Vehicle safety in an autonomous world: an interview

Let’s start at the beginning. What are the benefits of connected and automated mobility (CAM)? 

At Zenzic, we tend to think of this in four key areas and the first is safety.  

From a societal standpoint, we recognise that a number of people die on our roads every year. Depending on which stat you look at, upwards of 86% of accidents on the road have a contributory human factor. 

I think I’m a safe driver. I think I’m a good driver. Am I as good as I think though when I’m driving back from holiday and the kids are shouting because they can’t get on Netflix? Or when I’m tired? Or when I’m not feeling well? Other factors might mean that I’m not a consistent driver at times. Leveraging technology so that driving on our roads is consistently safe is one of our primary objectives. 

The second benefit is productivity, both personal and industrial. A pre-pandemic stat concluded that 225 hours per year are spent in traffic jams in a person’s daily commute, which is neither productive nor fun. If you don’t have to be the driver on your commute, you can spend that time more productively. I’m not suggesting your employer can make you work as soon as you start your commute, but there are obviously other productive things you could be doing in that time. Of course, leveraging CAM technology into a fleet and logistics operations means the productivity of the service you provide and the operations is increased with better scheduling of vehicles, smoother journeys, more reliable journey times on a network that is more connected as well as automated. 

The third benefit we often talk about is access to transport. Around half of disabled people report that access to transport is a real issue for them in their day-to-day lives. If we can leverage a broader spectrum of mobility options, with new vehicle types and new vehicle services which are unlocked by technology, then we can provide a greater equity to transport: whether it’s because you have a mobility issue or whether you live in a rural community where the archetypal bus comes once per week because those services are expensive to run. If you can leverage technology to be more responsive, more dynamic, lower cost, we can improve access to transport dramatically.  

And the fourth benefit of CAM, which I guess is a follow-on benefit from the previous three, is that there’s a huge economic opportunity for the UK.  

It’s estimated that by 2035 the CAM market could be worth up to £42bn. The question is: what role can the UK play within that market? Are we going to own the space? I don’t think we’re quite in a position to make that assumption. However, what we do believe in is the UK’s strength in loads of areas – the operational side, the software, the cyber security – and that there’s opportunity to generate real growth in the UK economy and, as a result of that, there are huge job opportunities that can arise from this new market that we’re seeing. 

According to your presentation at Logistics UK’s Fleet Engineer 23, Zenzic is “Championing the UK Connected and Automated Mobility ecosystem”. What is the company’s mission and vision for the future? 

Zenzic is an interesting organisation in a really unique position. We are a not-for-profit organisation that operates in the middle axis of government, industry and academia. We are a private company funded by central government, but also our industry partners. And what’s really exciting about that is that it allows us to work with all those partners in a really neutral way. 

We work very closely on policy and funding interventions with government. So, when we’re talking to industry, we can represent a government voice. On the other hand, we are very engaged with industry and represent a very strong, combined industry voice back to government. 

So that’s why we say we’re here to champion the CAM ecosystem because we speak on behalf of, not just our industry partners, but also government.  

I say this slightly flippantly, but Zenzic doesn’t do any of the ‘real’ stuff: we don’t build the vehicles and we don’t develop the software itself. Our job is to support those who are making the developments and those who are setting the regulations and policy for the use of those developments.  

So, our job is really to bring people together: we bring together industry forums – which is why we present at Logistics UK events – we represent this concept of CAM and we bring people together to deliver more effectively. 

How do Zenzic’s three pillars of Insight, Innovation and Collaboration help you achieve your goals? And which one is the most important?  

Picking one of Zenzic’s pillars as the most important is like picking your favourite child: all three of the pillars are required to do what we do effectively and have equal merit.  

Insight is really about understanding and knowing what’s going on. CAM is very emergent and moving at a very fast pace. A lot of things we took as gospel truth six months ago have changed dramatically, and now we know so much more, so we take a different view. We learn so much as we go. 

We often have people coming to us and wanting to know more about CAM and automated vehicles, but don’t know where to start. It’s our job to know what’s going on and who’s doing what. Through our engagement and our networks, we pride ourselves on being quite knowledgeable and that really kind of gives us a bit of credibility: a right to play in this space because we do know what’s going on and who’s doing what in the UK system. 

Innovation is really about ‘doing a real thing’. I’m a big believer that we don’t just talk about stuff, we don’t just do research for the sake of it, but that we strive to do things to make a tangible and visible difference. And our Innovation pillar really is about doing that. 

This is where we see a lot of the programmes that you might be familiar with. Our investment into SMEs – which we call our CAM Scale-Up Programme – where we provide funding to small and medium enterprises (and start-ups as well) to help them develop products and get to market quicker, sometimes by as much as 18 months because of the access we give them to testing facilities. 

We also support big funding interventions coming through government. So, the deployment programme we announced alongside government back in February 2023: seven projects that are putting our self-driving services onto the roads by 2025. That’s part of our Innovation portfolio: the chance to take a real, tangible step forwards in the CAM space that has safety and economic benefits and increased access to transport. 

Our Collaboration pillar is a bit of a wrapper around the other two and strikes the very heart of what we believe: that no-one can do this on their own. Even if we had a tech giant here in the UK with billions to invest every half hour, even then you wouldn’t be able to do everything on your own. 

You’re reliant on government for regulation, you’re reliant on the infrastructure and the road network to be there, you’re reliant on the transport operators to allow you access to the network to support what you’re doing. Collaboration for us is bringing people together to make the sum much greater than the parts. 

We do this by holding workshops to bring tech developers together with fleet operators, the insurance sector talking to road infrastructure providers. Collaboration knits everything we do together and is a huge part of why we exist. 

Zenzic’s position within the automated mobility automation system makes it ideal for gathering research to help steer the roadmap. How does the CAM Testbed work and how close is the UK to achieving its ambitious automation goals? 

This is what I call “The Glorious Day”, when CAM is all singing and dancing and the world’s a better place. 

Zenzic’s central position within the CAM ecosystem does afford us a unique visibility as to what is going on. CAM Testbeds UK was one of the first things Zenzic established when we started six years ago, and that was really quite a fundamental strategy that says: regardless of what you’re developing and where you want to deploy, you’ve got to make sure it’s safe, test this new technology and really build confidence, not just with the regulators who have to approve the technology, but with the public to say you can trust them: you can put your 13-year-old daughter in a self-driving taxi to school and feel comfortable about it. 

CAM Testbeds UK was set up to help people who are deploying new technology. We have six UK Testbeds that exist, broadly between Birmingham and London, covering physical and virtual test environments: controlled grounds, real-world urban streets in London and everything in between. And that really allows us to build out a safe understanding of what needs to happen and makes the UK an attractive place for me developing this globally to come and test. There are a number of companies who’ve set up in this country off the back of this ecosystem that we’re building. 

The roadmap that Zenzic has built is not just our ivory tower where we squirrel ourselves away for a year and come up with a mad plan of what we want it to do and put it out there and pretend it’s the real thing. We have 200 organisations across the UK that have all contributed to the roadmap, we’ve had workshops, we’ve had Post-it notes all over the wall, we’ve argued and debated about what we want to see and when it’s going to happen and everyone involved broadly subscribes to this vision that we have. 

When I speak to my friends and family and I tell them what I do, they ask ‘Is that a real thing?’ and ‘When am I going to see it?’ And frankly, they’re great questions to ask. When we set out the roadmap we recognised that 2025 is a really pivotal date. 

We knew that by this time we would need to have all the pieces of the jigsaw in place for the whole thing to come together and to start seeing it happen. One of the big things is legislation: in its policy paper last year, government set out the ambition to have all the regulations in place by 2025 to align with our roadmap so that we could start to see these things rolling out. 

Look around today and you can see small technology trials taking place: if you’re in the right part of Greenwich you might have seen some self-driving vehicles going round; if you’re in the West Midlands around the University of Warwick you will some other automated vehicles being trialled.  

What we announced with government this year is that, by March 2025, if you go to Sunderland, Edinburgh, Belfast or Birmingham along a logistics route along the motorway you will be able to see real services happening which are delivering goods. 

ASDA, one of our partners, is trialling a depot-to-depot logistics route. We’ve got industrial logistics up in the Nissan plant in Sunderland. All of these will be running real operational services. Passenger services will have paying customers on the bus in Edinburgh or the shuttle in Sunderland.   

If you are in those areas, you will see CAM being used in action and making a difference in the real world. You’re not going to see everything in action everywhere, but for me 2025 will certainly be a major kick-off point. 

These projects will be the North Stars for CAM where other local authorities and logistics services across the country can begin to look into leveraging what’s already happening successfully into their own operations. Between 2025 and 2035 you will then see a tangible build-up of CAM in deployment on UK roads. 

A lot of people are still nervous about CAM technology. What measures and regulations are in place to give people more confidence? 

The public’s buy-in to CAM is one of the most fundamental enablers and a topic that comes up a lot. 

Firstly, it’s always difficult to trust what you don’t know and what you have no experience of. It’s what we’ve recognised from a number of pieces of work that we’ve done, and the government did a piece of work last year to capture public sentiment called the Great Self Driving Exploration. 

What that found is that people’s perception and comfort and trust of these things was greatly influenced once they’d had a chance to experience it. By providing services and letting people use them, you can build trust in the technology. So that’s something we’re looking at, giving people more opportunities to experience the technology so they can become more comfortable with it and have more confidence in it. 

The other thing is the regulatory regime: the idea that someone, somewhere who knows exactly what they’re doing has looked at it, put it through its paces and confirmed that it’s safe is very important. To use the emerging legal words here ‘safe as a careful and competent human driver’. That’s the bar we set. 

What does that look like? Well, this is the subject of all the work that’s going on right now. There’s a programme called CAVPASS (Connected and automated vehicles: process for assuring safety and security), an internal government programme that’s putting all the mechanisms in place to ensure that it’s safe. 

To summarise, there’s a lot of work going on to make sure you understand not only how the technology works, but how it behaves. 

One thing we’re looking at is ‘scenarios’. In my job prior to Zenzic, when I led research teams at Transport for London, I used to joke that all the things that ‘never happen’ happen every day in London: Boxing Day roller discos, flocks of ducks crossing major junctions etc. 

Things we wouldn’t expect to see in our daily lives and certainly not on our driving test, but things that do occur and therefore would need to be navigated by self-driving vehicles. So, companies are building a library of scenarios so we can truly put a self-diving vehicle through its paces.  

The sign off on a self-driving vehicle does not just involve the technology of the vehicle, but also how it behaves in an environment and in different scenarios. CAM Testbeds UK, and our partners, help people develop technology and make it robust in its development process, then it goes to a regulator which carries out an equally robustm, independent assessment of how it behaves. No vehicles will get onto UK roads without going through this hugely robust two-stage process.  

How can freight and logistics firms begin to collaborate with you who aren’t already? 

We’re always keen to expand our scope and to liaise with prominent organisations like Logistics UK, as awareness really is a key thing. 

Autonomy, connectivity, self-driving are technologies that are coming to the market, so we want to make organisations across the UK aware of them and their benefits and implications. 

The second part is engagement. We are always open to having conversations with your members who want to find out more. There’s a huge amount of resources on our website and on our roadmap. 

If you’re completely new to this, that might be a difficult way in, so we have our stakeholder teams and research teams that are more than happy to have conversations with people and to share what we’re doing and answer any questions people may have.  

For more, visit the website, email info@zenzic.io or connect with them on LinkedIn. 

Published On: 07/09/2023 15:00:00

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