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| Air Wheel X3 Self Balancing Electric Unicycle |
WITH future transport systems predicted to see far fewer vehicles
sharing a lot more rides, workers in South Africa’s car trade are asking how
will this affect their jobs.
Last year, the auto trade counted 115 000 high-skill employees at
factory level and 496 000 employed in retail, distribution, servicing and repair
sectors.
For all these people, the hard reality is autonomous cars will see
factories and car sales scale down drastically. But the millennials will still
need cars, and their unique demands and new construction techniques, including
large 3D printers, will also open the door for workers to start boutique car
factories.
Boutique factories
Builder of the McLaren super car, the Yamaha city
car and lately the new Lotus — Durban-born Gordon Murray, is already using his
iStream process to enable artisans to make cars cheaply.
Explaining his revolutionary iStream process, Murray said car
factories fundamentally still stamps panels from a sheet of steel, weld them
together, paint them and “put the bits on and that’s your motorcar”, despite a
lot more automation and efficiencies being available,
Murray’s modular iStream is closer to the process by which most
racing cars are built, which is to start with a type of roll-cage, fit a drive
train and then bolt on the seats and panels.
“So this is very disruptive technology. It’s tearing up the rule
book and starting again,” said Murray.
In Washington, Local Motors CEO John Rogers have not even hear of
the book. Rogers wants to equip hundreds of micro-factories to 3D-print
self-driving minibuses.
In Pietermaritzburg, where taxi drivers and conductors recently set
fire to a pilot smart-card system, Rogers’s micro-factories may have to be
fire-proof. Such resistance from drivers will, however, not stop transport
changes from happening. The biggest of these changes promises to unused parking
bays.
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| Next's view of what how mini-buses should turn into city trains. |
Driving a hobby for the rich
Chris Dixon, a partner at Silicon Valley
investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, told Insider Tech parking bays use up to a quarter of a city’ real
estate, and could be used for parks and sidewalk cafes.
As for driving a car, Dixon thinks this will become hobby for the
rich, adding most cars on the road will be autonomous vehicles sharing knowledge
by the next decade.
“An autonomous car drops you off and picks up the next person, as
opposed to the model now, which is just so wasteful, to have the car sitting in
a parking lot 90% of the time.”
Tesla founder Elon Musk agrees a fleet of self-driving cars sharing
rides is the future, but he thinks this future is night — as close as in the
next five years.
Scootering about
Musk is banking on people still wanting cars and
Dixon invested in drones that carry a person, but Horace Luke, co-founder and
CEO at Gogoro scooters, is gambling that millennials will want independent
transport in mega cities without the traffic or exhaust fumes — i.e: electric
scooters. Gogoro’s former cellphone engineers looked at making a new model of
transport, starting with the way people use, consume and experience energy.
Luke said the transport industry has not kept up
with the pace of urban life and is still stuck in the 1900s.
Gogoro instead offers transport options that move
fast, with seamless connections and sustainable choices.
The company consequently has a business model
that sells battery banks where the Gogoro scooters can exchange flat batteries
for charged ones in seconds.
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| BMW's electric scooter. |
Sound advice for gov’t
South Africa’s commuters have so far resisted the
quick but fragile charms of scooters in cities, but fuel station owners and
other entrepreneurs with an eye on the future will do worse than register
interest on the Gogoro site.
Speaking at the third “Opportunities in the Fuel Retail Sector”
seminar, hosted in Pietermaritzburg by the Department of Energy last week, Sello
Madima told some 70 people the diesel and petrol currently sold at stations will
be replaced by alternative energy sources like solar power and bio-fuels.
Too big to change?
It is an open question whether the South African
Department and Ministry of Trade and Industry, which had contributed over R28
billion to vehicle and component manufacturers over the past four years, are
aware of these predictions.
They may very well feel they don’t need to care, for the billions
the DTI has pumped into the sector has showed very good returns, with the
broader automotive industry’s contribution to South Africa’s GDP was 7,5% in
2014 while vehicle and component production accounted for 33,5% of SA
manufacturing output. Investments to establish factories were also made by FAW,
Ford, Mercedes-Benz and most recently, Toyota, which paid R6,1 billion for a
Hilux/Fortuner line at its plant in Prospecton.
The thinking in these circles is they are too big to change.
But unless the big car brands manage to reshape their business
models to sell transport as a service, instead of cars as ego extenders, Dixon
predicts they will be replaced by the likes of China’s Protean, which makes hub
motors that puts the power of a V6 engine inside an 18-inch hub.
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| A bit of software from a Segway and a hubmotors creates a new type of unicycle |
It all boils down to software
The first trick car companies will have to master
is to make new models fast. Dixon quoted Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who
likes to say that, right now the phone is an accessory to the car, but pretty
soon the car is going to be an accessory to the phone”.
“Phones are updated every six months to a year.
“Cars are updated every five years. Even if car companies got
really good at software, it would be hard for them to really behave like
software companies.
“Unless they really lean into becoming software companies and
ride-hailing networks much more aggressively, it’s hard for me to see how the
existing car companies are more than people who manufacture power trains and
chassis.
“Everything else just seems like a software problem,” said
Dixon.
