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Five years ago, hype surrounding “autopilot” cars
peaked. But S&P Global Mobility’s updated forecast offers a
reality check of careful, limited adoption of self-driving
technology through 2035.
A world of autonomous vehicles is likely to exist eventually,
but for at least the next decade, that will be mostly in two very
specific areas: geofenced robo-taxis operated by fleets in specific
areas and hands-off systems with various safeguards in personal
vehicles that require some form of driver engagement.
As for a “World of Tomorrow” self-driving vehicle where you and
the family can sleep in your seats and wake up 200 miles away at
Grandma’s? The industry calls that “Level 5” autonomy, the highest
level of vehicular autonomy defined by the Society of Automotive
Engineers (SAE). That idea will stay firmly in the distance for the
foreseeable future, according to the latest forecast on vehicle
autonomy by S&P Global Mobility.
The ability for a consumer to buy a car that will drive itself
everywhere without the driver ready to take the wheel is unlikely
to happen by 2035. Level 5 implementation of fully autonomous
technology in the automotive retail fleet has zero representation
before 2035 in the S&P Global Mobility forecast, “and probably
for some time after that,” said Jeremy Carlson, associate director
for the autonomy practice at S&P Global Mobility.
“Level 5 is essentially perfect replication of human driving,”
Carlson said. “A car that is able to drive anywhere and everywhere
a human driver can go is simply not going to happen anytime
soon.”
Moreover, the S&P Global Mobility forecast predicts a very
low percentage of personal vehicles sold by 2035 will possess even
a limited version of autonomous vehicle technology described as “Level 4” under the SAE J3016 standard.
The latest S&P Global Mobility Autonomy Forecast details the
numbers, timing, and countries for rollouts of varying degrees of
autonomous technology — based on a rigorous forecasting
methodology analyzing
OEM and supplier strategies, regulations, technology maturity
and cost, consumer desirability and willingness to pay, plus
extensive interviews both with automakers and across the supply
chain.
This latest outlook continues to reflect the headwinds and
slower pace of development that both the automotive and tech
industries have demonstrated over the past several years. But it
also paints a stark contrast to the optimism of just five years
ago, when the world was swept up in the excitement of a future of
autonomous vehicles.
Now, S&P Global Mobility presents a more realistic forecast
while also unveiling new data on the
intersection of autonomy and mobility-as-a-service (MaaS).
Waypoints and indicators
As technology advances, of course, the array of automated driver
assist systems (ADAS) to compensate for driver inattention or error
will proliferate — helping to reduce crashes, injuries, and
deaths along the way. But it has proven incredibly difficult to
combine those systems and sensors with the necessary predictive
software and engineering into a vehicle that will carry us or our
loved ones to our destination unsupervised.
There have been extreme instances of autonomous test vehicles
performing as perfectly as a human would — perhaps the most
famous early example came in 2015 when a Google test car navigated
a situation where a woman in an electric wheelchair maneuvered
erratically on a residential street, while wielding a broom and
chasing a wayward duck.
But serious malfunctions of the nascent technology have brought
mass-production —
and public trust — back to a more conservative reality. And
the ability of autonomous systems to operate in the complex and
unpredictable world of interactions with human drivers (and
evolving driving circumstances) has proven a massive hurdle. From
the endless cycle of software development and training of neural
networks, to continuous improvements in sensor hardware
capabilities, to preparing for infinite corner cases that may
arise, driving through the world has proven a complex task to
solve.
While there are growing numbers of driverless prototype vehicles
and pilot deployments already on city streets, S&P Global
Mobility forecasters do not expect that to become widespread and
broadly accessible within the next decade. The vehicles you will
see will be capable of driving themselves in MaaS use cases. You
can think of them as “robo-taxis,” replacing anything from the NYC
yellow cab to rideshare services such as Uber and Lyft.
Robo-taxis come before personal vehicles
Robo-taxis are expected to be carefully geofenced for the
foreseeable future — offering revenue service only within
well-mapped areas where they have already been extensively tested,
Carlson predicts. That’s the model for current services from
Cruise, Waymo, Motional, Didi, Baidu and others. Waymo was first to
launch a commercial service in certain Arizona suburbs and is
testing in several major California cities. Cruise began testing in
San Francisco in late 2020 (and operating limited public robo-taxis
in 2022) and is now expanding to its seventh city. Several Chinese
mobility providers — from Baidu to Didi to Pony AI and more
— have similar approvals for testing and early, limited MaaS
operations in various cities and regions as well.
The cost of the multiple camera, radar and lidar sensors and the
high-performance computer systems, chips, and semiconductors to
enable the technology will remain sufficiently high that most
personal-vehicle buyers simply won’t pay for the functionality
— but taxi and ride-sharing services may. Those businesses want
to keep their vehicles on the road 20 or more hours a day, stopping
only to refuel or recharge the batteries. With that amount of
uptime, they can earn revenue without the inconvenience of drivers,
who need to be paid, change shifts, and often stop for breaks. All
of those factors cut into potential revenue hours; robo-taxis have
none of those constraints.
The ultimate goal — and the vision of lots of movies and
other science fiction over the past 75 years — is an unpiloted
vehicle where a rider can get in, input where they want to go, and
relax in the back seat. No matter the destination (anywhere on
earth a vehicle can go), the weather, or road conditions, the
vehicle simply drives there itself. “The industry is a long way off
from that,” Carlson says. “But forms of Level 4 are operating today
in limited numbers and have a promising decade of development and
growth ahead.”
A decade of tech hype
Fifteen years ago, the seminal DARPA Urban Challenge proved
vehicles could navigate themselves to a destination through unknown
and unpredictable environments. What followed was a wave of hype
splashing over what many saw as the imminent arrival of
autonomous-driving technology across the automotive spectrum.
Billions of dollars in capital expenditures were invested into
autonomous vehicle development, with substantial progress but
varying degrees of success. Bold visions have been espoused, and
while a few waypoints have been reached, the grandiose
proclamations have not been achieved.
Part of the overoptimism, Carlson says, came from technology
firms being the first to promote driverless cars in a big way. From
the multiple lidar firms commercialized after the DARPA event, to
Google, Uber, and Tesla, self-driving tech was assumed to be
largely a problem of sensors and software — and software could
be developed fast, right? The peak of autonomy hype came in 2018 at
venues like the Consumer Electronics Show.
Automakers and tech companies (and more than a few consultancies
and industry think tanks) were swept up in the fervor, with
executives and investors catching the fever — despite
protestations from engineers that even limited autonomy was a
really, really hard problem.
It was at CES in 2020, just before the global COVID-19 pandemic
shut down much of business as usual, that it became apparent lidar
makers would need more time to meet the cost and performance goals
their customers — the automakers — had set, pushing back
timelines for introductions of automated driving systems in Level
2+ and Level 3. While lidar is a key enabler of autonomous
vehicles, a similar but also unrelated reset of expectations
occurred with autonomous vehicles themselves.
Now, S&P Global Mobility states, the line of thinking is
more grounded: Unbridled optimism has given way to the slow,
measured development of new, highly complex technologies. Tech
companies must fuse reams of digital input from a variety of
sensors, model the results, and pass that model through software
that determines what behaviors to require of the vehicle as a
result.
Obstacles to progress
To understand how monumentally difficult this accomplishment
will be, an examination of each step in the route to fully
autonomous technology is required. And each step is steeper —
and more costly and legally binding — than the one before.
New-car shoppers today will have found most of the latest
vehicles now offer a variety of ADAS technologies, as either
standard or optional equipment. The lowest tiers of the SAE
autonomy scale, Level 0 and Level 1, are used for functions a
driver can invoke to control individual aspects of a vehicle’s
travel automatically, or otherwise assist the driver with alerts or
specific emergency interventions. From adaptive cruise control to
lane-departure correction, these systems compensate for driver
error or inattention, but generally only in one direction of
travel: either longitudinally (headed down to the path of travel)
or laterally (side to side within a lane).
Integrating several Level 0 and Level 1 features allows the car
to effectively drive itself within lanes (usually on limited-access
highways), which can extend the vehicle into Level 2. S&P
Global Mobility sees a huge proliferation of Level 2 systems —
becoming the de facto standard equipment for many vehicles —
along with a more capable subset of what has come to be known as “Level 2+.” Standard Level 2 can be found on vehicles from the
likes of Tesla, Toyota, and Honda, but the driver must prove they
are paying attention by keeping hands on the steering wheel —
as the vehicle will only provide emergency avoidance support (like
braking) but is not capable of responding to more complex changes
in traffic conditions.
The system tests for driver interaction by searching for
constant small inputs into the torque sensor of an electric power
steering system, which correspond to natural human movements on the
wheel. The problem is that this check process is easily defeated,
as dozens of YouTube videos show: Tape a half-full water bottle to
the steering wheel, and road imperfections cause the water to
slosh, jostling the wheel enough to “prove” a human has hands on
the wheel and is, presumably, paying attention. Capacitive sensors
like those of smartphone or touchscreen displays provide more
intelligence but require hands-on engagement.
The only way to provide a true “hands-off” system — while
still requiring the driver to keep eyes on the road, as opposed to
their attention on something else — is eye-tracking cameras.
Those are now built into a handful of models from a few makes but
growing rapidly and with strong upside over the next decade. The
resulting hands-off driving systems available today with driver
monitoring systems are known as Super Cruise (General Motors),
Autopilot (Tesla), BlueCruise (Ford) and various others.
European regulations will mandate the installation of these
driver monitoring cameras in mid-2026. It’s a stiff standard, but
the only one that effectively guarantees that while a driver’s
hands may be off the wheel, their eyes are still on the road ahead
— meaning they can retake control of the car in an emergency
within a second or two, rather than the five to 15 seconds (or
more) that’s required if hands, eyes and mind are distracted by
something else entirely.
The combination of Level 2 automated driving with driver
monitoring pushes into Level 2+ and is the area of focus for nearly
every automaker in the industry today. It includes a very capable
form of sensing and automated control while ensuring the driver
remains engaged and capable of supervising its operation. As
important as any part of the design, it also maintains liability on
the driver’s side of the equation.
Then there’s Level 3. This is autonomous driving by a vehicle
without the driver needing to pay attention, but only in strictly
limited circumstances. “Drivers are no longer required to
supervise,” Carlson explains. “Instead, the vehicle is responsible
for all of the object detection, response, and actuation of
appropriate control responses.”
This is a huge leap, both technologically and legally. The
significant difference is that liability for any crash caused by
the Level 3 (or above) vehicle operating in autonomous mode shifts
from the driver to the automaker, as the driver isn’t required to
be constantly engaged in the driving (or supervising) task. That
means automakers will be exceptionally careful in taking this step,
Carlson predicts. As such, S&P Global Mobility forecasts far
less Level 3 penetration by 2035 compared with the pair of Level 2
tiers.
Because robo-taxis are limited to certain operating areas and
conditions, they fall into what’s called Level 4. Carlson expects
considerably more services with potentially infinite expansions of
those geofences. Fleet operators see a potential business model
under which the added costs of Level 4 technology could be offset
by greater uptime over a vehicle’s lifetime. But automakers do not
see sufficient willingness among consumers to pay an additional
five figures for Level 4 functions in mass-produced vehicles over
the next 10 years.
Where do we stand today?
Tesla’s much-hyped Autopilot system to the contrary,
Mercedes-Benz has been at the forefront most recently as the
industry pushes into Level 3 and beyond. Its Drive Pilot system in
Germany relieves the driver of having to pay attention while the
car drives on limited access roads — at less than 60 kilometers
per hour (36 mph). This low-speed operation is the opposite of the
Level 2+ approach taken by GM and others, which started on
limited-access highways only and is now expanding to certain
divided secondary roads.
In Europe, regulatory updates are underway to boost the upper
limit to 130 km/h (80 mph), recognizing that automated highway
driving may save more lives through crashes averted than in
lower-speed urban environments — but also enabling automakers
to deliver more real-world value to potential buyers. Still,
carmakers are taking it slowly and steadily. The rollout of
autonomous driving features has proceeded more on traditional
automaker schedules for developing new features, rather than in “tech time” where features are conceived, prototype, launched and
revised on the fly.
But this tech industry influence is still the central theme of
the movement toward the software-defined vehicle, one that utilizes
over-the-air (OTA) updates to maintain and enhance functionality
even after the point of sale.
MaaS robo-taxis, for now
The S&P Global Mobility forecast predicts fewer than 6% of
light vehicles sold in 2035 will have any Level 4 functionality, as
described by the SAE J3016 classification. Early Level 4
implementations in personally owned vehicles offer advanced parking
functions, often with the support of infrastructure. But many
technology providers remain focused on the long-term potential of
scaling autonomous vehicles in fleets supporting MaaS business
models.
There are positive examples of autonomous vehicles performing as
well as humans in today’s pilot programs in places like San
Francisco and Phoenix in the US, and Beijing, Shanghai, and
Guangzhou in mainland China. But these same vehicles can still be
confounded by complex traffic scenarios the next minute or the next
day, giving regulators and consumers alike reason to be
cautious.
Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) and robo-taxis are nonetheless
expected to lead the transition to an autonomous vehicle future,
even with the relatively cautious growth ahead. There are growing
numbers of small-scale deployments in certain cities around the
world. But S&P Global Mobility forecasters do not expect that
to become widespread and broadly accessible within the next
decade.
MaaS-equipped vehicles and robo-taxi applications are expected
to represent less than 800,000 vehicles sold globally in 2035.
Robo-taxis will be carefully geofenced for the foreseeable future
— offering revenue service only within specific areas where
they have already been extensively tested, Carlson predicts. But
their high rate of utilization can be nonetheless effective at
bringing new mobility options to some consumers and new revenue
streams to automakers and mobility providers.
Owen Chen, senior principal analyst from S&P Global
Mobility, explains that robo-taxi development and commercialization
is a complex and multi-stage process, which can be summarized in
three stages:
- Stage 1: Technical feasibility demonstrations
confirm that robo-taxis can operate safely and reliably in the
targeted conditions; - Stage 2: The lengthy process of technology
optimization, integration and refining vehicle design eventually
brings scale to manufacturing and deployment; - Stage 3: The efficient expansion will extend
to many new locations and operating conditions, with profit on top
of revenue from meaningful adoption by consumers.
“In 2023, many are working through Stage 1 while several are
seeking scale in Stage 2, led by mainland China and the US,” Chen
said. “But the opportunity to restructure personal and shared
mobility exists.”
Nonetheless, challenges remain for successful and widespread
deployment of Level 4 MaaS. In addition to a fragmented regulatory
landscape and
relatively low public trust that may hamper consumer acceptance
and adoption, the cost of technology and the time needed for robust
development and validation of hardware and software have quashed
the optimism that defined much of the last decade.
The China factor
One major factor in the global race to develop driverless
vehicles is mainland China. Autonomous driving tech was one
priority of “Made in China 2025,” a document issued by the Chinese
Communist Party in August 2014 that set as a goal dominating the
global provision, supply, and use of several advanced technologies.
Those included not only autonomous vehicles but battery minerals,
battery production and EVs.
Quite a few vehicles from Chinese makers are equipped with
multiple sensors — more than would be required for today’s ADAS
technologies — and can be updated over-the-air with new and
more advanced software. It is an integral part of their technology
strategy, and it has taken root more quickly in China as new EV
platforms are designed.
Consumers in China are also more familiar, have greater
interest, and show more willingness to pay for these technologies
compared with other markets including the US and Europe, according
to the S&P Global Mobility
Autonomy Consumer Survey conducted in March 2023. Survey
respondents in China demonstrate the greatest interest in having
these autonomous vehicle technologies in their next car purchase
— 78% of respondents in China compared to 63% in the other
seven markets surveyed (Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Thailand,
UK, US)
The sense among some Chinese makers, Carlson says, seems to be
that if testing goes well, regulation that permits the rollout of
Level 3 systems will arrive in due course. They want their cars on
the road to be ready for that transition. And Chinese regulators
give companies a certain amount of leeway to experiment and to test
new technologies.
The US is unique in its tort bar, which demands the highest
possible level of assurance that a new automotive feature is safe
and effective. But do not assume that China is beta-testing its
citizens; Chinese regulators will come down hard on a company if
something bad happens and gets publicized — meaning there’s
similar oversight and pressure to ensure the systems work as
planned.
“Level 3 is going to be the big hurdle, for all the
driver-distraction issues inherent to its design,” Carlson says. “While both mainland China and the US are racing to develop and
deploy these systems, we forecast that China will be the volume
leader in both Level 3 and Level 4.”
“There’s plenty of opportunity and growth ahead,” says Carlson. “Significant volumes measured in the hundreds of thousands are
quite likely to come before 2030 — but a future of shared
mobility everywhere all the time remains an aspiration for the
industry. Fortunately, many automated driving systems, especially
in Level 2+ and Level 3, are coming soon. Those systems generally
deliver on their value proposition to consumers at a more
accessible price point.”
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- Source: http://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/fuel-for-thought-waiting-for-autonomy.html
