BlaBlaCar, whose amateur (mainly private) drivers share costs with passengers on long-distance journeys, will offer them cheaper car leases through French bank Societe Generale in the latest threat to traditional transport models, write Reuters and USNews. The Paris-based start-up will first offer the new packages for Opel models through the bank’s leasing business to more active BlaBlaCar drivers in France, before deploying the program more widely, Chief Executive Nicolas Brusson said.

BlaBlaCar, whose phone app has some 40 million users in 22 countries, is among the so-called mobility services whose growth is disrupting carmakers and transport companies alike. Besides ride-sharing, they include mainly local ride-hailing services such as Uber and car-sharing firms such as Avis-owned ZipCar, which offer access to self-drive vehicle fleets for as little as an hour at a time.

“The goal is to expand that geographically,” Brusson said. “We can pioneer a new approach to car ownership based on usage.” In response to the threat, vehicle manufacturers and transport operators have struck deals with providers of mobility services over the past decade or developed their own.

Daimler launched car-sharing through its Car2Go subsidiary in 2008. Among many more recent deals, Opel parent General Motors invested $500 million in ride-hailing firm Lyft and PSA Group has backed several startups. Even France’s state-owned SNCF railway has partnered with Zipcar.

BlaBlaCar allows car owners to cover their expenses but not make a profit – which shields it from regulatory costs and tax, further improving its appeal to passengers. Thanks to its potential scale, the Societe Generale ALD Automotive partnership adds the competitive clout of corporate leasing to BlaBlaCar’s already frugal peer-to-peer model. The start-up’s 9 million drivers buy an estimated 1.3 million new cars each year.

Read more:

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-04-05/blablacar-unveils-opel-leasing-deal-in-boost-for-ride-sharing

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-sharing-blablacar-idUSKBN177103

• BlaBlaCar now offers Opel cars through ALD Societe Generale.

Arthur D. Little (ADL) recently released a new study, “The Future of Automotive Mobility.” Based on a global survey of 6,500 participants, including customers, industry players and regulators, the report examines how the megatrends of electric mobility, car sharing and autonomous driving are likely to impact on the global automotive ecosystem and future OEM sales.

The report notes that the future of mobility will no longer depend primarily on the preferences of customers, but will increasingly be driven by regulation as cities seek to resolve traffic-generated problems such as congestion and poor air quality. Electric mobility, car sharing and autonomous driving solutions all have an important role to play in meeting these challenges – however, the effect on traditional OEM’s production volume may not be as severe as some experts have predicted.

For example, a key component of autonomous driving will be “mobility-on-demand” solutions, in which customers use “robot taxis.” Based on real mobility data from almost 100 mega-cities, ADL simulated the effect of robot taxis upon mobility behavior and car sales. The findings revealed that even with total market coverage, their effect was not as bad as the predicted worst case scenario.

Klaus Schmitz, Partner in ADL’s Automotive Division, explains: “In a moderate scenario, in which 11 metropolitan regions implement the new form of urban mobility by 2030, global vehicle sales will rise to 121 million vehicles a year, a 39% increase compared to today. In a progressive scenario of 52 pioneer cities, sales will amount to 119 million vehicles, a 34% increase.”

The report details how new roles are being created in the automotive-supplier pyramid, with the shift to the electric drive train and the increasing importance of software being additional factors to consider. However, a major challenge for manufacturers is the loss of direct access to the mobility customer.

Wolf-Dieter Hoppe, author of the study and Associate Director at ADL, warns: “Millions of individual customers will be replaced by a few very large, multinational fleet operators. These could take over the dominant role of OEMs in the ecosystem, as they would have direct customer access as well as considerable volume power. In particular, this would be a problem for today’s premium manufacturers.”

http://www.adlittle.com/downloads/tx_adlreports/ADL_Future_of_Automotive_mobility_short.pdf

• ADL: “A key component of autonomous driving will be “mobility-on-demand” solutions, in which customers use ‘robot taxis.’”

Look out, startups. The big guns are taking on autonomous driving with serious intent. Daimler, one of the largest vehicle manufacturers in the world, announced that it is partnering with Bosch, one of the largest automotive tech and hardware suppliers in the world, to bring fully autonomous vehicles to urban roads “by the start of the next decade.”

It’s already 2017, so the start of the next decade is not quite three years away. But with the resources available to the Daimler-Bosch partnership, they plan on co-developing vehicles capable of SAE Level 4 fully automated driving and SAE Level 5 driverless operation. The focus of the partnership will be on the software and algorithms required to make those advanced driving systems safe and predictable.

According to press releases from both companies, the goal is to create shared cars that can operate autonomously within designated areas of a city. The user can call the car via app, ride without a driver, and be dropped off, leaving the driverless car to pick up another customer. The companies hope to both ease traffic and improve accessibility for those who can’t drive or don’t have a driver’s license.

Of course, other ride hailing companies are already headed down this driverless road, most notably Uber. But Uber and Daimler formed a partnership in early 2017 to develop self-driving cars. And Mercedes-Benz, which is under the Daimler umbrella, has been showcasing fully autonomous concept cars at auto shows in recent years.

But in an interesting side note, the head of the Mercedes-Benz Cars R&D validation and testing, Jochen Haab, said in a recent interview that a ‘driverless taxi’-type situation was “at least a decade away.” Haab was in Australia overseeing an autonomous driving pilot project–one that may move a bit more quickly now.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/04/daimler-and-bosch-fully-autonomous-cars-within-5-years/

• Will Daimler and Bosch leave the Silicon Valley start-ups behind?

The first time I ever heard of LiDAR, writes Calum McClelland, Director of BD @ Leverege in Medium, was in regard to autonomous vehicles, used as a way of identifying (and therefore avoiding) objects. Curious how it worked, I began investigating LiDAR and discovered that there are many, many applications beyond just autonomous vehicles. LiDAR is extremely useful in fields like archeology, physics, and astronomy, among others.

Since I work in the Internet of Things at Leverege, LiDAR applications in IoT are particularly interesting to me, so below I’ll share some cool use cases for LiDAR in smart agriculture, smart retail, and smart cities.

But First: How Does LiDAR Work? If you’re anything like me, you love knowing how and why things work the way they do. So I’ll share a quick explanation of LiDAR before we check out some applications.

The term “LiDAR” originated in the early 1960s as a combination of the words “light” and “radar”. Some people treat LiDAR as an acronym, either for “Light Detection And Ranging” or for “Light Imaging, Detection, And Ranging”, but such acronyms were created retroactively. Just as sonar uses sound waves and radar uses radio waves to create a map of the environment, LiDAR uses light.

LiDAR works by rapidly firing lasers (up to 150,000 times per second in some systems) at a target and then measuring the time for the light to bounce off that target and travel back to the source. Since the speed of light is constant, you can figure out the distance to the object:

Distance = (Speed of Light x Time of Flight) / 2

This will give you millions of points, called a “point cloud” in aggregate, which creates a digital mapping of the environment.

For LiDAR systems that are moving (e.g. on an airplane or on a car), you also need a position (GPS) and navigation system. Although light is literally the fastest thing there is, it isn’t instantaneous. So if you’re moving, not only do you need the time of flight for the light, but you also need the exact location of where the laser was fired and the exact location of where the returning laser is received. This lets you build an accurate point cloud like the picture above.

Applications of LiDAR: Although LiDAR has become extremely useful for autonomous cars of late, it’s had important applications for decades now. Before we jump into the IoT applications, here are two non-IoT applications that I found particularly cool. Archaeology: Planes flying with LiDAR systems can capture high-resolution models of archeological sites that can reveal micro-topography otherwise hidden by vegetation.

In 2012 LiDAR was used to find the legendary city of La Ciudad Blanca in the Honduran jungle. Despite the heavy foliage, LiDAR was able to show extensive man-made structures which ground searches had failed to find for hundreds of years. Vegetation can be filtered and “lifted” off of the underlying surface, which revealed a complex of mounds and ancient building foundations in Honduras.

Physics and Astronomy: During the Apollo program, retroreflectors were placed on the Moon. As the name implies, these retroreflectors are used to reflect back lasers that are shot from observatories on Earth. The data generated by these LiDAR systems in observatories across the world can be compared to find the exact position of the Moon measured with millimeter precision. Using these exact measurements, we’ve been able to conduct tests of general relativity.

LiDAR is also extremely useful for mapping the surfaces of celestial bodies. For lunar and martian landers, it’s critical to have accurate topographical maps so that flat landing sites can be chosen. In 2001, the Mars Global Surveyor produced a spectacularly precise global topographic survey of the red planet which has been crucial in subsequent missions to Mars.

Read more: https://iot-for-all.com/lidar-not-just-for-autonomous-vehicles-42e518a0e6eb

• ‘LIDAR: Not just for autonomous vehicles’, writes Calum McClelland (Leverege).