Macau Matters | Cars of the future

Richard Whitfield

I firmly believe that Macau should be a showcase for “living in the future”. The region needs a place that is innovative and creative and shows what life can be like, and there are several benefits in Macau being that place. For example, it would greatly improve the quality of life of locals, and can be a foundation for diversifying the economy – we can sell expertise in new technologies and improved living to other places in the region. We are rich enough to live in the future in Macau, and it is small enough that implementing the future here is affordable. We also have the large number of tourists needed to generate demand for what we have in other parts of Asia.

One obvious major change that is coming is autonomous driverless vehicles. They will completely transform transportation for the movement of people and goods and I have talked about this change in these pages already – Driverless Macau, 2016 – but it is now much closer to reality. We need to remember the old adage that people over-estimate the changes that will occur in the coming year and under-estimate the changes that will occur in the next 5 years.

Some mines in Australia and elsewhere have been operating fleets of remotely controlled dump trucks for some years, and autonomous trains as well. (I understand that now more than half of the ore trains traveling on the Hamersley & Robe River Railway have no people on board.)

In North America and elsewhere, well over 25 cities have permitted driverless taxi experiments for a number of years. The major companies developing these technologies have collectively driven millions of public road test miles. Waymo and Uber alone have driven more than 5 million and 2 million test miles, respectively, with a driver just sitting in the vehicle to take over in case of emergencies. During this extensive testing there have only been a handful of accidents and a couple of fatalities. This performance is significantly better than the comparable performance of human drivers.

In Asia we are also just starting to get into the act, and driverless taxi experiments have been authorized in both Shanghai and Beijing, and some limited testing has begun in Singapore. Baidu, among other Asian companies, is investing extensively in driverless vehicles and other Artificial Intelligence technologies, but they are still a long way behind their American counterparts.

Waymo has recently been awarded the first license to operate truly driverless taxis in Pheonix, Arizona and they currently seem to be in the process of buying a fleet of vehicles to start operations soon. I am sure that we will see a spurt of cities authorizing similar services in the next few years.

In Macau, if they ever get it completed, the light rail system will supposedly operate driverlessly, but the MTR in Hong Kong was designed to have remotely operated trains in the 1980’s, and has done so ever since (the on-train staff have only ever controlled closing the train doors!).

In Macau we have a perfect opportunity to be among the first cities in Asia to permit driverless taxi experiments, but we seem to be hung up with trivial changes to existing taxi regulations to revoke the licensing of “bad apple” drivers. We could also be among the first cities to have a few driverless Grand Prix races but this has never been discussed. When are we going to get government officials and other community leaders with real vision who are willing to push through innovation and change and make us truly a “city of the future”?