Driverless cars: time for Hong Kong to step on the gas and grasp the future
Autonomous vehicle technology just needs a test bed, and we can provide it
It is not necessarily the fault of the Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Commission (ITC) that it is so difficult to live up to its grand title. It’s just that these government commissions – after all, a camel is a horse designed by a commission – never seem to amount to a hill of beans.
The ITC Commissioner is Annie Choi, a seasoned 30-year civil servant, who has served in such technological hot spots as the Civil Service Bureau and the Insurance Commission. It is not surprising that the ITC website is very domestic and boasts few links to the white heat of global innovation and technology as found in Silicon Valley, Silicon Fen, or any other silicate-related location.
The ITC, the billion-dollar Innovation and Technology Fund, the enterprise schemes to provide cash for ailing inventions; and the new HK$2 billion Innovation and Technology Venture Fund investing in local start-ups, are all laudable attempts to drive Hong Kong’s future. But how is a city of 7 million people, merely the 14th largest city in China, sitting on a pathetic 80 square kilometres of hillside, going to compete in technology with the big wide world?
Eventually driving will become a recreational sport like cycling – done between consenting persons in a private place
In our favour, we are rich and we have a lot of well-educated, globally minded people packed into a small space. We should find one good idea from overseas, pour our money into it, and make it a centre of excellence. Start with something that suits us perfectly and that is coming anyway – like driverless cars.
Elon Musk of Tesla believes that autonomous vehicles will be crossing the United States within two years. Ford chief executive Mark Fields reckons half a decade. Nissan’s boss, Carlos Ghosn, says, “I don’t see any impossible obstacle” to a five-year horizon. Anthony Foxx, US Secretary of Transportation, expects in 10 years to see them everywhere. This technology is not just coming – it is here. It just needs a test bed.
There is a flurry of development as we speak – Apple, Audi, BMW and Baidu, Fiat, Ford, GM, Google and Toyota, Mercedes, Nissan and NASA, Tesla, VW and Chinese bus manufacturer Yutong are just a few of those working on autonomous vehicles. There are still technological problems. Gill Pratt, head of the Toyota Research Institute said, “Most of it is easy, but a little bit is very hard.”
In 20 years time most of us will have stopped driving and will be using the time to work or play on our futuristic smartphones. No more waiting for a bus that comes full. No arguments with taxi drivers about crossing the harbour. No more blocking of the roads in Central by chauffeurs waiting to pick Mistress up from the shops. You will always have a robocar to pick you up, increasing your productivity.
Driverless cars will never run out of fuel/battery. They will know where to go to dodge the traffic. They will lower costs through increased sharing (personally owned cars are parked 95 per cent of the time) and they will increase mobility for the young, elderly and the handicapped. Autonomous vehicles are likely to kill fewer than the 1.2 million people a year that human drivers extinguish – sometimes by phoning, texting and surfing at the wheel. Fewer vehicles will reduce pollution and the need for new infrastructure. Eventually driving will become a recreational sport like cycling – done between consenting persons in a private place.
The transition from human drivers to the mass use of driverless buses, trucks and cars requires a serious public commitment to invest in new infrastructure and changed legislation – and a location that proves that it can be done. There were liability problems with cars in the early days – the British Locomotive Act of 1861 required a man to walk in front of a vehicle with a red flag. Airline growth was encouraged when the Warsaw Convention of 1929 limited the liability that fledgling airlines had to pay in the event of accident or loss.
Hong Kong as a centre of excellence test-bed for driverless cars would have huge positive spin-offs. A mass transit-type authority would encourage the entry of foreign technology leaders, like Apple or Google, to experiment on our roads as the MTR did 40 years ago. Once the system is developed, the authority could sell the technology to those too slow to catch up – like we normally are.
The future is obvious but George Bernard Shaw illustrated that a challenge is no excuse for inaction. “You see and say ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’”
Richard Harris is chief executive of Port Shelter Investment Management
