Kanata residents could soon be seeing empty vehicles driving themselves through the streets.
City council passed a motion in October that would allow for testing of driverless cars on public roads, starting in a north Kanata business park.
Kanata North Coun. Marianne Wilkinson initiated the plan, proposing that the west-end community should be home to a future municipal centre for automated vehicles since it already houses many technology companies that develop automated software.
The Kanata plan gained momentum ahead of an NCC-sponsored public forum on Oct. 24 about the potential benefits and impacts of automated vehicles.
“We need to engage everybody in this new vision,” said Robin Chase, the forum’s guest speaker and former CEO of the Boston-based Zipcar – the world’s largest car-sharing service.
Meanwhile, the idea of pairing private companies and the City of Ottawa in promoting a driverless-car industry is getting support from Invest Ottawa, the city-backed business incubator.
“We are really trying to engage the entire community across the city and work in partnership with different organizations and different companies to really bring everybody together and find the best route forward,” said Dana Borschewski, a market director at Invest Ottawa.
Barrie Kirk, co-founder of the Kanata-based Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence, wants these connections to develop as soon as possible. “The time to act locally is now,” he said. “We need to get involved in that supply chain, promote the local companies and have them promote themselves. If we wait too long, we’ll simply lose market share.”
The market for autonomous vehicles is likely to reach between $42 and $77 billion from 2025 to 2035, according to a study by The Boston Consulting Group.
“If we do this right, then Ottawa could become an important part of the auto sector in the 2020s,” Kirk added. Compared to other G7 countries, Kirk said, Canada is “dead last” in its preparation for autonomous vehicles.
One of Kirk’s biggest concerns is that the technology will be ready before the regulatory framework is in place.
Driverless cars, which are being developed by companies such as Tesla, Ford and General Motors, are expected to hit the commercial market in the early 2020s, leaving the government only a few years to develop policies.
In May, Tesla released details of the first known death caused by a self-driving car. The incident involved an Ohio man who was using autopilot to control his car while driving through Florida. The car’s sensors failed to distinguish an 18-wheel truck and trailer on the highway because of a blinding sun.
However, industry experts like Kirk are confident that driverless cars will be “better and safer drivers than humans.”
“I predict that we can save about 80 per cent of all traffic deaths and injuries from the use of technology in autonomous vehicles,” he said.
A 2015 study by the Conference Board of Canada estimated that Canadians will save $37.4 billion in fewer collisions with autonomous vehicles.
At the NCC event, Chase said that she sees two distinct possibilities in an automated future.
One option is that automated vehicles will mostly be personally owned or commercialized. The second option is to use them for taxi-like operations, which Chase calls FAVES – Fleets of Autonomous Vehicles that are Electric and Shared – in which individuals buy a seat in a shared car and pay as they go.
Chase said that using a FAVES vehicle would be more economical than owning a personal vehicle because the average car today costs about $9,000 per year – 18 per cent of an average household income – but sits idle 95 per cent of the time.
According to a 2015 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, each city exploiting the potential of shared driverless cars can deliver the same mobility with only 10 per cent of the current vehicle numbers.
Sharing vehicles would need fewer parking garages, described Chase, and there is potential to repurpose these existing spaces.
“Just imagine, what we can do with that extra space: more pedestrian sidewalks, bike lanes, sandboxes for children, picnic tables, gardening.”
However, citizens need to pressure their cities for these actions, she warned.
“We have to make our legislatures care and act on that,” Chase said. “We have to decide what we want to do with it and we have to decide now.”