Aditya Pathak
Mobility in the future will continue rapid advancements across the dimensions of cost, efficiencies, safety, and sustainability, the hallmarks of the modern automotive era. In addition, advances in artificial intelligence, connectivity, solar power, and batteries will finally unlock an unprecedented era of connected and autonomous mobility that will have tremendous social and economic implications.
This is the third of a three-part series, which sheds light on the evolution of mobility through distinct periods: ancient history, the industrial age, leading up to current technologies, and the era of AI and driverless e-Mobility.
Modern, interconnected lifestyles prevalent by 2050 will demand that mobility performs as a seamlessly integrated service that works behind the scenes to orchestrate the movement of people, goods, and services from source to destination. Imagine a future where a low-speed, golf-cart style neighborhood buggy shows up precisely at the time when you must leave home for work. The buggy drops you off at the neighborhood bus stop, where an automated people mover is already waiting to drop off passengers at the nearest metro station, where a train is waiting at the platform. At the destination, a similar orchestration takes place until the destination.
Orchestrating such a service for millions of users all throughout the day has been an impossible task so far, but with the advances in quantum computing, explosion in computing capacity and real-time, all-pervasive connectivity, mass personalization and optimization would be a reality through a combination of advancements at three levels:
- Intelligent, Aware, Electric and Autonomous Vehicles: Advances in battery weight and charging times through mainstreaming of solid-state batteries, will lead to all vehicles being electric-powered. Solar panels made of advanced materials like perovskite will lead to smaller panels and higher power generation, where solar powered vehicles will reduce the demand for grid charging. Connectivity would have further advanced in speed, bandwidth, and latency, and with 9G or 10G around, intelligent edge computing would work seamlessly with cloud quantum computing to make safe, real-time operations a reality. This will also lead to the creation of new types of vehicles, suited for usage environments from housing complexes, and neighborhoods at the local levels, to newer modes like eVTOLs (electric Vertical, Take-Off and Landing) for intra-city and inter-city travel.
- Smart, Interactive, and Adaptive Infrastructure: Vehicle-To-Infrastructure communication will become widespread, in intelligent cities, across all levels, from housing complexes to neighborhoods to local roads, highways and expressways. Real-time awareness of congestion, weather and road-conditions and communication to vehicles will improve safety, responsiveness, and convenience for users.
- Integrated Digital Mobility Fabric & Backbone: Advanced cities and countries will create an Integrated Digital Mobility Fabric that will be supported by a Digital e-Mobility Backbone to enable users and mobility service providers to engage with each other. Such a cloud-based backbone service will become a utility for autonomous e-mobility and will require governments and the industry to create standards for mobility services encapsulating the standards that currently exist, and develop new standards to fill in the gaps to enable customers and service providers to seamlessly plug in, discover each other through an optimized service orchestrated by the e-mobility utility.
When the foundational tasks for orchestrating mobility vehicles on the intelligent infrastructure become as reliable as any other utility, it will unlock productivity, personalization, and convenience at unprecedented levels. In addition to reducing the demand for parking spaces by 90+%, reducing collisions and deaths by 90%, increasing productivity by recapturing the commute time, new business models like mobile clinics, mobile offices, mobile kitchens, and many other personalized services, will become feasible.
These advancements are not only wishful, but a requirement given the aging of the world’s population. By 2050, the population of 65+ year olds will double to 1.5 billion, with the number of people above 80 years old tripling to 426 million. Just in the US, there will be 600,000 people, about half the population of Hawaii, over the age of 100. The female ratio in the older age population will increase to between 57-67%. With the decline in the working age population across most of the world, availability of autonomous e-mobility services will be a critical determinant of quality of life for a large section of our society.
Countries like Qatar have already made impressive foundational investments leaning on its Qatar National Vision (QNV) 2030, and the creation of a comprehensive Transportation Master Plan for Qatar (TMPQ) to support the QNV. Bringing the TMPQ to life by creating a digital e-mobility fabric and backbone will likely cement Qatar’s leadership in this space and possibly set standards for the world to learn from.
Aditya Pathak is the head of Automotive, Transportation and Logistics at Cognizant, a multinational information technology and consulting company, headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey.
Aditya Pathak is the head of Automotive, Transportation and Logistics at Cognizant, a multinational information technology and consulting company, headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey.
