The automotive industry is going through a lot of changes. The industry has been around for a long time, and it was once dominated by gas-powered cars that were sold to the masses. Nowadays, we have electric vehicles that are starting to take over the market share of gas-powered cars. With all this new technological information being introduced into this sector, there will be some interesting changes in the future. In this blog post, we will explore what those changes might look like.
The Fuel Efficiency of Electric Vehicles
First, let’s explore the changes that will happen in regards to fuel efficiency. Currently, electric vehicles have a much better fuel efficiency than gas-powered cars. They do not use combustion engines, and they are powered by battery cells that stores information from renewable sources like solar panels or wind turbines. This means they produce no emissions when running on full power, while gas-powered cars release harmful pollutants into the air by burning fossil fuels such as gasoline or diesel. As time goes on and more countries start phasing out traditional engine types for EVs (electric vehicles), we will see significant drops in greenhouse gases being released into our atmosphere. In fact, according to a study, it is estimated that global greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by 70% of all cars on the road were electric vehicles.
This is a great step towards protecting our planet, but we still have to figure out how this transition from gasoline or diesel engines to battery cells should take place. Some countries, such as Norway and India, offer tax incentives for people who choose an EV over any other type of vehicle. This has been very effective so far in increasing sales, but it can’t go on forever because eventually, governments would start running out of money.
On top of that, there might also be issues with building more public charging stations, increasing utility bills significantly. While these two factors may not seem like too big of a deal right now since EVs are only just starting to gain traction, we have seen what happens when governments can’t find a solution to these problems: they end up banning EVs altogether.
For electric cars to truly take off and become the dominant type of vehicle on our roads, this issue with charging stations needs to be solved. If it is not resolved soon enough, car manufacturers will stop making them because there won’t be any demand from consumers who are looking at their utility bills every month before deciding whether or not purchasing an EV would save them money. The first companies that figure out how to build more energy efficient batteries while also building public charging infrastructure will pave the way for other automotive corporations to come up with solutions.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning
Another technological innovation that is starting to impact the automotive industry is artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. It has been estimated that by 2020, 25% of all cars sold will be self-driving vehicles. This means they would not need any input from drivers because they can decide where to go or what speed to travel at based on pre-programmed data.
This type of technology could also be adapted for use in other types of transportation like public buses or long-distance trucks. In fact, we even saw UPS testing out this very idea when conducting an experiment with its delivery trucks back in 2017. As you might expect, there were still people behind the wheel just in case anything went wrong, but it truly was a test run for the CEO of UPS in seeing how well this type of delivery system would work.
This is why we are starting to see new types of jobs being created specifically for people who know how to create these AI engines, as they will become vital parts of our everyday lives and vehicles. For example, Tesla recently posted a job opening for an Artificial Intelligence Engineer position which requires at least five years of experience working on machine learning technologies. It’s clear that companies want individuals with extensive backgrounds in tech like this if they plan on making products more reliant upon advancements from the field.
Self-Driving Technology
Another way that technology is improving the automotive industry revolves around self-driving vehicles and how much data they can use to get better at their jobs. Some analysts have estimated that autonomous cars will generate about 25 terabytes of data every day. This would be comparable to all the internet activity generated in a single hour across the entire planet. With this increase in big data, there needs to be new systems for processing it so that engineers have access to information needed to make decisions on what actions should occur next.
In fact, Nvidia now claims its artificial intelligence supercomputers are capable of performing 24 trillion deep learning operations per second! While most people won’t need anything nearly as powerful or expensive when considering personal EVs, the same technology is needed to fully autonomous these cars.
While it might be a few years before self-driving cars are the norm on our roads, we have already seen semi-autonomous vehicles introduced in recent months like Tesla’s Model S and X, which come with an autopilot feature. However, even though this type of technology has been around for several years now, there was still one fatality involving a car using this function back in 2016, which brought up concerns about how safe they truly were when compared to human drivers.
Cars-as-a-Service (CaaS)
The automotive industry is also changing as more people rely on ride-sharing services like Uber or Lyft for their day-to-day travels. These types of companies want to ensure that drivers can get from one location to another in the shortest time possible, so they don’t have customers waiting too long before being picked up. If you’ve ever been locked into having a lemon and searching Google for something like “Toyota highlander years to avoid”, worry no more. You will have the flexibility to have a well performing vehicle.
This means there needs to be way better tracking on how fast a driver should take when getting somewhere, which has led many engineers to develop an algorithm capable of predicting travel times with 95% accuracy. The only problem? Even though it would help save money, these ridesharing apps still need cars available even if demand isn’t high at certain times during the day.
