to testimony, I wonder if the federal government has its infrastructure funding program set up right. For example, the public transit infrastructure fund, a $3.5 billion fund, is putting money into renewing bus fleets. In 2012 the TTC retired their last General Motors fishbowl bus that was purchased in the 1980s. These buses last for 20 to 30 years.

I hear about automation and the elimination of jobs and I listen to people like Mark Carney, who was referring to a Bank of England report that 15 million jobs in the U.K. are going to disappear. PricewaterhouseCoopers reported last year that 38% of all jobs in the United States will be eliminated in the next 12 years because of automation. I hear about the rapid transformation of vehicular traffic. Are we making the right capital investments by purchasing buses in our transit fleets in our large cities?

I also wonder about what happens to all these bus drivers and jobs and everything else.

It's more of a comment and something for us to think about as we embark on this study.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you to our witnesses. We very much appreciated your information.

We will suspend for a moment while our other witnesses come to the table.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I call the Standing Committee on Transport back to order. Under Standing Order 108(2), we are doing a study of automated and connected vehicles in Canada.

Welcome to all our guests: Denis Gingras, Professor, Laboratory on Intelligent Vehicles, Université de Sherbrooke; Scott Santens, Writer and Advocate of Unconditional Basic Income; and from QNX Software Systems Limited, Grant Courville, Head of Product Management, and John Wall, Senior Vice-President.

Mr. Gingras, why don't you start? You have five minutes, please.

[Dr. Denis Gingras, Professor, Laboratory on Intelligent Vehicles, Université de Sherbrooke, As an Individual]

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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. Gingras.

We'll go on to Mr. Santens for five minutes.

[Scott Santens, Writer and Advocate of Unconditional Basic Income, As an Individual]

I would like to thank the committee for having me here today.

In 2014 I went on a road trip with my fiancée, and on the road trip from Louisiana to Florida we had a conversation about the potential effects of driverless trucks. Months later I self-published an article born from that conversation, which went viral globally, and in these past four years, despite my own warnings about it, even I have been shocked by the speed of development of this technology.

I have no Ph.D. I'm not a programmer or a truck-driver. I'm simply a citizen who spends a lot of time researching topics of interest to me and writing about them. The area that tends to interest me most is the effect of technological advancement on human civilization. With that in mind, I wish to spend my time attempting to convey the monumental impacts automated vehicle technology will have on society as we know it, and the utmost need to understand what's coming down the road, so to speak.

To begin, I want to share a quote that I feel summarizes why this technology will happen. “It's not fantasy,” says the CFO of Suncor in regard to a fully automated fleet of driverless trucks operating in their mining operations. He went on to explain, “That will take 800 people off our site. At an average...of $200,000 per person, you can see the savings we’re going to get from an operations perspective.”

That's the cold calculus of self-driving technology.

Humans are expensive. Their labour is expensive. Their benefits can be expensive. They're costly to train. They get injured. They get tired. They make mistakes. They drink and use medications. They get distracted. They look at their phones. They go on strikes. They get involved in lawsuits. They get angry and depressed. They have physical and biological limits. They quit.

Machines do none of these things. Machines are the perfect worker as long as the cost is right and the output is good.

When it comes to driverless trucks, the cost of fuel also enters the equation. Trucks that drive themselves offer incredible efficiencies in fuel costs. Driverless trucks can travel longer distances in shorter times, thanks to not needing to sleep. They can travel in convoys to increase aerodynamic efficiencies. Fewer accidents can save a lot in human and capital costs. There are many reasons driving the adoption of this technology, and billions of dollars—both invested and at stake—for those who get there first.

I'm here speaking only a week after the first death of a pedestrian by a self-driving car, but that accident itself says a lot about the status of this technology. It's already as good as a human, such that people already expect superhuman abilities from it. Why didn't its radar and laser-based system see the woman before tragically colliding with her in the dark? Why didn't the car immediately detect her and immediately slam on the brakes?

We are talking about a matter of seconds, where below-average human drivers would have caused the same death, just as they cause over 3,000 deaths a day and 1.3 million deaths every year all over the world. The first human being has died, but this technology will save lives, money, and time, and it will impact our economies in ways governments needed to start preparing for years ago.

Don't be fooled into thinking this is just about eliminating driving jobs. The automation of vehicular transport will ripple through the economy. Think of cars and trucks as blood cells in a circulatory system, carrying oxygen throughout the body in the form of income and spending. There are businesses that depend on drivers spending their money. There are businesses that depend on car ownership. There are businesses that depend on vehicles getting into accidents, parking, and requiring insurance. These businesses are themselves then depended upon by other businesses, and so on, like falling dominoes.

The challenge that lies ahead for lawmakers is in helping guide this process in a way that doesn't discourage its advancement but enables it to flourish, while leaving as many people as possible better off. This means not just assisting people in learning new skills for new jobs, but also creating a safety net that acknowledges the transformation of work in this 21st century of great uncertainty.

Requiring former drivers to jump through an arduous system of forms and bureaucrats to receive income as they retrain and search for the next opportunity for employment is not the best way forward in a world of work where more and more people are between increasingly insecure jobs of shorter duration and greater monthly income variance.

This is why I also believe any conversation about automation of future work requires a conversation about a basic income guarantee. You're ahead of the curve in that you're already testing it, but I do wish to urge you of its importance. Self-driving tech will absolutely create winners and losers, and all of those who lose cannot be ignored or expected to just easily find a new job with equal pay, hours, benefits, skill requirements, security, meaning, and distance from home. It is imperative that you as lawmakers work to make sure that technology like driverless vehicles, and the AI that makes it possible, effectively works for everyone, not just its owners. Without that focus, danger lies ahead. It's up to you to negotiate our way around these dangers as best you can, so we can all arrive at a place our ancestors perhaps never even imagined possible.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Courville, you don't have opening remarks?

[John Wall, Senior Vice-President, QNX Software Systems Limited]

No, I do. I have a short....

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Mr. Wall, go ahead.

[John Wall]

Chairperson, thank you for inviting BlackBerry to speak to you today about connected and autonomous vehicles.

As this committee is aware, the automotive industry is undergoing a major transformation wherein a collection of computers, software, sensors, actuators, and connected networks will eventually take over the driving function from humans. BlackBerry is playing a leadership role in this transformation. We are proud to be a Canadian company that employs tremendous Canadian talent and constantly innovates to be at the forefront of technological progress.

BlackBerry QNX has been a trusted technology supplier to the automotive industry for approximately 20 years. Its software is used by more than 40 automakers, is in over 60 million cars, and will provide the foundation for autonomous drive systems into the future. The new generation of vehicles will increasingly be dependent on software and connections to external networks to perform critical functions. This will present increased safety risks if the vehicle systems are not developed in accordance with best practices and industry standards for safety and security.

BlackBerry has developed a framework of disciplines for securing modern cars to reduce the risk of cyber-attacks. We work closely with automakers and their suppliers and we know they are taking the issues of safety and security very seriously. They are aware of the public's concern and are aware that failure to adopt reasonable measures to ensure the safety and security of the vehicles will negatively impact the adoption of this technology, not to mention their reputations.

This is not to suggest that government does not have an important role to play. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that the next generation of vehicles is safely deployed and does not introduce unreasonable risk. Governments should endeavour to harmonize regulations across jurisdictions such that a patchwork of divergent laws and standards does not emerge. This will require coordination between multiple departments and levels of government, including foreign governments. The sharing of test results, ideas, and experiences among agencies and jurisdictions will also provide an efficient way for government to keep pace with rapid technological changes.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

We will go to five-minute rounds of questioning, starting with Mr. Chong.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My thanks to the witnesses for their presentations.

I have a question for Professor Gingras and the two representatives from QNX Software Systems Limited.

Can you describe quantitatively or predict quantitatively what percentage of the vehicle fleet on the roads in 2030 will be level 0 through level 5? What will be the mix of the fleet on the roads? I know it's a prediction.