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Written by Loni Sanders

Gordon is a grassroots educational speaker and electrical engineer. He is on the board of 4th Mobility Electric Vehicles working on the infrastructure for those vehicles. This group and others will have a convention for electric vehicles in 2020 in Portland. They expect 10,000 people to attend.

Gordon drives a Subaru hybrid, but hopes his last car will be part of the electric car sharing program.  

Gordon was a crew member of the only plane in the D Day Squadron. They came from Oregon (for a recent celebration to honor that day). The group originated from the Aurora Airport.

He recommended two movies which take place in the future and feature things like autonomous vehicles: Johnny Cab and Total Recall (with Arnold Schwarzenegger)

The first autonomous vehicles to be used in the US were farming equipment vehicles. There are combines and plows and things that work without drivers in our fields—starting in the 90s. They help with harvesting and seeding and those kinds of tasks.

He told us about the Darpa Grand Challenge, (a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense). The first year of the challenge, which was a 142 mile course none of the (unmanned) cars even finished. One made it 7 miles and one crashed right out the gate. But this year, they had a new course and 5 of the cars finished. The prize was $2 million. A team from Stanford won.

In the Urban Grand Challenge (a slightly different event) 6 or 11 vehicles finished the course in 2007. That also had a $2 million prize.

The vision is we will be able to ride along and do other things while the car is moving. We will be picked up and delivered to where we want to go. We won’t own the car, we won’t need a garage because we won’t have to store the car.

There are currently pockets of industries that use autonomous vehicles, such as mining operations. There are big trucks that move material back and forth which don’t have drivers.

Why the rush? This is a $7 trillion opportunity for our economy. It will change our lives, just as the advent of the car (and getting rid of horse drawn vehicles changed things a great deal at the time.)

By 2050, if we continue with our current model, it is estimated there will be 2.1 billion vehicles on our roads. The better plan is shared vehicles moving around. Our cars on average spend 300 hours per year driving. The bulk of the time they sit somewhere, at work, in our garages. There are 8,600 hours in a year. Which means shared vehicles would have to be able to drive many more hours than our cars do now. This presents several business opportunities: we would need software, security, the vehicle infrastructure, AI, communications services, and semi-conductors for starters.  The model is either V to V or V to I.

One of the challenges is that we will need to be converted to 5G (cellular) in order to move the cars effectively and ultimately will probably be using 7G according to Gordon’s prediction. The cars use the cellular service to communicate with each other.

Several companies are making great strides, Waymo, which is a division of Google is out ahead of the others. He didn’t know how Apple was coming along, they are very silent about their status and there are a lot of other companies working on the technology. He highly recommended a trip to our own Daimler Benz here in Portland. They use plan to use a platoon of 18 wheelers to move merchandise, with a driver in the front truck and the others would draft (they would be very close together).

Here are some of the major changes that would occur: there won’t be car dealerships anymore, we won’t need to take our cars to mechanics, because there will be fewer cars needed to move people and it’s so much more efficient, traffic will move much more smoothly, there will be fewer accidents and traffic injuries and fatalities. We can put 5 times the number of cars on a highway if they are autonomous. Mobility will be greatly improved for seniors and handicapped people. It will mean better care for seniors, because they will be able to experience less isolation, making aging in place much more practical. Vehicles will be able to monitor our health if needed. It will improve mass transit immensely. The average cost of travel will go down, right now we spend about a $1 per mile, it should be around 20c due to increased productivity. It will be so much safer, we currently look 100 people per day in auto accidents (deaths) and there are 1000 more injured daily in accidents, worldwide there are 1.1 people per year killed by automobiles.

Portland is one of the leading edge cities for AV. Gordon says we should have autonomous vehicles by 2040 in cities and maybe by 2035. They could do it sooner if they create geo-fenced assistive technology. But customer adoption is a big issue and there are ethical and political issues to sort out.