Autonomous vehicles lite self-driving technologies should start small, go slow

Many young urbanites don't want to own a car, and unlike earlier generations, they don't have to rely on mass transit. Instead they treat mobility as a service: When they need to travel significant distances, say, more than 5 miles (8 kilometers), they use their phones to summon an Uber (or a car from a similar ride-sharing company). If they have less than a mile or so to go, they either walk or use various “micromobility” services, such as the increasingly ubiquitous Lime and Bird scooters or, in some cities, bike sharing. The problem is that today's mobility-as-a-service ecosystem often doesn't do a good job covering intermediate distances, say a few miles. Hiring an Uber or Lyft for such short trips proves frustratingly expensive, and riding a scooter or bike more than a mile or so can be taxing to many people. So getting yourself to a destination that is from 1 to 5 miles away can be a challenge. Yet such trips account for about half of the total passenger miles traveled. Many of these intermediate-distance trips take place in environments with limited traffic, such as university campuses and industrial parks, where it is now both economically reasonable and technologically possible to deploy small, low-speed autonomous vehicles powered by electricity. We've been involved with a startup that intends to make this form of transportation popular. The company, PerceptIn, has autonomous vehicles operating at tourist sites in Nara and Fukuoka, Japan; at an industrial park in Shenzhen, China; and is just now arranging for its vehicles to shuttle people around Fishers, Ind., the location of the company's headquarters.