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ACES and the Future of Driving
The advent of mass-produced, relatively low-cost automobiles by Henry Ford and his manufacturing advances revolutionized how we get from place to place and how we live day to day. For the first time in a century, Bryan Mistele, CEO of INRIX, sees a similar transformation coming. “Fundamentally the idea of a human being buying a car that had four wheels [and] an internal combustion engine really didn’t change for 100 years,” Mistele said, “Think about how much has changed just in the last 10 or 15 years. Ten or 15 years ago…there was no Tesla, there was no iPhone, there was no iPad.” Mistele recently spoke on automated, connected, electric and shared vehicles — the ACES — as part of the U.S. DOT Volpe Center’s thought leadership series on Our New Mobility Future.
Mistele describes three numbers that underscore the key challenges in ground transportation: eight billion, 1.2 billion, and 37,000. “Eight billion, that’s the amount of hours wasted in congestion in the United States every year—not total drive time for commuters—the incremental amount of time wasted in congestion,” he said. While his first number indicates wasted time, 1.2 billion shows the wasted fuel due to congestion while 37,000 represents the annual fatalities on U.S. roads. “What we’re talking about are real, core, societal problems,” Mistele said, “…we’re talking a massive, global, societal problem with big ramifications.” Significantly, four recent developments may be able to address these in dramatic fashion.