Rethinking Mobility In A Digital World

Qasar Younis, CEO and co-founder of Applied Intuition, discusses autonomous vehicles and digital change in the mobility sector with Greg Williams, editor-in-chief of Wired UK.

While most car makers are working on autonomous vehicles, getting self-driving cars from labs onto the road is a “very incremental” process, Younis points out. And as usual, some places are further ahead than others.

“If you want autonomy, you can go to San Francisco right now and be in a car with no human beings”, Younis says. “It’s just that autonomy is not everywhere. It’s not in Munich. It’s not in India.” Yet.

“It will be everywhere”, Younis makes clear. “It just will get there in different time frames.”

Making cars find they way home on their own is “no longer a research problem, it’s an engineering problem”, Younis says. Still, it remains a big challenge. “This is the first time a real artificial intelligence system is going to be mass deployed. And this is not trivial.”

In addition, companies like Waymo need to find a way to become “cheaper than Uber. That’s what the entire industry is focused on right now.”

Five years from now, Younis predicts, cost – rather than safety – will become the dominant issue with autonomous driving. “The big question is: Is it cheap enough for everyone to use?”